Scoble, Facebook and a solution to the energy crisis
Go online and you will not fail to spot a common truth about the world we live in. Planet Earth is dripping in anger. The world is a boiling cauldron of fury and doom. Wherever you look there is someone either complaining or spreading the seeds of doom across our drab little lives. Politics, Religion, Traffic, Taxes, Terrorism, Global Warming, Food Scares, Aids, Ageing, Nuclear Despots, Asteroids, Britney Spears new single ..… there’s no end to the line of bloggers waiting to pile on the agony.
Its reassuring then that Robert Scoble, the well thought of tech blogger, has seen fit to add to the pile whilst sparking a debate on information privacy that has the tech world buzzing but the waves of public indifference lapping on the shore.
For those of you who have not been following the earth shattering debate, here it is in a nutshell. Scobel joins Facebook and over time gets 5,000 ‘virtual’ friends. Scobel runs script to extract the names, email addresses and birthdates of his virtual friends. Facebook spot the activity and suspend his account on the grounds that he has breached the sites Terms and Conditions. Scobel cries fowl and blogs about it. Facebook reinstate his account on the basis that he has stopped using the script. Big debate kicks off about who exactly owns the information:
Argument #1: By becoming a Facebook friend of Scoble, users are accepting that he can access their information and use it how he sees fit.
Argument #2: Any information on Scoble’s Facebook page belongs to Scobel.
Argument #3: By becoming a Facebook friend of Scoble, users are accepting that he can access their information however they are not agreeing to that information being extracted and used elsewhere.
Argument #4: Data on Facebook belongs to Facebook – it says so in their T&C’s and all users accept the T&C’s when they join.
Storm in a tea cup? Well it looks set to run for a while but for what it is worth here is my take on the debate.
