The woes that have struck Second Life and Facebook remind me of the topic Linksvayer and I have talked about, needing an EXPORT [1] of your data from these closed projects and,or, relying on one’s own infrastructure for social networking, identification, and personal data.
I don’t want Google, Flickr, Upcoming, Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, LinkedIn, or any other web-based service to lock down my data, even put it on their hard drives, nor keep any of my personal data anymore. I want my media and data on my servers, secured with my own security methods. These services should just provide their good proprietary methods for searching through, connecting with, etc, and my data is safe from their “government spy chips” (that is a bad inside joke from the EFF’s presentation at cc salon). No really, I just have like a gazillion usernames, passwords, different logins, media spread out (which is good), and travel patterns that take me through countries that might demand this from these capitulating companies who are shown and proven to fail their users with security exploits, lazy coding tactics, and philosophies that don’t jive with those of the software they primarily base their businesses on (ahem, L.A.M.P).
If these companies relied more heavily on user supplied systems, then if the users’s own system is hacked, then that is not on the company, as it would be an interchange for many external profiles (including user data, credit cards, etc).
This is one of the reasons (beyond getting paid from Creative Commons, because I worked on CC stuff before I got paid to do this) I really enjoy hacking on ccHost, an Open Source web-based media sharing software. This software allows anyone to run their own YouTube video sharing, Flickr photo site, etc on their own infrastructure.
I should write about this in a magazine with large press. Its time to up the Open Service ante. I know I have passwords and other personal data spilled out on the web because of these companies with flawed philosophies.
Footnotes
[1] This should probably be more of an export and delete, and, or export, delete and redirect.
[2] Yes, please everyone, lets remember that these sites are companies with closed applications and not the open service saviors that go hand in hand with the values of open source.
Jon,
Your comments on this issue are right on point with what most people feel but can’t yet express. What can we do about this? Does everyone need to own a server to keep track of their own participation with these sites? How much would that cost?
Joe
the local legal situation doesn’t help
countries with strong data protection laws require companies to hand over copies of any data they hold on you. I believe one of the major reasons to require this release of information is so that you can check the accuracy and make sure things like you credit rating is not destroyed because of someone with a similar name or some other inaccuracy causing you unfair treatment.
Even though companies may be legally required to share such information they are not necessarily required to provide it as a convenient “export” but it may be in their own interest to provide web bases services just as it is beneficial in other parts of their business. without legal pressure to share such information they are less likely to release it at all.