Tim Berners-Lee: Tell Facebook, Google you want your data back

When discussing data-portability of social networks, Facebook's data download feature is sometimes brought up.<p>I periodically use this feature, to see if it has improved any since it's initial disappointing release. As of a few weeks ago, it has not.<p>A <i>true</i> data download from Facebook would consist of: a machine-readable form of every action I've taken on Facebook (likes, friend requests sent/received, photos I added tags to, photos uploaded, status updates, messages sent/received, comments made, etc.) along with timestamps and <i>at least</i> URIs pointing to the objects referenced (photos, people, etc.) if not a copy of my view of those objects.<p>(I understand why Facebook might claim they shouldnt give me, for example, dates that other people de-friend me, since that isn't accessible info. However, I do think that copies of statuses I commented on and can still see isn't unreasonable)<p>What we have now is: A static HTML dump of your profile page, photo page, and messages that is massively incomplete. Since the switch to timeline, fewer actions I have taken in the past seem to qualify for inclusion on my page ("moxiemk1 commented on friend's photo" used to feature more often in my profile than it does now). Since the revamped messages/chat integration, the messages dump (which always eventually cut off at some point in the past) is even smaller, and harder to read.<p>I would indeed like to have copies of the data I've created, and would like to emphasize that Facebook's "effort" to do so is complete BS.

Twitter is one of the worst culprits. Currently there is no way to search for any tweet more than a few days old.<p>Google's realtime search used to provide the ability to search and retrieve tweets from a specific date and time in the past, but twitter cancelled that deal and haven't provided any decent replacement.<p>A publicly accessible archive has huge potential for research. A friend of mine used Google's realtime search to pin point and keep record of the first tweets out of Christchurch following the Christchurch earthquake. Sadly there is no way to do this now and twitter don't seem to care.

This is precisely why The OpenPhoto Project exists. We're building a system where users give applications valet keys to <i>their</i> data.<p>Data ownership without portability is a moot point. Many services allow you to download a blob of your content but that's of little to no value for most users. What we really need (it's 2012 after-all) is a more thought out system where the user actually owns and controls their data and gives applications access to them.<p>This means multiple applications can leverage the same set of data and the user doesn't have to continue using any of them. Basically, there's no single point of failure in terms of data interoperability.<p>Currently, a user's Facebook content can be used by other services but for this to remain the user must keep their Facebook account open.<p>We're solving this problem by letting the user grant OpenPhoto software access to their photos. Most likely it's a bunch of photos that reside in <i>their</i> dropbox account but could also be an S3 bucket or box.net account once those become more consumer friendly.<p><a href="http://theopenphotoproject.org" rel="nofollow">http://theopenphotoproject.org</a> or <a href="https://openphoto.me" rel="nofollow">https://openphoto.me</a> if you want to sign up for a hosted account.

<i>"There are no programs that I can run on my computer...."</i><p>Major generation gap and sophistication gap here. This is why the issue of data ownership took so long to get traction. For most people, data is invisible and using it is magic. The only difference people noticed when they lost control of their data was that they could suddenly access it everywhere!<p>The difference between owning your data and not owning it is like the difference between living in a country with civil liberties and legal protections versus living in a country without civil liberties and effective legal protections. The difference is abstract and meaningless until it becomes a matter of life and death, when you end up in a situation that you only thought existed in paranoid fantasies.<p>The invisible change from owning your data to being owned by Facebook and Google happened to correspond to a very noticeable improvement in convenience for users. As in more dramatic examples from history, an authoritarian regime has delivered in a way that its predecessor could not, and as a result, people have embraced it. It doesn't mean that people accept its ideology. The way we think about Facebook, the way anybody thinks about Facebook who engages in these conversations about web industry economics, <i>and therefore how Facebook thinks about itself,</i> is much darker and more sinister than the aspect of Facebook that users embrace. Users embrace the effect that Facebook has had on their lives, which is overwhelmingly positive. The side we see is not something they embrace; it is something they have barely begun to consider. I have faith that they will react to it as we do.<p>We are not more sensitive to freedom than they are; we are merely face to face with the problem because we like to imagine ourselves in Facebook's shoes :-) We imagine what it's like to have that power; we are able to think in a predatory, profit-oriented mindset; we understand the temptation. We don't have to be evil to see the temptations that Facebook faces. And we understand that a person can withstand temptation, but a corporation cannot. A corporation cannot withstand the temptation to make money. Only as long as its profits exceed the wildest demands, anyway. When profits flag, a corporation will collapse to the moral lowest common denominator, because the people who resist immoral profits will be replaced.<p>Like I said, we don't have to worry that the average Facebook user is okay with the dire scenario of Facebook fully and amorally exploiting its power. It's completely imaginary at the moment. Those who worry about it worry alone, but only because we are uniquely positioned to imagine it. We can make other people understand. Right now Facebook's major sin has been to appropriate a dangerous and therefore immoral amount of power. They haven't abused it yet, not the way they could. I think with the right kind of education, users will revolt and demand rights and control before Facebook breaks down and really abuses the terrifying power it has amassed.<p>Am I too optimistic?

It's interesting that people seem to have suddenly started talking about data ownership much more lately.<p>We have been working on a project called TheMux [1] that aims to create a data platform (for lack of a better term) which helps you to pull in and archive your data from various sources and apply some simple normalization. We're specifically working on ways to keep both content (blog posts, photos, status updates, etc) and datum (health info, workouts, communication data, etc) in a form where you a) have full control of the raw data and b) can make select data available to external apps which do things like presentation and analysis.<p>Our goal is to create an open-source platform to address some of these questions around data ownership, access and portability. Imagine the day when you decide that you want to move your blog from Tumblebook to Posterpress and you can do that by simply creating a new account on Posterpress and granting it access to your existing data. Or you've been using JogKeeper but then you find this great new service called SprintTracker that you want to try out - and all you need to do is connect and it will have your years worth of running data.<p>And we think that something like this will also make it much simpler for SaaS developers to compete not by customer lock-in but rather by providing superior products and continually working to make the customer happy.<p>We're taking it slowly right now to build this platform which we will open-source under a permissive license (as soon as it's a little more mature) by first building a few consumer-oriented services on top of it. Number 1 on our list is a blog-type website based on this MuxDB concept and that's what we're working on at the moment.<p>If you're interested in giving us your thoughts (or help, or tell us we're crazy, or whatever), my email is in my profile.<p>[1] <a href="http://theMux.com" rel="nofollow">http://theMux.com</a>

Original article: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/18/tim-berners-lee-google-facebook" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/18/tim-berners...</a>

Those of you in the European Union can avail of EU law which says you're legally entitled to get a copy of all the personal data companies hold on you. People have made this requests to Facebook. Here's how: <a href="http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data_.html" rel="nofollow">http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data...</a>

Honestly, i was happy when i first discovered google's data liberation project..<a href="http://www.dataliberation.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dataliberation.org/</a>. Was upset with fb a few years ago.. But nowadays i have accepted that no private company is going to have a financial incentive to give back my data. At best, there can be laws that are made, but loopholes will be found. Am moving all the stuff i care about to a vps hosted server. probably a couple more months and even email should be moved. Yay..:-)

It would be cool if all your personal data was stored in some central repository. You can designate certain chunks of that data as publicly accessible, and you can grant permission to different sites for reading and writing data to other sections. That way all sites can contribute to one data set, kind of like a personal Wikipedia. Everybody wins.<p>It would have a set of standards that make it easy to request commonly used pieces of information: name, primary-email, avatar, etc. You could even store passwords in it, or more likely just sidestep the need for passwords all together, since it could essentially be a global login. You would never have to fill out forms for registrations, credit card info, etc.<p>For sites that you don't want to give your personal information to, you just give access to a secondary set of data instead, with values for your internet nickname and persona.<p>Of course, there'd be big security challenges, but I think that would be a neat solution to issues with online identity and personal data.

I really have to wonder, why is there no "peer to peer" social network? It seems ideally suited for this type of usage, and this would ensure that data is only in each node rather than on some central server. Does something exist like that already?

&#62; <i>He also told The Guardian that his habits on his computer indicate his health and places he's been.</i><p>Technology can definitely make a difference.<p><i>Last week you sat on the bus next to someone who has been diagnosed with Avian flu - would you like me to schedule a doctor's appointment for you?</i>

Being able to download a blob != having your data available.

I do not want my data as much as I want to be able to delete everything from mm/dd/year to mm/dd/year. And I mean delete and truly forget. Tracking is the much bigger issue, my tweets out of twitter are worthless. Pictures posted are low res versions too.