Facebook up for murder charges?
When you enter information into your Facebook profile, does it belong to you, to Facebook or to the people you share it with? Right now there's an interesting debate going on in the websphere: Robert Scoble used a script to get all of his Facebook friends' information. Since that's against the Facebook terms and conditions, his account was disabled. Scoble was wrong – he violated the terms of the Facebook user agreement which he accepted when he joined Facebook. However, the debate isn't about whether Scoble violated Facebook terms. The debate is about whether users should be allowed to download their friends' data.
Nicholas Carr argues that your profile is your information, not your friends nor Facebook. And at the very least you should have a say about whether or not your data can be downloaded in mass by other users.
I'd argue that you made the data available to your friends when you entered into your profile and then friended them. For example, I know my contact info in LinkedIn can be downloaded in vcard format by anybody in my network. I know that anybody in my Facebook network can find my information easily by looking me up.
So is it so very different when someone scrapes your data instead of manually looking it up? I don't think so. Allowing scraping makes it much easier for them to get the data and therefore easier to misuse it, but they still have the same access to the data that they did before hand.
It's an old debate:
- Is a woman responsible for getting raped because she wore a mini-skirt in a dark alley?
- Is a gun manufacturer responsible when one of their guns is used to murder someone?
- Is a bartender responsible when someone drives home drunk and hits and kills someone?
- Is Facebook in trouble for misuse of their users' data because it was easy to download?
Obviously Facebook doesn't want to find out. Or at least that's seems to be the main argument on their side: they are protecting user data. However, they do have a more selfish reason as well. Facebook wants to make sure you have to use their application to get that data and that vendor lock-in is what Scoble is fighting.
