Open Sauce Software

Facebook and Plaxo are arguing over who gets to share their friends' personal data - but just owns that data?

Last week, blogger Robert Scoble incurred the wrath of Facebook by harvesting his Facebook friends' identities to put in his Plaxo address book.

Was Facebook cross because the tool he used
a) infringes his friends' rights?
b) makes it easy for people to get their data out of Facebook, and do their sociail networking elsewhere, eroding the value of all the "social graphs" on Facebook , which in the end is the only thing its multi-billion dollar valuation is based on
or (most likely) c) it simply goes against the Facebook terms and conditions. If you read the small print when you sign up to Facebook, you agree not to do this.

What interests me is the similarity with issues of sharing code. Do we own the details of our identity - and could they be protected by a licence rather than emotive and difficult-to-define privacy rules?

"Perhaps we need creative commons style licenses for personal information- which would allow for non-commercial use, attribution or whatnot," said James Governor of redMonk in an email.

But I don't think copyright in identities would be any easier to define. Is our identity (email, phone number gender, data of borth) etc our own copyright? Is it an original work? did we create it or were we given it? What if someone copies it into their database, but changes something (a mis-spelling, or omitting a redundant postal address line)?

Youi'd have to ensure that the permission notice was always kept attached to the details - a mandatory field in a vCard, say.

Companies obviously would license their contact details in the widest possible way - though they might then want to object if those details were posted on.

There's been a lot of thinking about online identity - and Kim Cameron at Microsoft is a good place to start.