My data, your data, Facebooks data – whose is it?

(you might want do read these, too: Scoble, Carr, Techmeme)

I actually think that it is not so difficult: Technically, my address is mine. But I don't own it, rather, the information is associated to me. When I sign up for a service, I might have to submit it as part of the ToS. In Social Networks such as Facebook I might decide to share it. Once I do that, I bear risk of it being just in any kind of way – the same risk I face when I put my address on my website. All the Plaxo thing did was automate it, he could have easily gone to the profile of every single one of his contacts, get the email-address and put it into his Plaxo, his Mac AddressBook or his little black book if he'd choose to that.
The important decision happens much earlier – do I want to be friends with Scoble and have him access my data. Do I want to put my address there or not?
Does this "scraper" as Nick Carr puts it help spammers? Sure, if you decide to befriend a spammer. If you don't they'll just have to go the hard way, surf to your website and copy it from there.

Especially with the myriads of social networks out there, having different friends on each site, I feel proven in my strategy to keep my own address book, the one that syncs with my phone. I actually agree with Publishing 2.0 here.


Technorati Tags: facebook, scoble, plaxo, socialgraph