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U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#31

Post by Mirioron »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #4

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?

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

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#32

Post by DevX101 »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #4

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?

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.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#33

Post by baq »

Mirioron wrote: post #24
amwelles wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to do that. Move all my Instagram pics to Pixelfed and all my tweets to Mastodon. Not sure I could do that with the way things are now.

But that kind of makes no sense. It'll be completely out of context and it's not going to provide much value. Wet can't you just link to your Twitter on mastodon?

Somebody might decide that his Twitter account offends somebody important and make it disappear. Or his Twitter might get compromised. Or Twitter might go out of business. Or maybe no reason at all.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#34

Post by netfl0 »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #4

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?

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”

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#35

Post by bilbo0s »

basch wrote: post #9
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #4

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?

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.

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.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#36

Post by ethbro »

ysavir wrote: post #21
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #4

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?

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".

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

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#37

Post by ghaff »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25
ghaff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>delete their data Which is arguably, at least in part, actually in opposition to this. To the degree that data can be better exported and spread around, it's more likely to be persisted than if it's locked up in a single company's system.

> Which is arguably, at least in part, actually in opposition to this Disagree. Today, questions about persistence and portability are made by companies. Users have virtually no say. Giving users say in the matter may mean some make bad portability decisions. But there is nothing fundamental to user-initiated portability that interferes with user-initiated deletion. Today, I can do neither with Facebook.

>Users have virtually no say.

Well, that's true. Because once content by or about you is out there, neither you nor anyone else really has the power to force anyone to delete it. That's not so much a company making a decision but a collective decision that you don't generally have a "right to be forgotten."

But that's not so much individual companies making an affirmative decision to always preserve data as no one providing individuals any real rights to erase what they've made public.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#38

Post by JumpCrisscross »

zubspace wrote: post #28

> The bill would require communications platforms with more than 100 million monthly active members - Facebook has more than two billion - to allow its users to easily move, or port, their data to another network, Warner’s office said in a statement. I assume that this proposal is based on good intentions. But how they want to overcome the technical hurdles is a mystery to me. Who decides, how facebook should structu…

> Who decides, how facebook should structure their exported data?

You might find clarity in the bill [1].

It avoids, as good laws do, defining how companies must comply, instead setting principles for clarification by the FTC and courts. ("A structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format" is the bill's language (§ 3(a)).)

> who decides which services need to have a compatible data format

Congress. "A product or service provided by a communications provider that...generates income, directly or indirectly, from the collection, processing, sale, or sharing of user data; and...has more than 100,000,000 monthly active users in the United States" is the bill's threshold (§ 2(7)).

[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/431507473/GOE19968

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#39

Post by ethbro »

bilbo0s wrote: post #35
basch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 decre…

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.

Re: U.S. senators want social media users to be able to take their data with them

#40

Post by bilbo0s »

DevX101 wrote: post #32
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #4

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?

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.

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.
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