Free the Scoble 5,000!!
It is easy to make light of the constant swirl of twittery online activity that surrounds well-known blogger Robert Scoble.
But Facebook’s disabling of his account yesterday–because he was apparently using a script to access and pull data from his own profile there to move it to other social graphs of his choice–is not going to turn out well for the social-networking company.
In fact, it seems to me that the company is about to shoot itself in the foot once again. And–let’s be honest–Facebook certainly doesn’t have any bullet-free feet to aim at after its recent debacles with its stalkerish Beacon ad product and its ill-advised legal action against a magazine that published embarrassing information about Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
As goofy as it seems, it looks like Scoble has aimed perfectly at the Achilles’ heel of Facebook–the testy issue of data portability and how much control you should have over your own information online.
In this case, as Scoble wrote in a blog post today, the fight with Facebook is over an effort he has been making with DataPortability.org, which notes on its Web site that “our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between, our chosen tools or vendors.”
Such activity–which Facebook characterizes as “scraping”–is not allowed under its Terms of Use.
More to the point, such an ability would be damaging to Facebook’s business plan around building a robust ad business. The success of that squarely relies on people staying and actively using the service because they have committed time and effort in putting up scads of information, photos and videos about themselves on the service, as well as establishing a complex and personally valuable network of friends.
For example, Scoble has said he has about 5,000 friends on Facebook alone–the upper limit on the service.
That’s some digital Rolodex you don’t want to lose, and Facebook knows this.
Thus, it has zero interest in allowing people to escape easily if they want to, even though THE INFORMATION ON FACEBOOK IS THEIRS AND NOT FACEBOOK’S.
Sorry for the caps, but I wanted to be as clear as I could: All that information on Facebook is Robert Scoble’s. So, he should–even if he agreed to give away his rights to move it to use the service in the first place (he had no other choice if he wanted to join)–be allowed to move it wherever he wants.
Still, in an email to him, Facebook customer service wrote: “Our systems indicate that you’ve been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script. This kind of activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.
“As a result, your account has been disabled. Please reply to this email with a description of your recent activity on Facebook. In addition, please confirm with us that in the future you will not scrape or otherwise attempt to obtain in any manner information from our Web site except as permitted by our Terms of Use, and that you will immediately delete and not use in any manner any such information you may have previously obtained.”
Scary! Of course, because it is Facebook, there is already a group formed to urge he be reinstated.
In other words, Facebook is about to get Scobleized and it is not going to be pretty.
Comments
The information on Facebook does, indeed, belong to its users. But the only information Robert owns is the information that he has personally put in - and that’s not what he was scraping.
What he was doing was taking information which he’d been granted access to by friends on Facebook, and moving it elsewhere. That’s something that, explicitly at least, they hadn’t given him the right to do.
I’m totally for data portability. But if the data you put into Facebook can be taken from it and used elsewhere by any user, then that needs to be made explicit when you sign up. Openness only works when it works both ways.
Posted by Ian Betteridge at January 3rd, 2008 at 6:29 amDoes anyone besides me see this as a non-story?
1. Blogger signs up for Facebook.
2. Blogger breaks TOS.
3. Account gets banned.
If Scoble didn’t want Facebook to have all this information, he didn’t have to give it to them in the first place.
Not to mention that he could have just throttled his scraping down to the pace at which a human might view the pages to avoid detection…
Posted by Christopher Finke at January 3rd, 2008 at 6:32 amIan,
Great point.
Posted by Kara Swisher at January 3rd, 2008 at 6:36 amAlthough by friending him, those users knew he was going to use that info in a way.
In any case, the makings of a great debate!
Chris:
I think it is not a non-story. This issue of data portability, combined with privacy issues has real legs, I think.
Posted by Kara Swisher at January 3rd, 2008 at 6:38 amThere is always a cost to a “free service”. In this case, Facebook considers the non-portability of personal data to be part of the deal.
Either pressuring them to change that policy (good luck with that, since your data and continued use of the site is how they plan to monetize the site) or not using the service is the only way to deal with this issue.
Posted by Chris Wexler at January 3rd, 2008 at 7:31 amThere’s an anti-facebook undercurrent developing that is being openly expressed by the alpha-geeks on twitter. I’ve been saying the same thing for a while now. Twice in the past 24 hours, two people have told me that they have either stopped using facebook completely, or that they are “…burned out on facebook”.
Right or wrong, many, many people pay attention and take their cue from these bloggers. I agree that a lotta users may be reluctant to abandon the time they’ve spent on facebook, but in the end you gotta see some ROI - what has all this really provided to the average user in terms of measurable advantage in business?
If there isn’t business value, then what? Status updates? One word: twitter.
If facebook’s utility to the alpha-tech can be so easily replaced by twitter (as has occurred to me and I suspect is occurring to Hugh McLeod [as one example] as well), then facebook better quickly figure out how to remain relevant to them.
Because when the alpha-geeks say ‘I don’t use facebook’, people will hear ‘Don’t use facebook’.
Posted by John Minnihan at January 3rd, 2008 at 7:42 amWell, in all of this Facebook drama, I hope that Mr. Scoble gets his Facebook account reinstated, in addition to Facebook allowing it’s users to send out an unlimited amount of friend requests daily..:-)
http://www.Drewryonline.net
Posted by Shawn Drewry at January 3rd, 2008 at 8:29 amThe “whose data is it?” craziness has been going on an awfully long time. In my space, it’s the “roach motels” of photo sharing - those sites, like Kodak and Snapfish, where your photos check in but they never check out (unless you don’t buy something, in which case they’ll happily delete your photos for you).
I’m not sure why businesses get proprietary about data they don’t even own. In the case of photos, it’s very clear - the customer clicked the shutter, not the site. What’s less clear is why customers put up with this sort of treatment…
Posted by Don MacAskill at January 3rd, 2008 at 8:34 amI see the wider story on data portability and you can argue that Scoble has used his muscle to elevate that debate. What Facebook can’t do though is allow a single individual run rough shod over their ToS.
You sign up, you are deemed to know these things. If you don’t like it later then that’s your problem. If Scoble isn’t careful, he runs the risk of being cast as a digital bully.
Posted by Dennis Howlett at January 3rd, 2008 at 9:12 amYes Kara, Facebook is getting Scobleized. And those who experience sudden termination, extermination, disablement or vanquishment … without warning … have been Scobled. You are completely correct in your observations here. What will Facebook do and say??
Posted by Jeff Crites at January 3rd, 2008 at 9:20 amKara, first though I love you videos, I love your prose more!
Just to get an idea of how big of a deal you think this is, how would you compare it with something like the fact that the banks/credit bureaus make good money selling our data, and then want to SELL US privacy protection services in case there is some breach in privacy due to the fact that our data was made available for sale to begin with?
We all seem fine with not having any financial privacy and Scoble notwithstanding, I find the issues with Facebook less irksome/worrisome. But it is just one opinion.
Posted by Robert Seidman at January 3rd, 2008 at 11:35 amsorry Kara, chris finke is right. this is completely black & white issue. Scoble (& more importantly Plaxo) violated FB TOS.
only gray area is whether FB should have put their foot down more gracefully if they knew it was Scoble, to avoid the same PR storm you & he & others are brewing up right now.
this was complete trojan horse to try to “prove” the data ownership / portability issue — but while that argument might hold water from other perspectives, busting TOS & violating *OTHER* user’s email privacy at the same time puts Scoble / Plaxo clearly in the wrong here.
perhaps right war, but wrong battle.
Posted by dave mcclure at January 3rd, 2008 at 1:15 pm(all that aside, love the headline dahling
Posted by dave mcclure at January 3rd, 2008 at 1:16 pmDon’t get me wrong I respect/am scared of the Tech Blogger-Nostra as much as anyone else.
But this is the same Scoble a few months ago who claimed that Social Search and Social Ad Delivery will eventually mark (no pun intended , well maybe a little) the downfall of google. What did he think those algorithms would be based on? Thus how could he possibly think FB wouldn’t protect what he so strongly believes will be the key to their ascension to the throne?
Secondly, 99.9 pct of the fb population now or in the future doesn’t know or will ever care about Scoble.
Thirdly , ‘uber bloggers’ really only have a grip on ‘uber geeks (myself included)’ if you actually go talk to people in AMERICA and the rest of the world (u know the places south east west and north of the valley). You’ll see only a small percentage of people have even HEARD of twitter , and further more MySpace (gasp) still has a bit of a strangle hold on much of America, ESPECIALLY lower-income America.
I think its a valid issue and timely article by The K , but to inflect that facebook is going to be ’scobled’ , or that this his latest shenanigan will have any sort of effect on the FB machine is just a seg-fault of reality.
Posted by nima negahban at January 3rd, 2008 at 1:55 pmIts clear that Scoble has broken Facebook’s TOS to some degree. Sites like Facebook, MySpace and others need to open up and this is a great way to show why. Currently these sites are like local bars where you can only interact with friends when you are in the bar.
I think in a way this is like DRM on music. The big music companies are finally figuring out that if they just sell it unprotected it will be a success. If the popular social sites would be more open they’d be surprised as well. Many users would just stay put while others would roam around resulting in good competition between sites and better features for all users.
Its not like anyone is wanting Amazon to share your credit card info with Barnes and Noble. We are talking about sites hoarding our basic profile info and connections to others online. That information should be available to take with us and share with any site we choose to visit.
Posted by Scott Cropper at January 3rd, 2008 at 2:10 pmShort term - a non-story. Nima is right in saying the masses don’t know or care who Scoble is. Plus, he got back in.
Long term - maybe history footnotes this as one of several incidents where social web users come to terms with privacy issues. Substitute “Scoble” for “Generic Corporation X” or “Friendly Government Agency” and argue for portability.
Bottom line - he broke the ToS, period. He knew what he was doing. As Wexler pointed out, freedom, and free service, isn’t free.
Posted by chris rogers at January 3rd, 2008 at 3:55 pmThis isn’t about data portability. It’s about Terms of Service for the various things we sign up for.
As Ian and others have said, Scoble KNEW the terms for using Facebook. He knowningly violated those terms. Now he wants to complain.
This is endemic to our new society - complain about things we knew we weren’t supposed to do but tried to do anyway. And it’s not right and it’s not the proper example for others. Scoble got busted and he should pay the price.
If he didn’t want to abide by the terms of service, he didn’t have to sign up. And if he’s THAT popular and so many people are going to go somewhere just for him, perhaps he should find a site that has terms of service more to his liking.
Or, better yet, CREATE something new for the world rather than complaining about what someone else has created.
Posted by Jeff Gordon at January 3rd, 2008 at 5:16 pmI’ve crafted a solution to retrieve your Facebook friend data (including e-mail addresses) without breaking Facebook’s TOS: http://www.chrisfinke.com/addo.....scavenger/
Posted by Christopher Finke at January 3rd, 2008 at 7:27 pmThis is not an easy call for Facebook. Either way they will lose users. Lets see if and how they respond.
Posted by Andy Wood at January 4th, 2008 at 4:38 am… and if Scoble truly believes in open Data, presumbly he will remove himself from Facebook for the time being - on a point of principle!
Posted by Andy Wood at January 4th, 2008 at 4:42 amWhat often gets lost in debates of this nature is that a service provider’s policies are not necessarily reasonable (or even legal) just because they are enshrined in a “terms of service” agreement. Subscribers can and do question the policies of services they subscribe to and, in extreme cases, mount class-action lawsuits against the companies whose policies they oppose.
It’s a free country—Facebook is free to stipulate whatever they want in their terms of service; and users are free to object to policies they consider unfairly restrictive and to organize in behalf of those objections. Power to the people.
Posted by Alan Sanders at January 5th, 2008 at 12:16 pmWhat a mess, Kara. And it’s not a simple good vs. evil mess; and it’s bigger than Scoble, Facebook & Plaxo. It goes directly to the heart of the entire Web 2.0, social networking explosion, as I wrote here: http://www.utahtechwatch.com/i.....uestions/.
On the other hand, Facebook and Zuckerberg need better PR counsel, because what ever PR advice they’ve been getting recently is B-A-D! And that’s not the good kinda bad. (See http://www.thebettyfactor.com/.....facebook/.)
Anyway . . . keep up the good work. I’ll be at the Delta 7 Sports table at the ShowStoppers media reception on Monday night. Hope to see you there.
David
Posted by David Politis at January 5th, 2008 at 9:36 pm