Who owns your notebook?

Who is guilty

Now the hype around the “second version of the web” is already boring for everyone, and is gradually eroding, and one of the basic concepts of web2.0 - user-generated content - is becoming familiar and widespread. Millions of users create terabytes of public and personal information and post it on the Internet. However, few people think about whether the information does not change the owner.

In some cases, the author’s goal is to make the information public domain, for example, on Wikipedia. However, in most cases this is not the case, and web services are used only to show a text or a photo album to friends or the whole world. Authors will not be very happy to see a reprint in another journal - electronic or paper - especially under a different name. It may surprise even more that the new “author” has the right to do so.

Fortunately, web services with draconian offers, grabbing rights from real authors, are rare. Although ... is it so rare? Remember that you do not own the blog texts or photos in the photo album - you also have personal information. It would seem that her security is all right now (let's not remember the horror stories about the FSB and VKontakte, but let us remember about the silly bug of classmates ).
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But now it is becoming increasingly important and another type of personal information of a person is information about his social connections, his friends, a notebook of the 21st century. How much trouble causes the loss of ICQ number or another pager, or the transition to another social network.

It would seem that the import-export of a notebook is not rocket science, mail programs have been doing an excellent job with this for many years. Why not do the same for web services? Can do. Some sites (for example, livejournal.com or liveinternet.ru ) allow you to get a list of friends in the foaf format, some use the xfn microformat for the same purpose. MyKrug exports to csv and vcard . However, most others are in no hurry to go this route.

However, it would be unfair not to mention here the “import of friends from gmail / hotmail / ...” which has recently become fashionable with Western services by login and password. Although it is a frankly dangerous approach - to transfer critical data to some website. Yes, of course, the probability of malicious use of them is relatively low, but what if it is multiplied by the amount of risk? The most innocuous thing that could happen, not so long ago, showed the world to quechup.com, sending invitations to all the people from the address books of its users .

This “integration” has one more drawback - it works only in one direction. The web service is ready to receive information, but it is not going to give it away.

The situation is explained very simply. On average, the more users the site has, the more expensive it can be sold or the more investment it can receive. As the user base grows, it becomes more and more valuable, and related services fade into the background or are completely forgotten. And if the user finds something better ... Well, it is impossible to forbid him to leave. But you can not let him take friends with him.

It turns out that: you worked, found friends, established contact with them, spent more than one hour on it in total, and as a result created information about your friends. Personal information, I will note. And now you do not give it to you, you can not pick it up.

So who owns your notebook?

What to do

Over the past six months, several resonant articles on this topic have appeared on the Western Internet. One of the first was the text of Brad Fitzpatrick "Thoughts on the social graph" ("Thoughts on the Social Graph") . It was followed by the “Bill of Rights of Users of the Social Web” (the Russian translation of the text with some comments was published on the “Webplanet” ). Shortly thereafter, Six Apart stated: "We are opening a social graph . " The authors demand for the user not only the right to export his list of friends, moreover - he can provide access to this information to other services of his choice.

And these demands were heard. Recently, Google, supported by dozens of partner sites, announced the launch of OpenSocial, a unified software interface for social networking sites . Yes, there are a lot of fuzzy language, but nevertheless it will make managing your social network much easier. It remains to wait a little working implementations.

However, OpenSocial involves voluntary collaboration of participating sites. And we have already figured out why many social networks are not at all eager to give users freedom. For example, I doubt that Facebook , supporting some semblance of OpenSocial, will accept a widget that allows the user to export all their data to another social network. No wonder: after all, this service does not even show you emails of your friends, forcing them to communicate with the help of a poor "lichka."

What then to speak about the Russian Facebook underclone - vkontakte . He does not show the e-mail as his elder brother, and he doesn’t have a software interface at all. I will not even talk about how things are going on orphaned classmates , and everything is clear. However, as mentioned above, on some other social sites (LJ, LI, MoiKrug) there is export.

What do those people who want to get their data from the evil closed vkontakte / odnoklassniki? Cry?

No, not so bad. There are certainly workarounds. For example, recently on mirtesen.ru there appeared the implementation of a rather ingenious idea, a sort of “good XSS ”. It consists in the following: javascript, connected using a special bookmark , pretends to be you - an ordinary user. It works in your browser, bypasses the list of all your friends (on vkontakte or odnoklassniki), and each of them sends an invitation to mirtesen. However, it seems that the link there can be inserted any, and thus entice friends to any site. I am very pleased that at the same time you control what is happening: passwords are not transferred to anyone, and you decide whether to use the bookmark again. At the same time, mirtesen itself is not greedy: honestly gives foaf and even marks out pages with microformats.

However, there is not without a fly in the ointment from our "villains". On classmates, this invitation works fine. And on VKontakte - a surprise! - any mention of mirtesen in a personal mail is transformed into an ominous inscription "SPAM DETECTED, IP LOGGED". Here, try it yourself. Does this remind you of censorship? I considered stories about links-email-numbers-icq, deleted from the lichka, to be ordinary horror stories, but this turns out to be true. I wonder how soon in a similar way from personal messages will be deleted links to classmates and LJ?

However, as the example of various “antimat” in Runet showed, most filters either easily manage with the inventiveness of ordinary people, or give a monstrous number of false positives, which does not benefit the resource.

The world is heading towards a bright future of convenient integration and a single information space, while the war of social networks is approaching in Russia? Soon! Watch on your monitors!