In the cloud, problems can often get confused. People worry about “giving information away” by joining social networks without stopping to think that they give information away on a daily basis. Supermarkets use the information gathered from loyalty cards to target customers, to revise stock-lists and more. The position of most mobile phones can be pinpointed with deadly acuracy.

Many people have a similar fear about “where” their data is. The questions that they should be worried about, in my opinion, are not about who currently owns the physical machines where the zeroes and ones that represent their data are stored, but rather who has control over the right to look at, or distribute that data. This is a matter of contracts, encryption and trust.

Example one: Foxmarks

I have been thinking a lot recently about the differences between ownership and control, and about how one might show these differences in practice. Ten days ago I moved from using the Foxmarks plug-in for Firefox, to using the Box.net Backup Firefox plug-in for this reason. I am sure the people behind Foxmarks are warm and wonderful, and as honest as the day is long. However, I do not know them and have no relationship with them. When I usde their plug-in they very kindly agreed to store my bookmarks on their server and let me synchronise them from there.

However, when I looked at their web site to see what they were doing, and why, I realised that their plans were much bigger than bookmark synchronisation.

At Foxmarks, we’re turning web search upside down. Creating a better way to search that is community inspired and people powered. Getting you to the content you really want – faster and easier.

My inference from this is that they are planning on using the data they get from my bookmarks (and millions of others) as the raw material from which to build a “people powered” search engine. Personally I would to see this in action before providing the raw material to power it. It might be great but, on the other hand, it might not be something I support at all.

I therefore switched to the Box.net plug-in. This does exactly the same thing – it lets me sync the my bookmarks so that every computer I use has exactly the same set. However there is one crucial difference. It stores the file it uses to synchronise with in my Box.net account.

This is totally transparent. Box.net are providing me with the plug-in because they want me to use their online storage. They want to make it sticky, so I keep coming back. They want to make it so useful that eventually a free 1 gigabyte is not enough and I happily take the $9.95 a month 5 gigabyte option.

And they have no use for my data.

In this arrangement I maintain control over who can access my data, and who can make use of it. There is nothing in Box.net’s terms of service that permits them to look at, play with, use or distribute my material – unless they discover that I am using their services for illegal purposes. Their privacy policy says that

We will not give, sell, rent, share, or trade any of your personally identifiable information, or the data that you store using our service to any third party, except as outlined in our Terms of Service and in this privacy policy.

The exceptions are what you might expect: if they are on the receiving end of a court order, or similar.

In contrast, the privacy policy at Foxmarks says that

We may analyze in aggregate the bookmarks of all users in order to deliver services of interest to other users. Such aggregate analysis will always exclude any personally identifying information. For instance, if we notice that many users are suddenly bookmarking a new site, we may display that site in a list of “hot sites.”

Now, this certainly means they will respect my “privacy” in that they won’t publish a page of Owen Kelly’s Twenty Favourite Sites, or anything similar. That is an old-fashioned concern, though.

My concern, as a prosumer, is that they will be taken my work and using it as their own raw material. To put it another way, the price of using the Foxmarks service is to provide Foxmarks with the raw material necessary to maintain a “people powered” search engine, and I think that price might be a bit steeper in the long run than the offer Box.net is making.

I appreciate that other people may well disagree.

Example two: Facebook

The example posed by Facebook is, I think, harder to disagree with. Two days ago, an old friend and work colleague of mine Reidar Wasenius, was summarily ejected from Facebook. His only warning was a brief email correspondence with an administrator there a couple of weeks ago who “warned him” in terms that made no sense to him, since he was doing nothing wrong – except using the service an awful lot.

He had over seven hundred friends – the most of anyone in Finland. There are some more details in the English translation of the opening statement in the We Want Reidar Back Facebook group.

Mr. Wasenius was kicked out from Facebook. His face is no longer in the book.

20th of November: The marketing manager of Samsung, Mr. Reidar Wasenius is astonished. He was kicked out from Facebook.

The expulsion did not happen without a warning. Two weeks earlier the popular social networking site warned Reidar Wasenius requesting him to change his behaviour, or his account would be closed.

- I had a short e-mail conversation with a Facebook support person, but I couldn’t understand the reason for the warning.

- We cannot reveal our algorithms, otherwise everyone could circumvent them, Wasenius was told. He believes that there is some kind of automatic control system which tracks deviations from average use.

Wasenius comments that the only deviation in his behavior is that he uses Facebook a lot and last Saturday he had already 773 friends. It’s the highest amount of Facebook friends for anyone from Finland.

Facebook is really shutting Wasenius out from the community. Nobody can even send him an invitation any more:

– The following email address is associated with an account that is no longer on Facebook.

Closing announcement directs to FAQs, which provide no answers.

Facebook is a company. What they offer is not a matter of life or death. They can do what they want in pursuit of their business aims. We can go elsewhere to Bebo, or one of a hundred alternatives, or to some site we start ourselves, if we don’t like it.

This is all true but it is not the whole truth. Reidar’s disappearance raises questions about the Facebook terms of service which become more and more alarming as you read through them. They say that

By posting User Content to any part of the 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, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

That is, they do not just store your material, they claim the right to reuse it in any way they see fit. Without claiming intellectual property rights directly they nonetheless claim effective ownership everything posted to the site.

This is completely different from the kind of claims made by other hosting sites such as Flickr. Coupled with the fact that you cannot ever actually delete your account (something which has been investigated in Britain by the television station Channel Four) . It has also been documented in detail by Steven Mansour:

I don’t know about you, but I like the idea of being in charge of my own private data, and controlling access to it accordingly. There will be lots of interesting battles fought over this in the next few years, so whatever you do, make sure you think long and hard about just how open you want to be with you own privacy – and whether others will treat it with the same respect as you do.

The question, then, is how to participate in Facebook while continuing to claim ownership of the data you display there. The answer, I believe, lies in the difference between displaying and posting.

Lengthening the chain

I find one of the most useful parts of Facebook to be the Twitter-like box in my profile where I can alert people to what I am up to at the moment. I had never really found a use for this kind of approach when it was embodied by Twitter itself, because on that site it existed without context and seemed to be another way of saying “LOOK AT ME!!!”. In the context of Facebook, though, it seems more like a telephone answering message.

However, I am not happy, having them turn up all over the place, courtesy of the advertising and marketing needs of Facebook. I therefore decided to stop posting them there, and merely display them there.

I opened an account at Twitter, and then added Twitter Tools to this site. This enables me to write tweets from any page here and have them appear seconds later on Twitter (where I don’t particularly want them). I then went to Facebook and added the TwitterSync application. This synchronises my Twitter account with the type-in box at the top of the Facebook profile.

Can they now claim that I am posting there, when I am in fact posting on my own site, where everything is publishing under a Creative Commons licence, and then transferring that copyright material to Twitter and then to them?

Possibly they can, but I suspect that the case is harder to make. I am not posting to Facebook, I am displaying material there that I posted elsewhere.

This same argument can be used by people who remove their photographs from Facebook; upload them to Flickr or elsewhere, and then display them on Facebook using a syncing application.

The point is not to remove stuff because they might msuse it. The point is to display it in ways that maintain control. One way of doing this is to deliberately lengthen the chain. Post material on Box.net or some other “neutral” server space. Then publish it, after the event, as you see fit, making certain that the originating material (the “prior art”) is copyrighted under a suitable Creative Commons licence.