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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

#111

Post by Alex3917 »

purple_ducks wrote: post #104
Alex3917 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook already has a data export feature. No it doesn't. It doesn't have the phone numbers or email addresses for the vast majority of people, even the ones who have their email address and phone number in their profile.

That's not your data - it's theirs (the respective persons)

No it's not. If someone gives you their physical business card, would you expect to lose access to it if you move houses? Once they give you their contact info, you should have a copy of it forever. Otherwise it's completely useless.

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

#112

Post by buboard »

danShumway wrote: post #103
buboard wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i wonder what caused them to limit their platforms so much.

A mixture of bad tech legislation, concerns over Russian interference, and good old-fashioned anti-competitive tendencies. Having itself supplanted MySpace, Facebook is in a good position to see how easy data-exports can help competitors supplant a dominant company. 3rd-party clients are also a good way to remove ads and tracking, which is obviously not in Twitter or Facebook's best financial interest.

Yet they still provide with tools to export all data . So i don't think the migration of users is a major concern for them.

I 'm personally all in favor of making the APIs open and unlimited again, but within a month you 'll have journalists nagging again

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

#113

Post by koalaman »

Alex3917 wrote: post #89
danShumway wrote: post #55

> 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. Facebook already has a data export feature. You have to manually navigate to that page and download a giant zip file. Cool. The much more important concept being propose…

> Facebook already has a data export feature. No it doesn't. It doesn't have the phone numbers or email addresses for the vast majority of people, even the ones who have their email address and phone number in their profile.

Facebook's argument that this data actually belongs to the friends and not the profile that's being exported, while convenient for Facebook, has to be acknowledged as a reasonable point of view on this matter.

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

#114

Post by buboard »

sasasassy wrote: post #87
scarface74 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Twitter and Facebook have monopolies? Isn’t that kind of the opposite of a monopoly?

They are different kinds of websites.

and that s why they are "monopolies" - they each dominate a format. It's like saying IRC is a monopoly - which it is, just not owned by a central entity. It's not really going to work with people having 2 facebook-like accounts - they 'll eventually gravitate to one. What will work, is if there are viable , better open source and decentralized alternatives.

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

#115

Post by bilbo0s »

buboard wrote: post #94
bilbo0s wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. That's actually a good question. Does it outline in this legislation who is responsible if twitter throws open their api's and the company that a user delegated steals the user's data by acting, essentially, as a proxy api for other companies? I would think it's obvious that from the moment you delegate access to your data, Twitter would no longer be responsible. Basically, they should only be responsible for ma…

Thhis isnt even about theft, but that people give their permission willy nilly to bad actors. Thats not a solvable problem

>Thats not a solvable problem

Well, we're not trying to "solve" the problem. We're just trying to clarify that Twitter has no legal liability for the problem. If you delegate access to your account and someone proxies it; or there are all of a sudden all these GDPR violations flooding in because you gave away access to your contacts' private information when you delegated access to your account; etc etc; that liability should fall on either the user, or the entity to which the user delegated access. It shouldn't really fall on Twitter.

That's all we're talking about here, just making sure that legal and criminal liability is matched with delegated authorization. Because the legal ramifications are what tend to ensure security and privacy.

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

#116

Post by [deleted] »

koalaman wrote: post #113
Alex3917 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook already has a data export feature. No it doesn't. It doesn't have the phone numbers or email addresses for the vast majority of people, even the ones who have their email address and phone number in their profile.

Facebook's argument that this data actually belongs to the friends and not the profile that's being exported, while convenient for Facebook, has to be acknowledged as a reasonable point of view on this matter.

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

buboard wrote: post #112
danShumway wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A mixture of bad tech legislation, concerns over Russian interference, and good old-fashioned anti-competitive tendencies. Having itself supplanted MySpace, Facebook is in a good position to see how easy data-exports can help competitors supplant a dominant company. 3rd-party clients are also a good way to remove ads and tracking, which is obviously not in Twitter or Facebook's best financial interest.

Yet they still provide with tools to export all data . So i don't think the migration of users is a major concern for them. I 'm personally all in favor of making the APIs open and unlimited again, but within a month you 'll have journalists nagging again

Export tools happened after GDPR.

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

#118

Post by MR4D »

MR4D wrote: post #102

This bill is great in theory, but.... Getting the language correct and the implementation will be extraordinarily difficult. For instance: Let's say you are on twitter. Does twitter have to build an email interface so I can DM my friends who are on gmail? Or maybe I'm on Facebook - do they have to let me allow people on Myspace to "friend" me? Maybe I see an article on ZDnet, and I'm tired of using multiple accounts,…

Found the text of the legislation here. For some reason the original is on scribd, not the senate website. Weird.

https://www.scribd.com/document/431507473/GOE19968

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

#119

Post by tlb »

neuroticfish wrote: post #64
danShumway wrote: post #55

> 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. Facebook already has a data export feature. You have to manually navigate to that page and download a giant zip file. Cool. The much more important concept being propose…

>Beyond advocating for data-exports, we should advocate that users have the right to delegate data-access through APIs to third-parties. IMO we should first and foremost be advocating for the right to have our data destroyed.

Someone will write an app that uses a delegation API to destroy your data. Possibly including better or more nuanced ways than simply deleting your account, like removing all pictures of yourself smoking or wearing a beret.

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

#120

Post by dspillett »

danShumway wrote: post #55

> 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. Facebook already has a data export feature. You have to manually navigate to that page and download a giant zip file. Cool. The much more important concept being propose…

> we should advocate that users have the right to delegate data-access through APIs to third-parties

From my PoV, for my purposes, as a technically minded user I might agree.

But thinking about the numpty-on-the-street, this could be a privacy nightmare with people being easily conned into allowing a random application full unrestricted access to slurp their data. This can happen already, of course, but the provider could detect a remote API scraper and try to block it, and a user-local malware scanner can be trained spot a rogue browser extension that scrapes the UI, but if API access like that is mandated they'll have to provide the access and won't be able to tell the difference between that which the user requested and that which the user was conned into requesting.

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