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.