Plaxo, Scraping and Data Portability
// January 3rd, 2008 // 1 Comment » // social media
Some of you discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web may know, during the day I work with a great bunch of privacy advocates. So I’ve got some opinions about the discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Scroble scraping issue of the day.
Just ask yourself: let’s say large consumer product company X had discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web created a fan group in Facebook. This morning, they decided to discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web launch a new promotional campaign aimed at just these fans, but needed the discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web contact information. Finding Plaxo’s cool new tool, they then discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web simply scraped the name, addy and preferences of all their “fans.”
Would that be acceptable? No. Damien Mulley has it right. It could be considered data theft.
And we would all be justifiably outraged about it.
It’s the discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web idea of scale. You move the information of your 20, 50, 100 or discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web 200 close personal and business contacts, you’re only maintaining your records.
You move 1,000 or more – you’re maintaining a mailing list.
The idea of data portability is discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web that users, consumers, geeks have control of their OWN data. In this discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web case, users entered into a relationship with another user (Scoble) where they shared access to their mutual Facebook profiles.
Facebook, for discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web all its weaknesses and commercial impulses, does have a limited level of privacy protection. The embedding of personal email addys in an discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web image is one. If you want to send me an email from discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web outside the walled garden, you have to take the time to discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web copy the addy by hand.
It’s one protection FOR ME to discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web avoid having my addy scraped and sold off.
So when discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Plaxo tells Jeremiah Owyang that their new tool is all about data portability – they’re full of crap. It’s all about data collection. Here is an excerpt from a quick interview Jeremiah conducted with Plaxo today:
“…What else should we know? In 2008, data portability thrust is discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web where we want to head, we want to turn the model upside down, so instead of widgets going to discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web the social graph, we would like to make the social graph very portable. This is discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web an area where Plaxo as more depth than anyone else.” (Jeremiah CS5 Production Premium with discount)
In the discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web comments that follow, there is a good discussion of the social contract between “friends” when exchanging access rights and personal information.
Part of this discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web contract, in this case, involves the privacy protections and restrictions put in place by Facebook. Facebook is discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web a wide-open app with a lot of publicly available information, but that discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web doesn’t mean that informed users don’t expect a discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web level of considered behaviour on the part of their “friends.”
When you decide Facebook isn’t the most appropriate tool for you, you can’t attempt to discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web migrate your mass of friends by breaking those protections and discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web restrictions.
Sorry that it’s inconvenient, but that’s the playground you chose to play in.
And if you’re a discount Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web commercial company that develops a tool designed to rip personal information out of proprietary social networks, don’t tell me you’re doing it in the name of the freedom for information to flow freely. There’s a commercial application behind the motivation.
[tags] data portability, data protection, identity theft, Facebook, Plaxo [/tags]
