6 ms·

Being able to take your data with you is good but most of the value in social media is due to the network effect. If you can't seamlessly being your connections

Being able to take your data with you is good but most of the value in social media is due to the network effect. If you can't seamlessly being your connections with you, the incumbents will continue to have a huge advantage over newcomers to the market. In the context of social media, how could someone bring their connections with them to a new platform without compromising the rights of those connected to?

ghaff 7y ago
Yes, it's not clear what bringing your data out of social media even really means. Saving your posts/photos is one thing. But it's not clear that exporting your social graph and all their posts/photos/comments/etc. is even a good thing--yet that's what exporting their social media would mean to a lot of people.
basch 7y ago
interoperability and distributed federation would be much more powerful than export. Maybe they dont know facebook already has an export button? And if that export is in a non-standard-structured format, its not even useful to import into another network.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  Interoperability just gives more people potential access to your data. What most activists are trying to do is move towards fewer people having access to your data, as well as you having full and legal custody of your data. Interoperability is better for companies, particularly small ones. But the idea here is to help people prevent companies from accessing their data willy nilly. I'd think the goal would be to decrease the number of access points and to require that strict, explicit, legally binding, criminally enforceable, consent be given for every access to a user's data. If you want to help smaller companies compete, that's a different discussion that can be had. But securing the data of users and providing a great deal more privacy than user's have right now really is a completely reasonable effort in its own right. In fact, I would think for the vast majority of users, the effort to ensure security and privacy should probably take precedence over providing more companies potential access to their data.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    The counterargument is that regulation around collecting and permitting access to data simply widens the moat for incumbents. Facebook and Google can implement a 500-page law. A startup cannot. So I think it's important to keep "How are we encouraging competition in the marketplace?" in mind as these proposals go through.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      I mean, as I said, "encouraging competition in the marketplace" is a separate discussion. If we start allowing marketplace needs to determine or even influence who gets to access a user's data, we're already moving away from the goal of the user being the final arbiter of who gets to access his data. Not to put too fine a point on it, but letting marketplace needs influence who gets access to a user's data is how we got to this point in the first place. It's a separate discussion, and it needs to be kept separate. Besides, whatever people come up with in that regard, the commercial entities that want access to users' data can really have no reasonable objection to obtaining strict, explicit consent to access that data. With the concomitant legally binding and criminally enforceable rules attached. Competition in the marketplace is good, but people are a society's priority. We can't lower the barriers to access on a user's private data in the name of, "this is good for business."
      - emiliobumachar 7y ago
        > Competition in the marketplace is good, but people are a society's priority. We can't lower the barriers to access on a user's private data in the name of, "this is good for business." That's a reasonable position to take in the two joint discussions, but that's not "keeping the discussions separate", that's defining your priority and optimizing for it at the expense of other concerns. Dismissing those concerns because they are not important enough is fine, dismissing them as if they didn't belong to the discussion is dishonest. I contest that the discussions are separable at all. The same regulation can be very good disregarding its effect as a barrier to entry, and very bad not disregarding it. Whether or not any particular regulation is good on net depends on pros and cons analysis that actually takes all relevant cons into account.
- justapassenger 7y ago
  > interoperability and distributed federation would be much more powerful than export It'd be great. But at the same time, interoperability brought us Cambridge Analytica scandal. I don't know who social networks could be interoperable without data leaks.
  - basch 7y ago
    What created CA was 2 fold. 1) people exposed their personal data to their friends, and gave their friends access to read their data 2) friends got a prompt that said "share data available to you" with CA and people pressed that button. The actual coherent arguments are a) people didnt know what information they were sharing b) didnt understand how that data could be aggregated c) what the share data with a vendor button did d) should be trusted to wield this kind of power e) that entities should have been able to aggregate data like that without arousing suspicion. f) who is even responsible for this error in judgement (data sharers or friends, or facebook or ca) The data leak here was people pressing "give away my friends data." Facebook designed the system that allowed it, hosted the data collector, incentivizing the bad actors to build their collection quizs and was responsible for communication of how the permissions system worked, but the data leaking itself was the sum of millions of people being careless with what their friends data. Facebook itself didnt directly leak the data. This was an aggregate human misbehavior.
ysavir 7y ago
My thoughts exactly. If this becomes reality as described in the article, the only change we'll see is countless new social networks popping up, creating shadow profiles based off of the exported data, and spamming phones and/or emails with "Someone you know joined our network and imported your post 'XYZ'! Click here to join them and see their comments on your post".
- ethbro 7y ago
  I don't have the technical specifics in working memory, but would the privacy-preserving Apple geolocation system work here? E.g. You could export edges of the graph as well, but in encrypted form. Only when the owner joins and supplies the decryption key do they become usable and valid
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> most of the value in social media is due to the network effect Global network effects require consolidation. But there are many local network effects that add value with less scale. In the real world, these local networks emerge as friend circles, interest groups, block associations, companies and industry networks. These local networks are either subsets of or correlated with the global network. But they produce value relatively independently of it. Starting such a social media company today is hard because surviving amidst Facebook is hard. (See Snapchat, which could be considered, at its start, a local network of a certain age group.) Portability lowers this barrier for new entrants.
- ysavir 7y ago
  Yes, but the question is how to achieve portability without infringing on others' privacy rights. If I'm on facebook and want to export all my comments, that would require exporting all the status updates of the people who's posts I've commented on, which then also includes those contacts, too. There's no such thing as exporting a single node in a network, you need the entire network.
  - kickscondor 7y ago
    You certainly can export a single node - just depends on your expectations. For example, the Indieweb has already done this in a way that I find acceptable. My blog (kickscondor.com) syndicates all the comments to every post (including deeply nested ones.) And it also captures a copy of all posts that I respond to (all the way up the chain going backwards.) This is sufficient for me. No need to export anything - it's already there in my own storage. You could also say that you'd need a snapshot of the entire Internet to provide context - but that's Just unreasonable. I think the a Web itself already has had a 'network effect' larger than that of Facebook or any individual subnetwork.
    - ysavir 7y ago
      > My blog (kickscondor.com) syndicates all the comments to every post What does this mean?
Mirioron 7y ago
But you can already take your posts with you. You can copy paste all the posts you've made and nobody can stop you.
DevX101 7y ago
It's easier to bootstrap a new network if you can take your data with you. This is how Facebook/LinkedIn got much of their early viral growth. They would scrape your email (at that time the biggest network) for contacts and invite people you knew.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  Just a nitpick, but FB did that without any real user consent. This would require that companies not do it at all. Rather that the user himself would have to take his data to the new company and explicitly give the new company consent to host the data. That's the way it should work. The user should always be in charge of her data.
netfl0 7y ago
Connections can be reestablished, people may like the ability to reconsider their connections. Additionally, there is a difference between content published and any content commented on/interacted with. I think most people just care about being able to export their “posts”
jagged-chisel 7y ago
Are "connections" not also "your data"? It's a list of other users, curated by you.
- Mindwipe 7y ago
  What information is in the list? I might have a photo of me on my Facebook profile. Does a friend of mine get to take that photo with them if they migrate to Gab? I would regard that as a breach of my rights.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    And it's worse than that - if it's a photo of both you and them, there's an immediate impasse. Does their right to take their data trump your right to keep a hold of it? Does it depend on who took the picture, or who uploaded it, or when it was taken or how embarrassing it is? I'm not saying these aren't answerable questions, but I'm very skeptical that the answer is so obvious and non-controversial that we should legally enforce it against all social media platforms.
    - jagged-chisel 7y ago
      Here's where law gets complex. Who took the photo? They hold the copyright. Who's in the photo? They have some [limited?] publicity rights. Perhaps those in the photo would need to consent to have the photo republished, which is not, IMO, technically enforceable, but only legally enforceable when someone hires a lawyer/files suit.
  - jagged-chisel 7y ago
    My question is limited to "the list." I.e. this is the list of people to whom I connected on this network and, perhaps, the connection type (e.g. followed them, allowed to follow you, both tagged in some post, etc.) But to add my thoughts to your question: I have a photo, I uploaded it to my account, it's my 'data' and I've simply shared it with you (or made it public) such that it is displayed to you. That doesn't make it your data, meaning you don't get it in an export dump. Perhaps you have a client that makes copies of published posts from your network, but exporting those things you consumed (which are not yours, to which you do not have a 'license') should not be the intent of this export functionality.
jrockway 7y ago
I wish there was some sort of "really simple syndication" that could be used to assemble a list of friends and then receive content from them.

ghaff 7y ago

Yes, it's not clear what bringing your data out of social media even really means. Saving your posts/photos is one thing. But it's not clear that exporting your social graph and all their posts/photos/comments/etc. is even a good thing--yet that's what exporting their social media would mean to a lot of people.

basch 7y ago

interoperability and distributed federation would be much more powerful than export. Maybe they dont know facebook already has an export button? And if that export is in a non-standard-structured format, its not even useful to import into another network.

bilbo0s 7y ago
Interoperability just gives more people potential access to your data. What most activists are trying to do is move towards fewer people having access to your data, as well as you having full and legal custody of your data. Interoperability is better for companies, particularly small ones. But the idea here is to help people prevent companies from accessing their data willy nilly. I'd think the goal would be to decrease the number of access points and to require that strict, explicit, legally binding, criminally enforceable, consent be given for every access to a user's data. If you want to help smaller companies compete, that's a different discussion that can be had. But securing the data of users and providing a great deal more privacy than user's have right now really is a completely reasonable effort in its own right. In fact, I would think for the vast majority of users, the effort to ensure security and privacy should probably take precedence over providing more companies potential access to their data.
- ethbro 7y ago
  The counterargument is that regulation around collecting and permitting access to data simply widens the moat for incumbents. Facebook and Google can implement a 500-page law. A startup cannot. So I think it's important to keep "How are we encouraging competition in the marketplace?" in mind as these proposals go through.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    I mean, as I said, "encouraging competition in the marketplace" is a separate discussion. If we start allowing marketplace needs to determine or even influence who gets to access a user's data, we're already moving away from the goal of the user being the final arbiter of who gets to access his data. Not to put too fine a point on it, but letting marketplace needs influence who gets access to a user's data is how we got to this point in the first place. It's a separate discussion, and it needs to be kept separate. Besides, whatever people come up with in that regard, the commercial entities that want access to users' data can really have no reasonable objection to obtaining strict, explicit consent to access that data. With the concomitant legally binding and criminally enforceable rules attached. Competition in the marketplace is good, but people are a society's priority. We can't lower the barriers to access on a user's private data in the name of, "this is good for business."
    - emiliobumachar 7y ago
      > Competition in the marketplace is good, but people are a society's priority. We can't lower the barriers to access on a user's private data in the name of, "this is good for business." That's a reasonable position to take in the two joint discussions, but that's not "keeping the discussions separate", that's defining your priority and optimizing for it at the expense of other concerns. Dismissing those concerns because they are not important enough is fine, dismissing them as if they didn't belong to the discussion is dishonest. I contest that the discussions are separable at all. The same regulation can be very good disregarding its effect as a barrier to entry, and very bad not disregarding it. Whether or not any particular regulation is good on net depends on pros and cons analysis that actually takes all relevant cons into account.
justapassenger 7y ago
> interoperability and distributed federation would be much more powerful than export It'd be great. But at the same time, interoperability brought us Cambridge Analytica scandal. I don't know who social networks could be interoperable without data leaks.
- basch 7y ago
  What created CA was 2 fold. 1) people exposed their personal data to their friends, and gave their friends access to read their data 2) friends got a prompt that said "share data available to you" with CA and people pressed that button. The actual coherent arguments are a) people didnt know what information they were sharing b) didnt understand how that data could be aggregated c) what the share data with a vendor button did d) should be trusted to wield this kind of power e) that entities should have been able to aggregate data like that without arousing suspicion. f) who is even responsible for this error in judgement (data sharers or friends, or facebook or ca) The data leak here was people pressing "give away my friends data." Facebook designed the system that allowed it, hosted the data collector, incentivizing the bad actors to build their collection quizs and was responsible for communication of how the permissions system worked, but the data leaking itself was the sum of millions of people being careless with what their friends data. Facebook itself didnt directly leak the data. This was an aggregate human misbehavior.

ysavir 7y ago

My thoughts exactly. If this becomes reality as described in the article, the only change we'll see is countless new social networks popping up, creating shadow profiles based off of the exported data, and spamming phones and/or emails with "Someone you know joined our network and imported your post 'XYZ'! Click here to join them and see their comments on your post".

ethbro 7y ago
I don't have the technical specifics in working memory, but would the privacy-preserving Apple geolocation system work here? E.g. You could export edges of the graph as well, but in encrypted form. Only when the owner joins and supplies the decryption key do they become usable and valid

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> most of the value in social media is due to the network effect Global network effects require consolidation. But there are many local network effects that add value with less scale. In the real world, these local networks emerge as friend circles, interest groups, block associations, companies and industry networks. These local networks are either subsets of or correlated with the global network. But they produce value relatively independently of it. Starting such a social media company today is hard because surviving amidst Facebook is hard. (See Snapchat, which could be considered, at its start, a local network of a certain age group.) Portability lowers this barrier for new entrants.

ysavir 7y ago
Yes, but the question is how to achieve portability without infringing on others' privacy rights. If I'm on facebook and want to export all my comments, that would require exporting all the status updates of the people who's posts I've commented on, which then also includes those contacts, too. There's no such thing as exporting a single node in a network, you need the entire network.
- kickscondor 7y ago
  You certainly can export a single node - just depends on your expectations. For example, the Indieweb has already done this in a way that I find acceptable. My blog (kickscondor.com) syndicates all the comments to every post (including deeply nested ones.) And it also captures a copy of all posts that I respond to (all the way up the chain going backwards.) This is sufficient for me. No need to export anything - it's already there in my own storage. You could also say that you'd need a snapshot of the entire Internet to provide context - but that's Just unreasonable. I think the a Web itself already has had a 'network effect' larger than that of Facebook or any individual subnetwork.
  - ysavir 7y ago
    > My blog (kickscondor.com) syndicates all the comments to every post What does this mean?

Mirioron 7y ago

But you can already take your posts with you. You can copy paste all the posts you've made and nobody can stop you.

DevX101 7y ago

It's easier to bootstrap a new network if you can take your data with you. This is how Facebook/LinkedIn got much of their early viral growth. They would scrape your email (at that time the biggest network) for contacts and invite people you knew.

bilbo0s 7y ago
Just a nitpick, but FB did that without any real user consent. This would require that companies not do it at all. Rather that the user himself would have to take his data to the new company and explicitly give the new company consent to host the data. That's the way it should work. The user should always be in charge of her data.

netfl0 7y ago

Connections can be reestablished, people may like the ability to reconsider their connections. Additionally, there is a difference between content published and any content commented on/interacted with. I think most people just care about being able to export their “posts”

jagged-chisel 7y ago

Are "connections" not also "your data"? It's a list of other users, curated by you.

Mindwipe 7y ago
What information is in the list? I might have a photo of me on my Facebook profile. Does a friend of mine get to take that photo with them if they migrate to Gab? I would regard that as a breach of my rights.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  And it's worse than that - if it's a photo of both you and them, there's an immediate impasse. Does their right to take their data trump your right to keep a hold of it? Does it depend on who took the picture, or who uploaded it, or when it was taken or how embarrassing it is? I'm not saying these aren't answerable questions, but I'm very skeptical that the answer is so obvious and non-controversial that we should legally enforce it against all social media platforms.
  - jagged-chisel 7y ago
    Here's where law gets complex. Who took the photo? They hold the copyright. Who's in the photo? They have some [limited?] publicity rights. Perhaps those in the photo would need to consent to have the photo republished, which is not, IMO, technically enforceable, but only legally enforceable when someone hires a lawyer/files suit.
- jagged-chisel 7y ago
  My question is limited to "the list." I.e. this is the list of people to whom I connected on this network and, perhaps, the connection type (e.g. followed them, allowed to follow you, both tagged in some post, etc.) But to add my thoughts to your question: I have a photo, I uploaded it to my account, it's my 'data' and I've simply shared it with you (or made it public) such that it is displayed to you. That doesn't make it your data, meaning you don't get it in an export dump. Perhaps you have a client that makes copies of published posts from your network, but exporting those things you consumed (which are not yours, to which you do not have a 'license') should not be the intent of this export functionality.

jrockway 7y ago

I wish there was some sort of "really simple syndication" that could be used to assemble a list of friends and then receive content from them.