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

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

#151

Post by merpnderp » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 4:25 PM UTC

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…

This is the last thing these companies will allow because it would destroy their business model. This would allow federation of different competing sites and users could pick the company/interface they like most and still have access to all their friends/pages/connections on FaceTweet.

I love it.

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

#152

Post by emiliobumachar » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

bilbo0s wrote: post #66

ethbro wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> 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.

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

#153

Post by Alex3917 » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

bilbo0s wrote: post #143

Alex3917 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. Because that's the same argument FB could make. No. Your data remains your data, even if you allow someone else to look at it. You should be able to allow others to look at it, or even delete it after having allowed others to look at it. Now in practice, you can't. I get that. But that doesn't mean that it's not your data. Certainly your contact info is your data. I shouldn't be able to give a girl's contact info…

> Your data remains your data, even if you allow someone else to look at it. You should be able to allow others to look at it, or even delete it after having allowed others to look at it.

So you would argue that it's fine that Apple was deleting people's email the other day, because it's not really their data?

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

#154

Post by bilbo0s » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 4:30 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #134

bilbo0s wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 liab…

That’s what platforms already do - yet they are being slandered for not saving their users from themselves.

First, I doubt many people knowingly allowed Cambridge Analytica access to their data.

Second, slandering is not the same as legal liability. If people are slandering you, sue them. But people can't sue you and say FB gave some company access to my data unless FB actually does that without the user's knowledge.

Lastly, under this new system, no one would be saying that FB is legally liable for a user explicitly granting access to a third party. Vast majority of people would lay the blame for that at the foot of the idiot user. Again, we're just trying to verify that the legislation reflects that very common sense view.

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

#155

Post by jedieaston » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #120

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…

Can’t you already post through the Facebook API, just in a non-standardized format? I know you can’t anymore for Instagram, but I thought that third parties could post to your feed with your authorization.

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

#156

Post by basch » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

justapassenger wrote: post #109

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 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.

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.

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

#157

Post by bilbo0s » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #153

bilbo0s wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Because that's the same argument FB could make. No. Your data remains your data, even if you allow someone else to look at it. You should be able to allow others to look at it, or even delete it after having allowed others to look at it. Now in practice, you can't. I get that. But that doesn't mean that it's not your data. Certainly your contact info is your data. I shouldn't be able to give a girl's contact info…

> Your data remains your data, even if you allow someone else to look at it. You should be able to allow others to look at it, or even delete it after having allowed others to look at it. So you would argue that it's fine that Apple was deleting people's email the other day, because it's not really their data?

I don't know what you're talking about.

But for an answer's sake, no, Apple should not be able to delete an email I wrote. But that's the entire point of what I just said. I should be the final arbiter of my data. Me putting my data on an Apple Mac does not make the data Apple's. It's still my data. I should be able to show it to other people, or delete it whenever I like.

Apple should not be able to show it to other people.

Apple should not be able to delete it whenever they like.

But again, that's what I said in the first place.

>Your data remains your data, even if you allow someone else to look at it. You should be able to allow others to look at it, or even delete it after having allowed others to look at it.

So I really don't get your question at all?

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

#158

Post by JumpCrisscross » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

dependenttypes wrote: post #130

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

The Constitution talks about copyright and a series of court cases have circumscribed commercial speech within the First Amendment's projections, e.g. you can't commit fraud and call it free speech.

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

#159

Post by scarface74 » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #144

scarface74 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if we granular defined monopoly - HN could be defined as a monopoly. But the fact that people have LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc accounts does show that people will use more than one service. How many people are in multiple Slack groups.

Hn and reddit are the same format. And linkedin could easily merge with facebook. But facebook and twitter don’t mix > How many people are in multiple Slack groups Aren’t they using a single app?

And you expect legislators to understand that distinction?

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

#160

Post by yason » Wed, Oct 23, 2019, 4:46 PM UTC

Something like this would be the right way to do social media and networks, and it would never be allowed to work.

Ideally, I would own my data and I could just bid the social media providers I want to host my data. I could pick one, or several, and I could pick free providers with ads or pay for a premium provider with no ads and other benefits. I could also host the data myself, and messages, posts, friend requests, and updates would travel from service to service via standard protocols. Each user would have a cryptographical identity that would be unalterable across different services; of course you could create many of them, such as one for your work-self, one for your personal self, and one for your hobby/forum discussion/spare time self.

This would reduce social media companies into mere infrastructure carriers. Even telcos talked themselves out of it, I can't imagine social media companies to want anything except own us.