The wonderful horrible life of Facebook users and their data (or, "data hogs get slaughtered")
Doc has an important post today that reflects on data and privacy. The post comes back to Marc Cantor's "but it's our daaaaaatttttaaaaaa dudeeeeeeeessss riggggggggghhhhttt?!?!?!!!!!!" …
Context & Ripple Effects
The post lands mid-backlash: on November 21, 2007, Facebook users and MoveOn publicly attacked Beacon, the ad feature that broadcasts members' purchases from other sites to their friends, and by November 23 the program was drawing sustained user protest. Doc Searls used that moment to argue for users writing their own data rules, and Marc Canter's emphatic 'it's our data' framing gave the argument its slogan.
Calacanis amplifying it matters because the debate has moved past one feature into ownership of the underlying asset — Facebook had just become a full-fledged platform for communication, sharing, and advertising, so what happens to member data now sets terms for every developer on it. The same-day pickup on Doc Searls Weblog and Dave Winer's 'I want control of my data' shows the question resonating across the blogging establishment at once.
First-order effects
- Facebook faces direct pressure over Beacon from its own members and MoveOn, forcing it to defend or dial back a feature built entirely on sharing off-site purchase data.
Second-order effects
- Developers building on the Facebook platform inherit the trust problem — any app touching member activity now operates under the same scrutiny that sank Beacon's reception, and rivals courting the same users can differentiate on data handling.
Third-order effects
- If Canter's 'users own their data' framing hardens into a norm, platform economics shift from extracting behavioral data by default toward opt-in consent structures — the beginning of a data-rights fight between social networks and their members rather than among networks themselves.
The trend: Social platforms built on advertising are colliding with an emerging user data-rights movement, with Beacon-style features turning privacy from a settings issue into a legitimacy test for the whole platform model.