Posted January 10th, 2008, in: Semantic Web| Technology| Web 2.0

Still a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about the recent Scandal, famous tech blogger Robert Scoble’s FaceBook account getting suspended after he was using a script Plaxo is working on that can extract email addresses from your friends profiles, using text-recognition (user’s emails on FaceBook, if they decide to share them, are displayed embedded in images on their profiles to prevent text-scraping)

This is a comment I left on the SixApart News Blog’s post:
“Looking Through the Hype of Scoble and Plaxo’s Facebook Conundrum“ 

EDIT: Later, I decided to reuse this rant over on Publishing 2.0’s post here: “The Coming War Over Data On The Web” I’m linking to these things because I think you may want to go read them and the comments they are sparking.  Pretty interesting.

From my point of view, as a pretty avid user of social web apps, I think there are a couple of things missing from the way this discussion is playing out in most cases.
1. By “friending” someone on MySpace, Facebook or wherever, you’re agreeing to give them more access to you. Generally there are two levels of access – the non-’friend’ level and the ‘friend’-level. A user has control over what is published on each tier of access so it seems pretty obvious to me: if you don’t want someone to have access to your email address or phone number, don’t give it to them. Don’t give them that access.
Whether or not someone uses a script to manage the information you give them is beside the point. We don’t hand people our business cards saying “You may only use this email by manually typing it. You can’t put me in your bulk emailing lists.”
2. When you give someone your email address (or whatever), whether it’s embedded in an image or not, you are trusting them to not abuse it.
3. there are a few advantages to using Social Networking Services’ messaging systems in lieu of regular email. One is the ability to communicate with people despite the fact that you haven’t given them your email address, phone number, messaging handle or other private information. The other is the ability to ‘block,’ (and sometimes even flag) a user so that they actually lose privileges.

As users of a networking service, I think making a distinction between running scripts or not, with regard to how I can use the information you gave me, is terribly naive. I mean maybe I shouldn’t be able to use keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste either. It’s a slippery slope. If we draw the line for how I can and cannot use data that you give me at using software, then how about this scenario: I just so happen to be fairly wealthy and I hire a whole room full of overseas workers to manually manage my contacts, send messages etc… See?

Can I be trusted more because I’m not using a bot? No. Making the privilege of access to your contact information hinge on whether or not I will use software to help me organize it is a bit like saying I may only have your information if I promise to only use it in relatively more difficult ways.

When I tell people about some of the work that’s being done to create more universal data formats in the Semantic Web space, they often freak out about privacy, big brother and all that. It’s like people believe that if everything is disorganized and harder to use, there is more safety, privacy etc. This is troubling to me. Thank goodness people don’t manage their households and personal wealth with this approach to security!

If we rely on disorganization as a layer of security It means that only those with greater access to more powerful tools (whether they’re software tools or human resources) can extract and mine the data – data that’s already intended to be public in the first place!

Similarly, contact information should be managed via it’s point of access, not how it’s used. How it’s used is a matter of trust and those of us with integrity have reasons to honor the privacy and comfort of our contacts.