|
||||||
|
Wow, crazy good day for data portability capped by Tim Berners-Lee’s thoughts on the subject. From CNET: “The father of the World Wide Web says having all that data could have “tremendous potential to help humanity.” Full article here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57415764-93/tim-berners-lee-tell-facebook-google-you-want-your-data-back/ [The following is not a commentary on data portability policies at Facebook --- that will be a follow-up to this series. Instead, this article attempts to document the current state of data portability within social media, and in this case, Facebook in particular] Every day, Facebook consumes billions of snippets of people’s lives in the form of freely-provided pictures, comments, messages, and more and stores them away in server facilities scattered throughout the world. This information is added to the tons of other information they already have and then used to render details of our lives upon request. But beyond the Facebook website, how can a user interact directly with their information? Facebook’s Personal Archive
Accessing your Facebook information is as simple as visiting your Facebook page, or that of your friends. This structured format is constantly being tweaked to provide what Facebook believes is the best way for you to interact with all of this information. But they also provide a mechanism for you to take your data “offline” through the downloading of a “personal archive”, as in:  Getting to this result starts easily enough, simply access your account settings from your Facebook page and select “Download a copy of your Facebook data” at the bottom of the GENERAL ACCOUNT SETTINGS tab.  After a bit of security validation, the process begins. Facebook starts gathering your information into your personal archive and emails you when complete. Not all of your information is provided, however, particularly things that involve activity with others. Specific information includes:  Now, I believe that I am a moderate to light-weight Facebook user. I do not use it every day, although I do have several hundred “friends” and my twitter feed auto-posts to Facebook. Still, it took almost a full hour to gather my information and package it up with neatly organized directories into a 44MB zip file ready for me to download.  And here’s the content of the zip file representing my personal archive from Facebook:  Now that I have my data on my own computer, I can browse through it without having to be connected to the internet. I have successfully downloaded a copy of my data Facebook allows me to access offline. There were some issues browsing the data, the biggest being no “pagination” for the data, hence when I tried to view all my messages the browser locked up trying to render so much information. From a pure data portability perspective, this process is more of a “backup” of data than true data portability. The information provided is pre-formatted into html documents that make it easy to interact with IN THE FORMAT CHOSEN BY FACEBOOK, however much of the underlying data is unavailable to non-programmers. I had hoped to see additional formats to the archive, or even just one, other than formatted HTML. JSON would have been my first choice, and, in fact, there was a time when Facebook did provide this option, but alas no more. Facebook’s Graph API
Programmers have considerably more options through Facebook’s extensive SOCIAL GRAPH API and related tools and resources, but this is not for the average user. Most applications today that integrate with Facebook are doing so in one form or another through the API interface (or one of its related components or plugins). Interaction with graph data is extensive. From the Facebook’s Developer pages:
Facebook has also provided public access to the GRAPH API through the use of its RESTful interface. This makes it extremely easy to gather specific information from the social graph simply by referencing a web address, as in:  3rd Party Alternatives to Facebook’s Personal Archive
 Facebook itself is not the only option for users interested in extracting their information. One of the most interesting alternatives is a site called www.givememydata.com (with an accompanying Facebook App), built by assistant professor of art Owen Mundy of Florida State University. It essentially provides a user interface to many of the programmatic aspects of the Facebook Graph API.  A variety of other options exist that can help users access and interact with their information, but ultimately Facebook has the biggest opportunity, as well as responsibility, to see these initiatives through. Coming up next: The State of Data Portability in Social Media, Part II – A Closer Look at Google. – Steve Repetti
Facebook continues to improve on data portability issues. On The Media spoke last week to an Austrian student sent a thousand-page data dump when he asked Facebook for his personal data under EU law. Today, when you ask, Facebook sends you a form email (text below). You’re still not getting all of your data, but your self-service options are more complete and easier. Data you can download includes your profile and much of your activity, including off-Facebook “likes.” How useful and reusable is the downloaded data? I don’t know; if you try, please ping me and I’ll update the post. Meanwhile, Facebook’s Data Access Request Team writes “We expect to have a new tool with additional categories of data to download available in the next few months.” Here’s hoping the new downloads come with specs so third-parties can put your archive to work. Mike Swift writes up the personal data space as a contest between individuals and large corporations. Swift interviewed Kaliya Hamlin of the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium and PDEC members Reputation.com, Personal, and Singly. The Consortium doesn’t approach the challenge as a direct conflict. They see a realignment of behavior by people and enterprises producing . . . → Read More: Merc: Battle brewing over control of personal data online Google today unveiled a new service that provides advanced Data Portability across its diverse platform. Google Takeout (http://www.google.com/takeout) makes it easy to extract your data from a variety of Google Services including: Buzz, Contact and Circles, Picasa Web Albums, and Profile. The information is provided in a variety of formats, including vCard and JSON . . . → Read More: Google Unleashes New Data Portability Initiative: Google Takeout  Comments are closed  Announcements, perspective, Uncategorized  data portability, facebook, google tackout, google+ Today, friends of Data Portability lost an ally in their cause when the Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, announced he will be leaving his post in August. Mr. Kundra was the first-ever Chief Information Officer of the United States. During his tenure, Mr. Kundra championed the use of open standards, cloud computing, accessibility, and data . . . → Read More: Data Portability Applauds US CIO, Mourns Departure Comments are closed Official comment, perspective Accessibility, data portability, dataportability, privacy, US CIO, Vivek Kundra
We took a stab at rewriting the ten Portability Policy questions as user demands, behavior we want. The list so far. Document your APIs and data formats. Support existing identities. Support referencing to authoritative data in a location of my choosing. (include by reference) Support auto-updating from authoritative data in a . . . → Read More: Tuesday’s DataPortability session at IIW12 When titans of industry and state meet, worlds can change. The World Economic Forum launched a three year “Rethinking Personal Data” project, including data portability. Their first report, Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class, shows their direction. A new asset class? That’s a telling use of language. Investopedia refers to securities with “similar characteristics, behave similarly in the marketplace, and are subject to the same laws and regulations.” Stocks, bonds, cash, real estate, and intellectual property are common asset classes. Some managerial accountants defined human capital as a new asset class. Securities and IP go back hundreds of years. As a new asset class, personal data will have its own characteristics and market behavior, its own laws and regulations. We’ve barely mapped this new landscape. U.S. law doesn’t even recognize a theory of rights associated with personal data. So there is a great deal of work ahead. Some of that is ours, at the DataPortability Project. It falls to the DPP to crisply define data portability’s purpose, why it matters, how it fits into lives lived digitally. That’s some of our work at next week’s Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View. [Skype me if you’d like an IIW discount code.] Speed matters. A look at the chart below, from Bain, shows a rush to capitalize on billion dollar markets in data.
If we don’t embed data portability values and vision into the new identity and personal data infrastructure, it could take decades to achieve our goals. So read WEF’s first report, below the fold. See where their thinking is now. And ask: where can we amplify their commitment to personal data portability? Continue reading World Economic Forum starts work on Data Portability |
||||||
|
Copyright © 2012 The DataPortability Project - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
“The Graph API presents a simple, consistent view of the Facebook social graph, uniformly representing objects in the graph (e.g., people, photos, events, and pages) and the connections between them (e.g., friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags).” 
Data Portability Wars : Google and Facebook vs. YOU
Well, here we go again.
The big companies love to embrace data portability and the freedom it provides its users, not to mention the press and goodwill that comes with it, as long as it doesn’t conflict with their corporate agenda.
Let’s call it what it is: Facebook and Google both support “convenient” data . . . → Read More: Data Portability Wars : Google and Facebook vs. YOU