The Duncan Riley News: Data Portability Goes Prime Time

Everyone on Twitter today has been holding their collective breath waiting for 1 PM PST, when Duncan Riley's post at TechCrunch would go live. The big news? Facebook, Google, and Plaxo joined the Data Portability Workgroup.

I suppose, for me at least, this huge news was actually a let-down. Anyone who followed last week's PR debacle when Facebook banned Robert Scoble really should have seen this coming. They already faced down the backlash over Beacon, so this seemed like a no-brainer after the collective hue and cry that resulted from this move, especially when Scoble updated the group information to include his joining the Data Portability Workgroup.

Here's the thing, though. I agreed with Facebook's move regarding banning Robert Scoble. This opinion will probably get me banned to the outcast table in the lunchroom, but I had actually started an opinion piece about it last week when events were transpiring and then decided against it. No one wants to be a lone voice of dissent.

Please understand. I've been using OpenID for a year now. I've been an obvious fangirl of the stuff that Chris Saad and company have been doing with APML. My problem, however, is in the definition of what data is mine to port.

Robert Scoble was banned from Facebook for running a script that was, essentially, scraping the contact information for all 5000 or so people who have friended him. Aside from what that must look like from a system administration perspective on Facebook's part, do all 5000 of those people understand that by friending a personality like Scoble, they are essentially giving him access to their data? Including their email addresses, contact information, and birthdays? Whose data is that, really? And once you determine ownership, whose right is it to port it?

Believe it or not, I'm a very private person online. Until I turned to writing as a career, the only place my real name ever appeared was on mailing lists of programmers. You would have no idea that I've had an online presence for well over 13 years and have been active in a number of different communities. I keep my personal and professional selves private, and attempt to do the same with my social networking. It's because of my private nature that I try to treat the data that others share with me as respectfully as I can, and for that same reason, I tend to not friend Internet personalities because of that increased visibility.

While I assume that the majority of the tech-savvy are vigilant about protecting themselves in a like manner, I'm brought back AGAIN to the Kathy Sierra issue and other privacy concerns of last year. I see people I know who have no issue with publishing pictures of their children online using real names, and much of that information is available via their social networking profiles. What are the boundaries of data portability? I hope that these large data-capturing sites joining the organization means that everyone will benefit and more definition of who owns what data will come out of it. Because frankly, at the moment, the idea of my Google searches met with my Facebook activity added on to my Google Apps-hosted email? Is making me want to lock my suitcase and hide it under my bed.