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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

#121

Post by dependenttypes »

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.

The concept of data ownership is a very anti-freedom/pro-copyright concept.

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

#122

Post by romaaeterna »

buboard wrote: post #68
romaaeterna wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To break the Facebook and Twitter monopolies.

By doing something that is already possible, and has not broken their monopoly?

I didn't say it would work. I said this is what the Senators are trying to do. We'll see what the final form of the bill looks like.

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

#123

Post by buboard »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #117
buboard wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they existed long before gdpr, e.g.:

https://www.askdavetaylor.com/export-data-facebook/

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

#124

Post by scarface74 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #88
scarface74 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bill [1] is currently ambiguous.... A bill written by a bunch of clueless lawmakers to legislate technology - there couldn’t possibly be any unintended consequences.

> A bill written by a bunch of clueless lawmakers to legislate technology This has been Silicon Valley's party line for why we can't be regulated by governments, and should instead be left to self regulate. While I agree with that for start-ups, it's patently failed with Big Tech.

And look at what happened when California tried to regulate Uber to force them to treat drivers as employees.

Now freelancers in other industries who don’t want to be employees are having to jump through hoops.

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

#125

Post by adrianmonk »

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…

> What most activists are trying to do is move towards fewer people having access to your data

It seems to me like there are two important issues currently. There's access to data, but there's also how influence works and who controls that. Right now, social media companies decide what rises to the top of your feed.

The current situation is that if you want to be part of the Facebook community (for lack of a better word), you need to let Facebook decide how you see that data. I could see an argument that some kind of federated system might allow different lenses where you could still communicate in a social media way but different things could rise to the top.

Anyway, the point is these two concerns seem to be at odds with each other. If you don't want one party to have the power they get from being the only party in charge of processing the data, then you need multiple parties to have access to the data.

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

#126

Post by AlwaysRock »

archie2 wrote: post #86

For God's sake can the US government stop meddling in this kind of garbage. The republic is collapsing around us and we're supposed to be conserned about being able to port our facebook posts over to twitter. WHO CARES

I understand where you are coming from but because one part of the government is failing doesnt mean the rest of it should shut down and focus solely on it. How would any long term change be enacted if every elect shifted focus every time something new and seemingly more important came up?

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

#127

Post by akersten »

Alex3917 wrote: post #111
purple_ducks wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't that an argument Facebook could make too, that it's not your data now that you've given it to them?

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

#128

Post by mal10c »

Hmm.. so I agree that it would be awesome to easily port my data from company A to company B. I mean, that would be really great! But I kind of don't think that's an appropriate role for the government. Feel free to disagree, I'm all ears on other opinions, I just don't feel the government should have that type of authority to regulate a company like that.... but maybe that's just me.

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

#129

Post by MR4D »

MR4D wrote: post #110
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,…

One thing I forgot to add - how would this interoperate with the GDPR laws? For instance, if I move my data from FB to something else, what happens to the email addresses and phone number of all the people I'm connected with? Assume this gets even worse when you have social platforms based in different countries (e.g. EU, US, Russia, China for instance).

Section 6(c) "Technical Standards" looks intriguing. Basically tasking NIST with publishing technical standards for online messaging, multimedia sharing, and social networking.

Definitely some good parts here, but I'm still worried about the laws of unintended consequences. Nobody thought that allowing software patents would be bad, but clearly that's been way more costly than anyone imagined. I worry the same is true here.

This paragraph on its own is great. Would love to see a step-by-step approach rather than doing everything at once. Less change for screwing up, and you can adjust new legislation as needed.

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

#130

Post by dependenttypes »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #82
jagged-chisel wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question (I'm not making the connection on my own, so please help me out): how does giving me the ability to instruct a social network to delete my information (and a law to enforce that instruction) infringe on the network's first amendment rights?

> how does giving me the ability to instruct a social network to delete my information (and a law to enforce that instruction) infringe on the network's first amendment rights? There is a difference between the right to deletion and the right to be forgotten. Right to deletion is "I gave you these data, these data are mine, please delete them." Right to be forgotten means "you have these data, they concern me, please…

> Rights to deletion don't necessarily interfere with the First Amendment because they concern your first-party data

The first amendment does not talk about copyright or distinguish first with third-party data.

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