Comments on: Web 2.0 and the limits of owning your data

By: Good neighbors « The gaping silence

Good neighbors « The gaping silence — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:51:43 +0000

[…] I’d recently been reading this post on EconoMeta, in which Adam talks about our changing relationship with our personal data: one […]

By: rob rowntree

rob rowntree — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 11:36:40 +0000

Independent of Web 2.0 developments, frameworks and specs. for Web services have also been addressing the problem of isolating the (meta)Data from the implementation.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/specification/ws-resource/

Best practices dont seem to be saying that web20 implementations should be WebServices based. However, there is something to a framework that allows you to build things using a sort of template like:
1. tell me what you want to do
2. tell me where the WS-Resource compliant data is
3. provide an implementation that can use any source for #2 but that in this particular instance will use the data at #2

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 16:36:34 +0000

Dorrian, I couldn’t agree more — at least in copyright law, it seems to me that the root issue is that the nature of a “copy” has changed, and therefore so must the laws (although I’m not sure exactly in what way). I also agree with your first point, which to me says that yes, personal data such as identity and social networks have value to the user and so are subject to a demand by users for decoupling from apps; but even for data that has no such demand associated with it (e.g. for users that do everything within Yahoo or Google), decoupling is still important to avoid a potentially dangerous concentration of power. Thanks for the comment.

By: Dorrian Porter

Dorrian Porter — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 22:13:30 +0000

For me the debate has shifted a little from a point I was trying to make (less about data). I was mostly concerned with elements of identity and social networks, and the impact on switching costs. I’m most torn over the problem that a website or service is the holder of reputational, preference and identity data, and not the Internet itself. Of course it is in the interest of any website or service to want to guard that data and create switching costs, but it just seems to be so damn inefficient. I’m tired of hearing about any company that thinks it can get me to create a social network within its site. Yet, the problem is even bigger when you think of the major players - where they believe, based on size, bredth and scale, that they are a natural fit for holding all of this information across all categories. It’s scary. That’s when I think the solution must lie in giving the individual more control.

The content creation/management side is a separate albeit equally interesting and challenging issue. Lessig made probably the most compelling point to me for the reason CC exists in a recent post. “If copyright regulates “copies,” then while a tiny portion of the uses of culture off the net involves making “copies,” every use of culture on the net begins by making a copy.” That sure made me stop and think just how troubling old laws applied to the new world might be. Laws definitely need to change.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 00:30:37 +0000

That’s my first reaction as well; but then I think, what about authors who are depending upon income based on their writing on the web? Even if the feed is only excerpts, the entire article can always be screen scraped — that’s why I think the ongoing debate around *public* data is more about monetization and recognition for the content creator.

In fact, I’d say it’s really not a technology or business issue at all, it’s a legal issue: if society wants authors (or musicians, artists, etc.) to be able to somehow profit from their public works in a digital world, legal restrictions have to be made on what is permissable. DRM, robot.txt mods, and similar tech doodads are just enforcement techniques, but they all only make repurposing more of a hassle, they’ll never really prevent it.

In the end, enforcement has to center around a clear idea of what everyone has decided is right and wrong, and right now, with so many new ways of repurposing data being created, no one is really sure.

By: Seth Russell

Seth Russell — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 22:07:56 +0000

Over at Shelly’s site you said “if you make your data public, you necessarily lose a great deal of control over it” … which struck me as ooh so true. Information is not like physical property. It is fundamentally different. The value of information lies in its ability to be repeated and still remain useful. If it can be used in only one spot, in only in one context, then is its value is substantially diminished.

Now I certainly subscribe to the idea that people should be able to export\import their data between web services. But the ability of an author to restrain the flow and interaction of the information that they generate when they write on the web is not, in general, something that is going to improve our culture. In fact that ability is something that we would be better off if it were just forgotten.