

Facebook Says Some of Your Personal Data Is Its 'Intellectual Property' - nextparadigms
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111011/12190216306/facebook-says-some-your-personal-data-is-its-trade-secrets-intellectual-property.shtml

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techiferous
This doesn't bother me.

#1: The protection against data that would require "disproportionate effort"
seems like a valid protection of the company. A company the size of Facebook
surely has very complex databases, logs, and caches going on, so that if they
had to _literally_ fetch _all_ the data they have about a user, I could see
this becoming quite a project.

#2: I would consider data models a trade secret. So if the personal data
contains information that belies the underlying structure, I'm okay with the
data being "scrubbed" clean of anything that would potentially give
competitors a peek into the underlying engineering.

Note that I canceled my Facebook account long ago because I think Facebook is
a system that is structured so that the users' best interests are not a
priority. But this doesn't mean that everything Facebook does is bad or is
against users' privacy, so I find this article to be a bit sensationalist.

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ltamake
#1: A large company called Sony recently had almost 100 million accounts
stolen from PSN. We all assumed that because they're big, they wouldn't do
stupid things like store our passwords or credit card numbers in plaintext.

If Facebook can't fetch data from its own infrastructure, I would be seriously
worried, more so than I am right now.

#2: I understand them wanting to preserve trade secrets like facial
recognition, but I still would like a general idea of /every single thing/
Facebook has on me. That's like a bank storing a bunch of information on me
while refusing to disclose certain parts of my bank account because they're
"trade secrets".

You're right, not everything Facebook does is bad. But they don't have the
users' best interests at hand and when you need to worry about a site tracking
you across the Internet simply because you have an account and they can,
that's the time to worry. I'm surprised we haven't seen more lawsuits than the
media is reporting.

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tedunangst
#1: How is that at all relevant? Did Sony at some point claim they were unable
to retrieve users' passwords without disproportionate effort?

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Tangurena
Because Sony decided to add a mandatory arbitration clause to get around the
lawsuits resulting from the disclosure of 100,000,000+ names, addresses and
credit cards. [http://www.gamepolitics.com/2011/09/15/sony-adds-
mandatory-a...](http://www.gamepolitics.com/2011/09/15/sony-adds-mandatory-
arbitration-clause-psn-tos)

~~~
tedunangst
Can you rephrase that to include the words "disproportionate effort" so it
gives the illusion of being relevant?

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wmf
We need facts. _What_ data is missing?

~~~
tedunangst
Exactly. Obvious example would be whatever data facebook uses to determine
what's interesting and to put in your newsfeed. If it's just profile views,
that's your data, but if I were building a site running at facebook scale, I'd
be performing the final calculation using some intermediate data massaged by
some totally top zecret algorithms.

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CWuestefeld
I agree. It doesn't seem so outrageous to me that, after sending a CD worth of
data, they drew a line.

At a certain level of detail, what they report back is going to start
revealing internal secrets and IP, such as data models or algorithms. And
given the volume of data that they _did_ , provide, I find it plausible that
they've drawn the line in an appropriate place.

The headline is sensationalist scaremongering. A careful read shows that it's
not the data itself that's IP, but that the form in which it's presented
reveals Facebook's IP.

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kposehn
I agree. The headline and article seems more geared to making people draw
conclusions than pointing out the reality of the situation.

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vsl2
Whether Facebook can get away with this depends on (i) what the data is and
(ii) applicable European legal precedent, if any..

There may not be any legal precedent with regards to this type of situation
since laws (in the US and abroad) are notoriously slow to adapt to new
technologies, so this case may be the first test.

From a moral standpoint, it clearly seems wrong for Facebook to claim that its
users' personal information is its intellectual property. Users can protest
Facebook's stance through account closings, etc. But its not likely that
enough users will care to force Facebook to change.

~~~
anigbrowl
The EU (and the UK) are actually good way ahead of the US in this area, to the
point that control over your personal data is written into the EU charter of
fundamental rights as article 8:

 _1\. Everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him
or her. 2\. Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on
the basis of the consent of the person concerned or some other legitimate
basis laid down by law. Everyone has the right of access to data which has
been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified. 3\.
Compliance with these rules shall be subject to control by an independent
authority._

<http://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf>

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elemenohpee
Could it be that it is not the information per se that is IP, but the actual
type or structure of the information?

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Shenglong
The title is misleading. This isn't what Facebook is claiming at all. This is
terribly biased reporting.

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chris_gogreen
maybe releasing some data will allow for reverse engineering of sorts, if
telling you that will reveal something about how they collect, or store or
analyze the data...

