[Air-L] Fwd: Facebook data destruction

[Bertil Hatt]

Couldn't a for-statistical-purpose-only access have been a possible option?

   I'm not familiar with handling such massive data, and I assume that could
only have made sense through a paying service, but… allowing scripts to pull
some aggregated data (say, preventing any results that didn't involve
10,000+ accounts) would have respected most privacy concerns, no?
   Having those data anywhere, hackable, is a legal risk and that enough
justifies Facebook's threats but I'm still hoping for an academic access of
this amazing database.

2010/3/18 jkd <jkd at email.unc.edu>

>
> I'm not going to sanction Facebook's rather cavalier attitude towards the
> selling/dissemination of personally identifiable information (though I do
> agree with Michael that Warden's use violates the ToS and their own does
> not); however, I think it's important to think about the different
> mechanisms for accountability in both cases.
>
> With an enormous data set released to the open web, there are no longer any
> mechanisms for accounability. Don't like that your personal information is
> out there? Too bad: it's not coming back, and you can be sure that
> datamining/harvesting businesses would've been the first to download that
> data (even if academic researchers would, too).
>
> With Facebook dealing in more B2B transactions, there is certainly a high
> degree of opacity, and I personally would probably disappove of a lot of
> their transactions. But at least in this case there are clear lines and
> mechanisms for accountability, derived both from the ToS (however
> user-unfriendly they are) and through the legally-binding data use
> contracts that FB is arranging with other companies. In practice,
> individuals are still up the creek a bit with regard to their own data on a
> personal basis but there's at least a clear line of blame and
> accountability for potential abuses.
>
> What's more potentially powerful in this context is the possibility of a
> class-action lawsuit enacted on behalf of a huge mass of FB users against
> any business that flagrantly violates privacy norms and/or against FB
> itself, a possibility of which I'm sure FB is keenly aware.
>
> Again: not sanctioning their behavior, but keeping this stuff behind a wall
> does have certain benefits in terms of potential remedies for bad action
> that become impossible when it's released fully into the wild.
>
> jkd
>
> On Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:42:49 +0000, Nick White <air-l at njw.me.uk> wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 08:32:41AM -0500, Michael Zimmer wrote:
> >> I'm not surprised that Facebook has requested this action. But contrary
> >> to Warden's quote, I see a difference between the data being _available_
> >> to commercial firms (which he means crawlable by search engine spiders,
> >> if I'm reading the post correctly), and having it _released en masse_ to
> >> the public in an easily digestible form.
> >>
> >> Given the threat of a lawsuit, it appears that the former is allowed by
> >> Facebook's TOS, but the latter is not. And, clearly, there is the
> problem
> >> of taking the information outside of its intended context once you
> >> aggregate it and release it to the public, as I previously detailed
> here:
> >>
> >> "Why Pete Warden Should Not Release Profile Data on 215 Million Facebook
> >> Users"
> >>
>
> http://michaelzimmer.org/2010/02/12/why-pete-warden-should-not-release-profile-data-on-215-million-facebook-users/
> >
> > While crawling public information for a generic search engine may
> > not violate a sense of contextual integrity, that isn't the only
> > other use of such data. A couple of examples could be a firm using
> > facebook mining to build up / improve a profile of me to sell to
> > others, or a government using the information to broaden a database
> > on citizen's political leanings. Those certainly go beyond the
> > expectations of usage of a lot of users of facebook.
> >
> > At present this sort of information is available to anyone with the
> > resources to gather it (which aren't enormous). Of course, even if
> > facebook tightens this up in the future, they're keen to sell plenty
> > of personal information to others (which doesn't seem to be well
> > understood among users I've spoken to), which does weaken the
> > argument that they have an obligation to reconsider how/what public
> > information is published.
> >
> > Nick White
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