Jon Phillips of Inkscape and Creative Commons fame asks “How do our beloved desktop applications such as Inkscape, Gimp, Scribus, Krita, and Blender fit into this new world wide web world order (NWWWWO)?” in his blog and wikinotes. Worth perusing as we all ponder the transition from traditional desktop apps to more network-centric content development.
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I’ve argued here (and elsewhere) that privacy in network services is a problem best solved by data portability. The resultant competition, which would let people migrate from services with worse privacy policies to services with better privacy policies. Of course, the issue isn’t that simple- in particular, there are complex questions about who can export what data. If someone comments on your wall, can you take that with you? If you comment on their wall? What if they put up a picture of you? A picture of you, and someone else? I don’t pretend to have a solution to that, but my sense has always been that once a reasonable line was drawn, it’d got a long way towards helping resolve the privacy problems that have plagued Facebook.
James Grimmelman has a new paper out on privacy in social networks that suggests I might be wrong. In short, Prof. Grimmelman argues that data portability is not a solution to the privacy problem, because privacy is determined not just by who controls data, but by what code controls and interprets the data. Of course, the code won’t follow ‘ported’ data. For example, if a friend shares a picture with you, they aren’t deciding ‘just’ to share that picture with you, they are deciding to share it under the specific rules of the social network they are sharing it through. They may not fully understand those rules, but the rules are discoverable, choosable, and maybe even predictable. If that picture is taken elsewhere the rules may be better- but they may well be worse. Using the example of Scoble getting banned from Facebook for importing information into the notorious Plaxo, Grimmelman points out that this helped Scoble’s independence- but may well have violated the privacy expectations of anyone who had shared data with Scoble, assuming that Facebook would enforce certain rules on the use of the data. Or to put it more abstractly: “data portability may reduce vertical power imbalances between users and social network sites, it creates horizontal privacy trouble.” I think I’d known this before reading this paper, but Grimmelman laid the problem out so clearly that I will be forced to revisit the question.
(Tangentially, Grimmelman notes that this problem is in part a side-effect of the use of notions of ‘ownership’ to describe personal data, when property norms may well be the wrong metaphor for personal data. Certainly we’ve been guilty of that mistake here from time to time.)
Grimmelman does suggest a slew of other approaches that might lessen the privacy issues in modern social networks, and critiques a slew of others that he thinks won’t work – so for anyone thinking about privacy and network services the paper is well worth a read. In the meantime, I’ll be mulling what it means for free/autonomous social networks, and invite others to do the same.
Following in Evan’s footsteps, I’ve written a post on clouds and hype over at Freedom To Tinker. The nutshell is that there are different types of clouds, and we should be keeping that in mind instead of treating all clouds as either good or bad. But head over there for the full story.
Careful readers of the Franklin Street Statement will have noticed that it doesn’t ever use the word ‘web.’ That was very deliberate. While web services are pretty important to all our lives at this point, and web services like facebook and twitter have provided plenty of fodder for discussion of autonomous services, there are lots of non-web services that are pretty important. These range from very obvious ones (like email) to less obvious ones- like, say, virtual worlds like Second Life.
There has been some progress in virtual worlds, particularly with efforts like opencroquet, but more could still be done. Azdel Slade has written some worthwhile and interesting posts about the problem here, here, and here- worth a read!
In interviews, in private discussion, and in some media articles about autonomo.us, people have suggested that we’re redundant to other groups like DiSo or DataPortability, who are discussing standards and writing code. To quote webmonkey:
Rather than spending their time on grandiose statements, the DiSo Project and others like are already distributing code that just works. … [T]he web moves much faster than desktop software and it remains to be seen if the principles of desktop software can guide the development of an open web.
I’ve noticed some complaints that the Franklin Street Statement does not address privacy issues. I thought it might be worth explaining here why I am less concerned. As usual, I speak for myself here, rather than the group, but we all welcome constructive feedback on the issue.
Free and open software has a slightly indirect mechanism for dealing with software of low quality. It gives people the freedom to fix the problems themselves, pay for someone else to fix it, or to get their data out and use other software. In other words, freedom creates choices and markets- which allow and encourage quality to happen. Given that free software originates in one man’s quest to improve the quality of his printer, this side effect of freedom shouldn’t be too surprising.
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