I was reading over Thinking in Web 2.0 and found myself agreeing with many of the points enumerated by Dion Hinchcliffe. However, the one that most struck me was this: Data belongs to those that create it.
Yes, you heard me. Everything a user creates, contributes, or shares is theirs, unless they have given away the right explicitly and by free choice. Any information they contribute to the Web should be editable, deleteable, unshareable by the contributor whenever they feel like it. This also means indirect data like their attention records, log entries, navigation history, site trails, or anything else that might be tracked. And all Web sites must clearly and simply state what information a user is creating and give them a way to stop creating it and even clean up.
The single most frustrating thing about many services is the lack of any good way to get my data out--either for backup purposes or to import it elsewhere.
Posted by jzawodn at February 26, 2006 07:12 AM
Jeremy I think you might find this article interesting:
http://workboxers.com/online-money/is-the-money-really-in-the-content/
This closely resembles some ideas Steve Mallet was throwing around a couple of years ago. He had a web site called DataLibre, but it seems that he has lost interest. Some stuff is still available:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041010005146/www.datalibre.com/?q=node/view/5
Steve Mallett here. It's not that I lost interest really... It think it was just a bit ahead of the curve maybe & people weren't really interested at the time.
Maybe they hadn't contributed enough to others yet to start to get it. Maybe the time to re-address this is starting to come along.
I think the two promises we need from every one of these sites are the abilities to (1) export and (2) delete our data from their databases. There's no other way to hold a data-accumulation business to any standard of customer service unless you have these abilities. (I made this argument at more length in my "Future-Proofing Your Privacy" keynote at EuroOSCon last year....still need to write that up and post it.)
To take a contrarian position, can you "sell" your ownership of that data?
If you can sell it, can you trade it away for a discount on a service which by tracking you can offer lower prices?
If you can trade it for a discount, can you trade it for simple access to a service?
Once you've traded it, do you still have a right to delete it?
I wonder how many people who want control over their data download songs off of file sharing networks.
Craig,
Yes. It happens all the time. However, it's often not explicit and it's often not a equal agreement.
What about web services? If people contribute data which is available publicly on a website they should have a reasonable expectation that Google, Yahoo, A9, MSN, and any other web service in the world can aggregate their data as long as they're not a direct competitor or hurting their performance.
I've had problems with Web 2.0 companies blocking my robots simply because I'm not paying them for their public data.
While I don't necessarily have a problem paying it seems to stand in the face of the new mashup culture.
For the record all of TailRank's user contributed data is public.
"I've had problems with Web 2.0 companies blocking my robots simply because I'm not paying them for their public data."
I personally don't see any problem with a user blocking access to whomever they don't want using their data. I think robots.txt is really the only half-working implementation of this idea aside from using feedburner to dictate who can use your feed.
I think this going to be primarily a user issue though. Not business to business.
So what does it mean to "create" data? If I submit a restaurant review to a site, I'd say I "created" the review. On the other hand, if I just typed in the restaurant's menu, I'd say they "created" it. If I take a photo and upload it, I "created" it, but what about the subject(s) of the photo?
It gets more interesting when you think about financial transactions, which are generally two sided. Which party owns the data from the following transactions?
- I pay my mortgage to the bank
- My employer pays me
- I buy or sell an item on eBay
"I personally don't see any problem with a user blocking access to whomever they don't want using their data. I think robots.txt is really the only half-working implementation of this idea aside from using feedburner to dictate who can use your feed."
The problem is that all these terms are done under the surface and the user never knows.
What if Six Apart started to charge Technorati to aggregate their blogs? There's NO way I want anyone standing in the way of my content getting into Technorati.
The issue is that when users are contributing data to a public system they expect the data to be public.
Discrimination on robot source isn't good.
Robots are people too! :-)
Kevin
I wonder if there are any provision in the DMCA that one could use to legally go after businesses that _don't_ give you back control of your data. If they store (copy) my data, and they use it (whether in aggregate or not) can I not go after them the same way the RIAA goes after teenagers and grandmothers?
I actually started thinking about this issue a few years ago, myself. It was in the context of grocery store discount cards. Yes, the business transaction itself, the exchange of money, is 1/2 you, and 1/2 the supermarket. But the actual set of assembled items, the "basket" of what items I purchase at the same time as other items.. well that is purely my intellectual creation...and therefore my intellectual property.
Knowing which items get purchased with which other items is marketing gold. That is how companies learn to do product placement, and shelving design, and Amazon-like "customers who bought this also bought that" recommendations. But it was my original intellectual effort that put those items in the same basket to begin with. Is that intellectual property, my intellectual property, not protected under the DMCA?
"The single most frustrating thing about many services is the lack of any good way to get my data out--either for backup purposes or to import it elsewhere."
Which is why I don't use very many Yahoo services...too much data (and metadata) is too hard to get back out in a usable form.
Another tricky area is collaborative content generation ... e.g. multiple people contribute to a list ... like Listible. According to the ToS, Listible owns the compilation.
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