Breaking the Social Contract: My Data is not Your Data
This is likely my last post in Robert Scoble vs. Facebook saga but I think there are some subtle points being lost because of the typical blog feeding frenzy where people either choose to flame Facebook, Scoble or both.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Scoble-Facebook fight has been escalating all week: Facebook disabled his account on January 3 after he ran a script to pull his friends' email addresses out of the service, and he documented the fallout in Erased two days later. The blogosphere has since split into camps flaming Facebook, Scoble, or both.
Obasanjo's intervention reframes the dispute rather than picking a side: the contact data at issue belongs to Scoble's friends, not to Scoble, so exporting it is not a simple property claim. That argument lands against a backdrop already laid out in Jason Calacanis's November 2007 piece on how Facebook treats its users' data — and against confirmed reports that Facebook had been using members' profile pictures and endorsements in ad campaigns without their explicit knowledge days earlier.
First-order effects
- Robert Scoble remains locked out of his account under Facebook's Terms of Use, which prohibit automated extraction of friends' email addresses — the ban is the direct cost of treating the social graph as portable personal data.
- Facebook faces a widening criticism problem beyond this one ban: within the same week it enforced its Terms of Use against a scraper, hosted a malicious widget pushing Zango adware, and ran ads built from members' profile pictures without explicit consent.
Second-order effects
- Every social platform now has to draw an explicit line between what a user owns (their own profile) and what they merely access (their friends' contact details), because Scoble's script turned that abstract boundary into a public test case.
- Facebook's asymmetric posture — strict with users who extract data, loose with its own commercial reuse of profiles and endorsements — hands critics a concrete double-standard argument that raises the reputational price of each future enforcement action.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, data portability disputes will force platforms to codify the 'social contract' Obasanjo invokes into actual terms-of-service and API policy, rather than leaving it to ad-hoc bans of high-profile users.
- The episode marks an early instance of the recurring conflict in which a platform's most valuable asset — the network of relationships between users — sits in tension with any individual user's claim to carry their connections elsewhere.
The trend: Social platforms are being pushed to define formal boundaries around the social graph, as users' demands for data portability collide with platforms' claims over relationship data.