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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

#191

Post by munfred »

Please note that this article makes a crucial omission: this bill only applies to communication platforms With more than 100M users in the United States.

To my knowledge, only Facebook and Facebook messenger meet that threshold (please list others for which there is data supporting that they'd also be affected). So as it is, this bill would make Facebook offer APIs to it's services, but other services with less users in the United States won't have to.

Here's the relevant section of the bill:

(7) LARGE COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM.—The term ‘‘large communications platform’’ means a product or service provided by a communications provider that — (A) generates income, directly or indirectly, from the collection, processing, sale, or sharing of user data; and (B) has more than 100,000,000 monthly active users in the United States.

Link to bill on congress website: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/265...

Link to the full proposed text as uploaded by Mark Warren: https://www.scribd.com/document/431507473/GOE19968

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

#192

Post by scarface74 »

buboard wrote: post #190
scarface74 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you expect legislators to understand that distinction?

if they can't understand the tech, why would they be fit to legislate ?

As if most legislators are elected for their ability to understand technology....

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

#193

Post by mlok »

bcheung wrote: post #188

I'm 100% for this idea but is a government law really the best way to go about this? There are already social media alternatives that are decentralized and give users control and nobody uses it. There's an increasing amount of bureaucracy in the tech space that it is going to make it very hard to innovate. Laws typically deeper entrench bigger companies because they have the resources to have full legal teams and dep…

This law is for companies with more than 100 millions users. This bureaucracy will not be a problem for innovators and startups because it takes a lot of time to reach this threshold, they are not concerned by this while at the startup stage.

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

#194

Post by Vinnl »

Funes- wrote: post #148
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…

>> Under the bill the companies would be required to maintain an interface to facilitate interoperability. This would be easily achieved with ActivityPub [0]. >> The bill would require communications platforms with more than 100 million monthly active members [...] to allow its users to easily move, or port, their data to another network... That's the idea behind Berners-Lee's Solid [1]. I wish legislators were more…

Solid is not the first effort in this area, but the timing w.r.t. consumer sentiment and legislation, combined with the clout of TimBL, does make it feel like it has a serious shot at success.

(Disclosure: I work at inrupt, the main commercial player supporting Solid, founded by TimBL.)

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

#195

Post by beatpanda »

hnbroseph wrote: post #186
beatpanda wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their argument doesn't hold up under the slightest amount of scrutiny. You can go to your friends' pages and manually extract their email or other contact information. If it's visible to you, its because your friend made a decision to make that information visible. They designed the data export tool that way knowing that the main thing someone trying to leave Facebook wants is contact information for their friends th…

so if a person puts a number on a page, that also means they want everyone scraping it? that's not a very privacy-friendly perspective.

If I put my number or email on my page, and I adjust the privacy settings to "only friends", I understand I am making that information available to my friends. They are free to copy that information by hand, or by copy-pasting, into their own address book. I have explicitly made it available to them. Facebook includes information about your friends, such as their birthdays, in your data export. Their decision to not include off-Facebook contact information is a business decision designed to make leaving Facebook harder. It has nothing to do with privacy.

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

#196

Post by dependenttypes »

jonfw wrote: post #135
dependenttypes wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With such a shallow view of freedom, physical property ownership is a very anti-freedom concept as well, is it not? Ownership of a house is an infringement on the freedoms of other poeple who want to live there? Intellectual property is no different than any other sort of property. The right to own property is invaluable, and serves the purpose of maximizing freedoms in the long run.

> physical property ownership is a very anti-freedom concept as well, is it not?

I am sure that some here would agree with that. I personally do not.

> Intellectual property is no different than any other sort of property

This is a very extreme view. You are basically saying that specific numbers can be owned by someone.

> and serves the purpose of maximizing freedoms in the long run

I can't see how this is the case, at least as long as intellectual property is concerned.

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

#197

Post by Iv »

zubspace wrote: post #107
Iv wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All data should be exportable in a single file in a documented format with no encryption, no patents, no copyright or trademark claims attached to it. I think this would solve all problems. An open standard would quickly appear and every platform would support it.

Exporting data is alot simpler than importing data. I therefore doubt that all platform providers will sit together and debate, how to structure your content. In some way this could even be impossible. Let's say platform A uses id's for references, platform B uses hashes. platform C uses GUIDs. This doesn't stop here. Think about image codecs or internal links. This makes writing importers a huge pain. Only large com…

Yet, there is a lot of incentives to allow importing into your social net.

Right now, if only facebook was authorizing scrapping instead of actively fighting it, even in the absence of a clear documented API, people would be writing bridges to import your contacts just by making http requests.

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

#198

Post by bryan_w »

riffic wrote: post #22

G Suite, or what was originally "Google Apps for Your Domain" is a white-labeled Gmail. Commercial social media companies can theoretically make some serious money by whitelabeling their services and selling those to whoever has an audience. Stop thinking about things in terms of followers - it's the publishers that need to be captured for revenue. What I'd really like to see from U.S. Senators is legislation to requ…

You should check out workplace (by facebook).

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

#199

Post by grishka »

buboard wrote: post #91
danShumway wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter's API is notoriously bad for 3rd party apps.[0] In order to use the standard API, you need to register for a developer account, which requires manual approval and which Twitter can deny for any reason.[1] Facebook has a history of outright suing 3rd party apps.[2] If I can log into Twitter, I should also be able to update my account with an HTTP request. That's it. I shouldn't need to sign an agreement, or te…

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

As I understand it for Twitter in particular, third-party apps were limiting the reach of their business-related tactics that users hated. Namely, none of those apps implemented any kind of invasive advertising, tracking, and recommendations – which made those apps much better from the UX standpoint than the official ones.
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