Facebook, Data Ownership and the Like

Okay so after a few days of various bashings by the press, bloggers and assorted “informed” people Facebook have rolled back their T&C’s to the point of not seemingly claiming ownership over users data for ever and a day.

Whilst a great deal of noise was made about the whole issue it is interesting that very few commented on the probable thinking behind the change despite a post from Mark Zuckerberg doing a fairly decent job of trying to allay fears.

From what I have read the change to the FB T&C’s was in order to try to retain some of the integrity inherent in the relationship formed by creating data rather than claiming “all shiny things as theirs.”

Let me use a simile to try to explain…

If I shop at an online supermarket they necessarily collect data about me as well as the purchase in order to fulfil my order; meta-data about the relationship formed by the purchase.  It is jointly owned for the purposes of maintaining the relationship.

VRM/ESOOU thinking dictates (please do correct me if I am off track) that actually the information is solely the property of the user and therefore under my control.  However if I unilaterally remove all the information within my ownership (even the jointly owned content) then the relationship falls apart – you can’t have a single node relationship.

BUT my purchase, or more specifically the data surrounding what I bought, when and price is NOT my sole property.  They are  stock related information owned by the store vital to it’s operation – what is mine are the personal details identifying the purchaser as me.

So what I am trying to get to is that ownership of data isn’t as straight forward as “it’s mine” and more often than not it is “part is mine, part is yours and another bit is ours.”

Now from what I understand FB were trying to achieve a point where once information was placed into the system (the relationship was created – normally between two users) that if the originating owner wanted out of the relationship the T&C’s gave FB (and therefore the second party) a degree of integrity for that relationship.  In other words, whilst the relationship could be anonymised it could not be completely removed.

To my thinking this isn’t a bad place to be, the problem was that FB took a rather parental approach to the issue dictating through the T&C’s that they would in effect own the data taking the issue away from the user.

So in this case community pressure has “won” their cause having the terms revert to the old script but I can’t help but think there was indeed nothing malevolent about the move in the first place, just maybe poorly worded and poorly sold to the user base – so nothing new for Mr Z there then.

Fresh New Take on Things?

A few weeks back I was talking to Tony Hall (Another Photograph) at the every mind-expanding Tuttle Club. An interesting chap with a background in education (tertiary if memory recalls, and sadly it does fail me as I approach the big FOUR OH) Tony and I chatted for a good hour about, well not alot and everything all at the same time.

What I took away from the conversation was just how valuable conversation can be, an idle chat which allowed Tony to probe my inner mental workings and I to exercise thoughts and feelings. A conversation recently sadly lacking from my life (and no disrespect to my super intelligent wife or parents) having recently moved back to the UK.

It reminded of Chris Locke’s essay in The Cluetrain Manifesto when he talked about his role as a PR guy for an AI company back in the early 90’s.

“I started having genuine conversations with genuinely interesting people. I’d call up… no agenda, no objective – and we’d talk.”

“These conversations weren’t work. They were interesting and engaging. They were exciting. They were fun. I couldn’t wait to get back to work…”

Locke found this approach to be far more productive generating, in his case, far more positive attention for his employer.

So back to me then – after all this is my space for socialising thoughts and as a reader you can always change the channel.

I like to think of Social Media as a shelf full of toys for facilitating conversation, I am by no means a Social Media expert but my dialogue with Tony help me revisit long since filed away thoughts on the underlying purposefulness of Social Media. More to the point; is there a singular reason behind why conversational approaches work so well?

Is is because of some deep human desire for inclusion into a thought or decision making process, or a narcissistic want to espouse one’s own knowledge (which certainly drives me for sure)? Well probably both of those and a pile of other rationale, but I suspect that underpinning the lot is trust. Or more correctly a notion of trust.

You see Trust is really just a personal perception of how much faith we place in another entity based upon a set of very personal criteria. Each of us will have very different notions of how much faith we place in certain brands, people, thoughts etc based upon things that matter to us personally.

Conversation in a professional context helps to build a relationship, one in which each party not only understands the content of the conversation but the position from which the other party comes from. Trust dictates the weight of that conversation within it’s context.

So in the case of my ramblings with Tony, he as an educationalist (well ex) was interested in the thinking behind some of my thinking on the whole social space, he was looking as the sociological side of my thought processes. For him, I suspect (read hope) his interest was piqued by some eloquent elaboration on why this is that, and that is this. From Tony’s perspective I appeared to know what I was talking about and therefore he was able to make a personal assessment of how much trust he should place in my thinking.

I on the other hand wanted, no needed, Tony’s attention and at some level validation of my thoughts. I wanted his trust. Why? Because as an ex-educationalist, as a fellow Tuttle Club attendee, as an interesting and inciteful thinking I trusted Tony’s opinion. It mattered to me as in my judgement Tony was qualified to pass judgement.

And this surely holds true for conversations in all sectors; brand to consumer (yuk word but hey), business to business, even government to electorate. I mean just look at the unprecidented use of social media by the US Democratic campaign to engender trust in the Obama/Biden ticket. Would people really have voted for Obama if they hadn’t trusted that he was the best option for the role? I certainly hope not.

So I am going to have to explore this area again, more, a lot more as to my mind everything revolves around trust.