data portability

Some thoughts after reading this piece in Wired (although this actual blog post could have been written anytime in the last few years).

Let's imagine that the US Government announced that they had started a web site. On this site, you needed to enter your personal information, including an address, and various interests. Once this was done, you could tell the government – via the web site – all about your day to day activities: what you read, where you were going, what movies you like, etc. Then, you could identify your friends, and upload pictures and video of these friends.

This is a small subset of what Facebook users do every day, by choice. Facebook is probably the single largest opt-in surveillance program ever seen. If any government ever tried to build a site like this – even with an ostensibly worthwhile goal, like mapping public services to people based on interest, geographic location, and perceived need – the outcry would be deafening.

Facebook's "services" – and I'm thinking specifically of Facebook Connect – extend that surveillance to what people do on sites outside of Facebook. However, Facebook's internal search – powered by their deal with Microsoft – will provide an enormous amount of raw data about what individual people want. Given that these searches will be conducted by people logged in to Facebook, the search strings used can be mapped to specific individuals. As we have seen before, even a little bit of information about search strings can lead to some awkward revelations.

When people get a glimpse of how much Facebook knows about them, they generally freak out. Yet, the freak outs subside, and people keep plugging away, adding more data into the system.

Okay, time to go. Need to update my status:

Adjusted my tinfoil hat. It had tilted precariously back, exposing most of my frontal lobe.

Recently, via a listserv where I participate, I learned about a site called StudyBlue. This site was touted as part of a new set of tools supporting networked learning; my response is reposted below.

My response

Hello, all,

At the risk of being a curmudgeon, we need to look at the terms of use of the services we are using/promoting.

The Terms of Use of StudyBlue, available at http://www.studyblue.com/Terms.htm, contain the following language:

"By posting Member Content to any part of the Web site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing."

However, this site is one of the rare cases that has Terms that are worse than Facebook's (who at least pay lip service to respecting user's privacy decisions).

From the StudyBlue terms of service, from the link above:

"When you upload Member Content as Private the Company will not post the information to any other Member without your permission. However, upon leaving a class or course, any Member Content left uploaded as Private will be made Public for the life of the Web site. You may remove your Private Member Content from the Web site before you leave a class or course. If you choose to remove your Private Member Content before leaving a class or course , the license granted above will automatically expire. If you do not remove your Private Member Content from the Web site before you leave a class or course, the license granted above will not expire and will continue indefinitely."

So, if you create private content in a course/group, it will become public if you leave the course without deleting it. Moreover, on a quick read through, these terms say nothing about what happens if a user wants to delete their account. Under these terms, there seems to be no way for a user to delete their content, which is, according to these terms, licensed in perpetuity to StudyBlue.

Facebook recently enraged a portion of their user base by similar behavior: http://consumerist.com/5150175/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-... or http://is.gd/jDf4

The web opens up an array of options for teaching, learning, and connecting, but we need to remember that learning should be organized around the needs of the student/learner. The cost of joining a website should not be complete loss of control over your content, and as technology advocates we need to become more aware of the ramifications of data control and data portability within networked learning environments. In short, learners deserve better than the terms offered at StudyBlue, Facebook, Ning, etc. Why should a prerequisite of social learning be the loss of control over how your work is used/reused? By promoting sites that are predicated on an intellectual land grab of learner-created content, we perpetuate the lie that this is acceptable behavior.

In an earlier post this year, I held out hope that 2009 would finally be the year where people started taking data ownership and data portability seriously.

As Facebook often does, they help illustrate why this is relevant, and why this is something people should care about.

The fun began a few weeks ago, when Facebook changed their Terms of Service. Last weekend, Consumerist described the specifics of the changes:

Facebook's terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.

Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

To summarize, the old version of Facebook's Terms of Service used to specify that, when a person deleted their account, their content went with them (and never mind that the process of deleting an account has proven, well, troublesome for some).

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg initially defended the change (does this remind anyone else of the response to Beacon?), but 24 hours later Facebook announced that they would revert to the original terms of service.

But really, the hue and cry over Facebook's terms of service misses the larger point: when you put your data into a hosted service, you are allowing it to slide outside of your control. This is true of most hosted services, including Facebook, Ning, MySpace, etc. Facebook's change of the license terms illustrates a larger point: they control your data. More importantly, sites like Facebook and Ning allow people who have no ties to either company to access your data via third party apps. A quick read through the Developers Terms of Service for both Facebook and Ning show that developers of these apps can access user data and content, but this creates an enormous gray area: if someone deletes their account, what happens to any data collected by these third party application developers? I would love to hear of the mechanisms in place that measure how application developers abide by the rules concerning user data.

So, when evaluating a platform for use by you, by your class, or within your school, department, district, or organization, make sure to read the privacy policy, terms of service, and any applicable third party developer terms of service. All of these affect how the work of people within your site will be treated, and potentially used -- which is especially relevant given that most of these sites include terms that allow for indiscriminate resuse and republication of content posted in the site.

At the risk of stating the obvious, none of these are concerns for sites built using open source tools.

And for those curious about where this ends, it looks like Facebook's interest in user data extends beyond the grave.