Social Graphs – What do we own? January 3rd, 2008
I watched the blog build up around Scoble’s ejection from Facebook with some amusement today. But its a good question, what parts of your social graph do you own?
Well thats easy, you own the edges that connect to you and your own node, nothing else. You most certainly don’t own all the contact information at the end of each edge (node=person, edge=relationship) which is why Scoble got kicked off Facebook for trying to grab all the other node information.
Dave Winer pitches in but he misses the point. Its not Scoble’s data, as Damien says more cogently than me.
5 Responses
Segala Says:
Cancel your Plaxo account if you care about privacy…
I wrote a blog post earlier today about Facebook disabling Robert Scoble’s account for attempting to extract his contacts’ information using a script.
Since writing my post and conversing with what felt like the universe on Twitter about the ma…
Aijoovai Says:
I’m sorry but you miss the point.
Scoble (with Plaxo Pulse internal beta) wasn’t trying to cull anything more but names, email addresses and birthdates the three main components to identify his facebook friends. Of course this data is not ‘his’ BUT all of his friends (and ‘friends’) have given him the explicit right to view this data.
What you are implying is that if you’ve given someone your business card you would have the right to demand that person destroy the card one day.
This has NEVER been the case. Not in the 1st millenium, not in the 2nd.
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