Entries RSS · Are web businesses above the law?
Meet AddressBookSync, a simple Mac-app created to synchronise pictures and trivial (birthday) data from Facebook with the local Address book the Mac. This is about as much as you could possibly get out of Facebook, without infringing on the terms of agreement that you agreed too (probably without reading) when signing up to Facebook.
And meet my other friend, LinkedIn’s AddressBookExport, which allows me to place all of my contacts into the, again, more useful Address Book on the Mac.
Now, I can take that address book and import it back into Facebook. But I cannot do it the other way around.
Maybe I’m being too European about this, but it seems logical that this should be a law. These are your contacts; there’s a mutual agreement between both parties to come into contact. That same agreement might not exist regarding me importing their addresses into Facebook (Still have to read those TOCs), but Facebook still allows it.
We all get why they don’t allow the opposite. They don’t want me to take my contacts with me to some other social network. Because it isn’t a utility like LinkedIn, but more like a gym-membership, with lots of fun activities to do onsite.
But seriously, shouldn’t this be a law, and if so, why isn’t it being implemented?
Vincent
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Tags: common sense, export, import, law, legal, Mail, privacy, theft
Facebook, Friends, Globalization, Internet, Networks, user-generated content, web2.0, web3.0
If I remember correctly, one of the topics at one innovation/web 2.0/bs seminars around here was “Are privacy laws hindering innovation?” and I guess that many sites are at least in the grey zone when it comes handling private information when it comes to Finnish/EU privacy laws, so I guess this is a partial answer to your blog post’s title. I guess some web 2.0 companies might think that privacy/copyright laws are just quaint out-of-date obstacles.
But, if I understood you correctly, you take the point that all the information that you’ve entered into a web sites’s database system should be exportable by you. I guess that’d be nice, but if you broaden that idea to not only your address book but all your status messages and comments and everything, it might become quite a burden for web companies like Facebook.
In theory, a company has to let you know all the personal information that they have stored about you in their systems (I guess this is a EU norm?).
I think users would love it, once they realize that their generated content is being locked-in, but on the other hand it severly eats into the business logic of many web sites…. but it would improve competition and isn’t that was EU is always after? =)
In some ways, the Internet has led to the re-surgence of the State. Yahoo pulled posting Nazi memorabilia for sale after France was given the legal right, in a US court, to sue the company for circumventing French law. It’s illegal to see Nazi stuff in France, but French users were browsing the memorabilia on US sites. The California court supported the French state’s imposition of French law on a US company with US sites “too easily” accessed by French users.
As you point out, Linda, national legislation is quite meaningless on the internet. I think it’s quite worrying to some extent, especially when giving the example you give.
Kari, I do distinguish between contacts and content. Content should be exportable without question, which is why many blogging plaforms provide export-tools.
Contacts is a grey area, because who owns that data? But my stance is that since there is a mutual consent between parties, they also give consent for that data to be shared.
I personally have 0 interest for the “burden” that platforms are feeling to allow the exportation of that data. They should have accounted for that in their initial technology plan in a section, which I entitle “how we respect our customers!” Facebook’s burden is not technological either, its strategic, probably expanded in a section, entitled “how we respect our shareholders!”