

Ask YC: With startups starting to implode what happens to the user data? - zitterbewegung

What happens to the social graphs, blogs, and other information that is held online? Does it get liquidated to the next buyer? Where does all the data go? For example Pownce has been liquidated. Where does the social graph and microblogs go?
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emmett
It depends. Sometimes it's just mothballed/destroyed. Sometimes the acquirer
keeps running the service as-is (that's what happened with kiko.com).
Sometimes the user data is sold off to the highest bidder.

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teej
"Sometimes the user data is sold off to the highest bidder."

Do you have any source for this, anecdotal or otherwise? While the paranoid
part of me wants to think that happens, the logical side is having a hard time
believing it.

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emmett
I've seen it before. Sometimes it's actually not bad at all (person A takes
over posting to person B's mailing list), and sometimes it's horrible (selling
the email addresses for your webapp to spammers).

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Anon84
I would love it if they would make a properly annonimized version available
for research. (Social graphs in particular) Not likely to happen any time
soon, though. Specially after the AOL search data debacle.

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myrm
drop database <failed company>

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fak3r
It's a great question, with all the data that people willingly share online
now, there's little thought to what happens to it if it's not cared for/looked
after. What is the companies legal obligation once they no longer have a need
for the data? Do they destroy it? Who checks on this? Or do they simply drop
it into an xls spreadsheet and auction it off to a spam house...

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pj
Pownce owes it to the user community to make their data available to them. I
would suggest only those users connected to the social graph it contains
should have access to it -- they built it.

Any other use/sale/provision of the data should be held to a vote of Pownce
users

... or whatever users were using the service that shut down.

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sjs382
In the case of Pownce, it /was/ made available to them. The community was
given 2 weeks and a set of tools to export all of their data.

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pj
That's cool then! That makes me smile. I never used Pownce, I have to admit,
so I wasn't up on it, but it'd have been nice to be a member just to have a
large dataset like that to play with.

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mdolon
we feed the data monster om nom nom nom! </reddit>

