Google Sky: To Freely Go

Robert Scoble cried over Microsoft's upcoming WorldWide Telescope, and he may well not be alone, since I'm sure there will be some proprietary angles that push people towards viewing it under Windows. For the rest of us, Google has created the browser-based Google Sky: maybe not as breathtaking as Microsoft's, but at least it doesn't cost you the earth in terms of your freedom.

Data Non-Ownership

There has been a bit of a kerfuffle over Robert Scoble's run-in with Facebook. In this clear-headed analysis, Ed Felten points out that the problem is everyone tries to frame it in terms of who owns the personal data on Facebook:

Once we give up the idea that the fact of Robert Scoble’s friendship with (say) Lee Aase, or the fact that that friendship has been memorialized on Facebook, has to be somebody’s exclusive property, we can see things more clearly. Scoble and Aase both have an interest in the facts of their Facebook-friendship and their real friendship (if any). Facebook has an interest in how its computer systems are used, but Scoble and Aase also have an interest in being able to access Facebook’s systems. Even you and I have an interest here, though probably not so strong as the others, in knowing whether Scoble and Aase are Facebook-friends.

How can all of these interests best be balanced in principle? What rights do Scoble, Aase, and Facebook have under existing law? What should public policy says about data access? All of these are difficult questions whose answers we should debate. Declaring these facts to be property doesn’t resolve the debate — all it does is rule out solutions that might turn out to be the best.

This is going to become an even bigger issue in the future - which makes sensible thinking about it all-the-more necessary and valuable.

Open Social Web: A Bill of Rights for Users

Authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington
September 4, 2007

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

* Ownership of their own personal information, including:
o their own profile data
o the list of people they are connected to
o the activity stream of content they create;
* Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
* Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

* Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
* Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
* Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
* Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

(Via eHub.)