Comments on: Who owns your social graph — you or Facebook?

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 23:58:21 +0000

i suspect some day soon this debate will end up in DC just like do-not-call lists and anti-spam legislation. at that point we are looking at the DRM arugments of the music and media industry – namely, you can lisense my content, but you don’t own it. We will be copy writing our personal content and lisensing it to our ‘friends’. i get final say as to who does what with my email address for example. import it to your phone sure… sell it to a marketer, no.

By: Jon Brown

Jon Brown — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 23:47:25 +0000

It seems the root of Facebook’s problem is their privacy model is crap…. If Facebook made it easier for users to control what personal information (email addresses) were shared with which circles of friends then their would be no argument here. Yes the reference to ‘circles’ was deliberate. Regardless, Facebook makes that level of control a PITA and in doing so encourages people to grossly overshare personal information with “Facebook friends”. On FB you can’t control contact information sharing on a list by list basis, only Everyone, Friends of Friends, Friends, or if you navigate through custom options Only Me and selected individuals.

By: Thelma Myers

Thelma Myers — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:37:32 +0000

I exported my facebook contacts a long time ago as I knew that Suckerberg would try and lock me into his ponzi scheme

By: Anders Abrahamsson

Anders Abrahamsson — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 19:42:47 +0000

I added a Facebook Community Page for the issue;.

http://facebook.com/MyContactsAreMine

By: Jon

Jon — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 17:50:55 +0000

There’s genuinely an antitrust issue here under US Antitrust Laws. Not so sure Facebook considered that carefully enough.

By: Jea-jean Breu

Jea-jean Breu — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:21:02 +0000

hello , welcome, goodmorning

By: Mathew Ingram

Mathew Ingram — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:17:14 +0000

Good point, Artem — thanks for the comment.

By: Kat Armstrong

Kat Armstrong — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 08:21:56 +0000

I agreed for the most part up until you stated: “If Facebook wants to protect those who don’t want their information shared in this way, it could always send an alert to someone whose data has been exported, so that they can reconsider whether they share it and with whom.”

Why the heck would I want FB to alert me AFTER the fact? Shouldn’t I have the option to allow someone to export my information? I don’t want to know about it later and then choose whether or not to continue being their friend. The damage is already done at that point.

By: Artem Petakov

Artem Petakov — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 05:40:30 +0000

Simple technical solution to Facebook’s export concerns: If exporting out e-mail addresses is really a concern, then just use a one-way hash of the e-mail address and export that. Then when you import this into Google+ or some other service that already has e-mail addresses, they can use this to match to an existing e-mail address. So good services can compete fairly, but bad spammers can’t use this info.

By: Mathew Ingram

Mathew Ingram — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 04:16:40 +0000

I agree, John.