Facebook and Lumpy policy decisions

Rethinking your TOS/EULA is a pain in the neck. Nobody wants to divert attention, money or energy thinking about it. It seems like a serious distraction from making money and serving customers.

Looking at the 2009 Facebook policy hubbub, it’s a big deal. It sucks up attorney fees, management, press, even engineering into a big, risky, bothersome pile of unhappiness.

So a reasonable company wouldn’t volunteer for exercises like that. Maybe, at most, an annual review. It might look like this.

Lumpy.

Huge piles of politics.

What if you smoothed it out?

Would that reduce the icky parts of policy review and enhance the charming parts?

Because policy review has its charming parts.

• It lets you re-engage your customers on what matters to them.
• It helps you restate what you need from customers their language.
• It helps turn your policy from a just-click-through-it to a loyalty building selling opportunity. Maybe even a competitive advantage.

And a smoother, more continuous approach has its tasty bits too.

• Fewer surprises.
• More continuity, less forgetting of why.
• Less distraction, cost, effort.
• Smaller changes, more easily absorbed.

Smoothing might have parts like:

• An internal TOS/EULA lmailing list that any employee can join.
• Annual policy summit. A little bit of briefing. A few workshops. A lot of Open Space unconference.
• A public TOS/EULA listserve/bbs for policy advocates, concerned citizens and partners.
• Ongoing communications (blog posts? videos?) about the state of your policy thinking, inviting participation in that thinking.

Should DataPortability.org help companies engage in that conversation? To move from lumpy to smooth. To avoid the icky bits. To enjoy the tasty and charming parts of policy definition. We already are – join us!

Redefining and Standardizing ‘Ownership’

Facebook, by virtue of its sheer size and scope, is often the first to run into issues that the rest of the social web will need to address sooner rather than later. To its credit, Facebook seems to be trying to address these issues in a way that protects their short and long term business while balancing the needs of the community.

By observing these actions the DataPortability project, and the wider community, can learn lessons on what works and what doesn’t so we can all adopt clear community endorsed best practices.

The latest Facebook step (misstep?) occurred last week when they made some changes to their Terms of Service and one of the items of contention by many is the following statement:

“You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. “

“So Who Owns Your Data” is always a question that myself and other members of the DataPortability Project (DPP) have grappled with for some time. No doubt ‘ownership’ of data is top of mind to people who are interested in data portability.

We have said in the past that Ownership without Control is worthless. Scope of Control, however, seems to stem from ownership. That is, you should only be able to control what you own. So the fundamental question of Ownership is still important.

‘Ownership’, however, is tricky when you are talking about bits and bytes that are getting shared, indexed, replicated and mixed together by multiple services and participants.

Perhaps Ownership is not the right metaphor at all? Late last year, fellow DPP co-founder Elias took the time to address some thoughts on ‘ownership’ of data with a post titled “You don’t nor need to own your data” that I would recommend reading. In it, Elias discusses traditional concepts of ownership and goes on to suggest that perhaps we need a new term to describe our relationship to social data.

Here is a large section from his post:

First of all, let’s define property ownership: “the ability to deny use of an asset by another entity”. The reason you can claim status to owning your house, is because you can deny someone else access to your property. Most of us have a fence to separate our property from the public space; others like the hillbillies sit in their rocking chair with a shot gun ready to fire. Either way, it’s well understood if someone else owns something, and if you trespass, the dogs will chase after you.

The characteristics of ownership can be described as follows:

1. You have legal title recognising in your legal jurisdiction that you own it.
2. You have the ability to enforce your right of ownership in your legal jurisdiction
3. You can get benefits from the property.

The third point is key. When people cry out loud “I own my data”, that’s essentially the reason (when you take out the Neanderthal emotionally-driven reasoning out of the equation). Where we get a little lost though, is when we define those benefits. It could be said, that you want to be able to control your data so that you can use it somewhere else, and so you can make sure someone else doesn’t use it in a way that causes you harm.

Whilst that might sound like ownership to you, that’s where the house of cards collapses. The reason being, unless you can prove the ability to deny use by another entity, you do not have ownership. It’s a trap, because data is not like a physical good which cannot be easily copied. It’s like a butterfly locked in a safe: the moment you open that safe up, you can say good bye. If data can only satisfy the ownership definition when you hide it from the world, that means when it’s public to the world, you no longer own it. And that sucks, because data by nature is used for public consumption. But what if you could get the same benefits of ownership – or rather, receive benefits of usage and regulate usage – without actually ‘owning’ it?

Property and data – same same, but different
Both property and data are assets. They create value for those who use them. But that’s where the similarity’s end.

Property gains value through scarcity. The more unique, the more valuable. Data on the other hand, gains value through reuse. The more derivative works off it, means the more information generated (as information is simply data connected with other data). The more information, the more knowledge, the more value created – working its way along the information value chain. If data is isolated, and not reused, it has little value. For example, if a company has a piece of data but is not allowed to ever use it – there is no value to it.

Data gains value through use, and additional value through reuse and derivative creations. If no one reads this blog, it’s a waste of space; if thousands of people read it, its value increases – as these ideas are decimated. To give one perspective on this, when people create their own posts reusing the data I’ve created, I generate value through them linking back to me. No linking, no value realised. Of course, I get a lot more value out of it beyond page rank juice, but hopefully you realise if you “steal” my content (with at least some acknowledgement to me the person), then you are actually doing me a favour.

Ignore the above!
Talking about all this ownership stuff doesn’t actually matter; it’s not ownership that we want. Let’s take a step back, and look at this from a broader, philosophical view.

Property ownership is based on the concept that you get value from holding something for an extended period of time. But in an age of rapid change, do you still get value from that? Let’s say, we lose the Holy War for people being able to ‘own’ their data. Facebook – you win – you now ‘own’ me. This is because it owns the data about me – my identity, it would appear, is under the control of Facebook – it now owns, that “I am in a relationship”. However, the Holy War might have been lost but I don’t care. Because Facebook owns crap – as six months ago, I was in a relationship. Now I’m single and haven’t updated my status. The value for Facebook, is not in owning me in a period of time: it’s in having access to me all the time – because one way they translate that data into value is advertising, and targeting ads is pointless if you have the wrong information to base your targetting on. Probably the only data that can be static in my profile, is birth-date and gender – but with some tampering and cosmetics, even those can be altered now!

With their change of terms, Facebook is essentially saying that they will ‘forever own’ a copy of your data as part of their archives to do with what they wish. I will go so far as to sympathize personally with the team there and give them an approving nod for some of Zuckerberg’s comments especially acknowledging that they are indeed trying to address some serious questions around how we live our digital lives. It’s not easy and they certainly don’t have to go it alone.

I would invite them, and anyone else interested in the topic, to join one of our most recent TaskForces – the EULA & ToS Taskforce.

Following the example of  Creative Commons, the goal of our task force is to identify and name key concepts that help users and service providers understand what each other expects . The intended output will be a set of documents that can be referenced or included in EULA and TOS agreements and simple descriptions for users to understand what it means when they upload and share data with services providers.

As part of this taskforce, we seek to provide a standard way of describing the relationship between the user and site that is easy to understand and provides both sides with the control that they need.

If you are interested in the subject – now is the time to join us and help define some basic principles that services providers should support by joining and supporting the work that the EULA & ToS Taskforce is conducting.

And another kudos to Facebook for starting a discussion topic immediately on the “People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)” Facebook Group. Some real use cases and concerns are being captured in that discussion that will help us all as we work towards our common goal.

Some additional posts on the subject of Facebooks New Terms of Service:

• Where the buzz started on the Consumerist Blog (a consumer advocacy blog) Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.”
• Caroline McCarthy CNET: Facebook: Relax, we won’t sell your photos
• An interesting overview of the various terms of service out there by Amanda French : Facebook terms of service compared with MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter
• web.tech.law What Facebook’s revised terms of use mean for your content
• There are plenty of other posts and suspect more to come so here is a link to posts via Techmeme
• Comparing the Terms and Conditions of Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Graceful Exit: Yahoo!’s flickr evicts Shéhérazade

Flickr deleted a popular photographer’s collection. Thomas Hawk reports this eviction from start to finish. Arbitrary justifications, no notice, no appeal, no ability to restore the photos, deletion of third-party intellectual property (thousands of comments). It seems the justification was without merit.

Does your city give landlords this much power?

Should you have the power to fight eviction?

Graceful Exit: facebook evicts Nakedjen

Excerpt from a tragic exit, a story of online eviction from Facebook, without notice, merit, or recourse: 

All was definitely not well.

Facebook obliterated Nakedjen.

Obliterated.  Deleted.  Made me disappear. 

And they did it without any warning or even a simple email telling me that I had done something wrong.

My email to them asking what I might have done to cause such a brutal outcome was just met with an automatic reply telling me that I must be in violation of the TOS and to read it carefully.

Which I did.  Every single word.  Carefully.  There is absolutely no term or stipulation that I even came close to violating other than that my name is Nakedjen.  However, as I mentioned, that is MY name.  And it has been my name on Facebook since day one.  The email that I used for the service is even nakedjen@nakedjen.com  Could I be more clear or obvious?  I don’t think so.

What I also learned, while reading each and every word carefully, is that my account on Facebook is at will and can be terminated by Facebook at any time for any reason they deem “reasonable.”  Basically, our accounts are being hosted for free on their servers.  So this actually does make sense.  If someone in their offices wakes up today and decides that the word Naked is pornographic or even just decides that my photo of Buddha wearing a ski cap is offensive, that person can just hit the delete button and bye bye Nakedjen.

In addition, all content that is published by me (or anyone else) including photos, blog posts, and videos becomes the property of Facebook.  You may own it, but so do they because they are now hosting it on their servers and they have claimed rights to it in their TOS.

Nakedjen’s full post challenges definitions of data “ownership”. She concludes:

This is a lesson in our digital rights and freedoms.  I know it may seem like a trivial thing.  A Facebook profile being deleted because I call myself Nakedjen.  However, if they can obliterate me (and my entire group of friends and family and all my files) just because I have Naked in my name, how long before they obliterate you because your name vaguely sounds Islamic?  Or Muslim?  Or even just American?

Think about it.