Jan 05 2008
Data Governance & Privacy - Who Owns the Data?
Who owns the data associated with a user’s account within an online service?
The answer isn’t simple. For example, email has a different status than an address book. In the case of a social network derived from an address book, the social graph is viewed by the business as a compilation of data with a unique arrangement, and therefore copyrightable.
However, many consumers don’t understand or fully agree with this data grab. Facebook was at the center of a recent scandal. A user wrote a script to pull our his social graph information. A FB script noticed the TOS violation and banned him. However, consumer groups are forming lobbying groups to advocate for more user rights in “data portability“.
There are startups developing “Social Network Aggregators”, and those were recently proposed as the 2008 killer app. The Open vs Closed debate will continue moving to center stage this year.
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