[governance] open standard for "facebook crowd" interactions

Michael Gurstein gurstein at gmail.com
Sat May 14 21:17:16 EDT 2011


Tim,

I'm not sure I understand the specifics of your answer but at the general
level I understand you as saying that CS shouldn't be concerning itself with
the operations of FB and similar companies as the market will somehow take
care of this.

Could I point you to the following

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-privacy-meeting/

and suggest that even if Civil Society doesn't express an interest there are
larger political forces which do have an interest.  The problem that I have
with this as I mentioned before is that while the US Congress may be
representing the interests of 20% of FB users, who or what is representing
(or rather could represent) the interests of the other 80%?

This is a question which I think the IGC should very much be attempting to
address and in whatever fashion moving to have the global IG community
address this as well.

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: governance at lists.cpsr.org [mailto:governance at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf
Of McTim
Sent: Friday, May 13, 2011 12:24 PM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Norbert Bollow
Subject: Re: [governance] open standard for "facebook crowd" interactions


On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 7:45 PM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> whatever happened to focusing on ACTUAL INTERNET GOVERNANCE 
>> activities, instead of talking endlessly about shapes of tables for 
>> potential IG bodies???
>
> Cool idea.
>
> How's the following for a topic?
>
> I think that it should be possible for me to interact with anyone who 
> is "on facebook" and who wants to interact with me, without having to 
> put my personal data onto the servers of a company that I don't trust 
> at all, and which in addition is under the jurisdiction of a country 
> whose legal system I trust much less than I trust the Swiss one.
>
> Now I'm not demanding that Facebook Inc. should go out business or 
> that they'd have to "give away" copies of their software, just that 
> there should be open interfaces allowing others to implement their own 
> software to communicate with the "facebook crowd" while keeping their 
> personal data on servers of their own choosing. (And analogously for 
> other "social network" server based services.)


Those things already exist, and account (in part) for the success of
FB/Twitter/etc.  Isn't that the whole point of APIs?

from wikipedia:

More than 250,000 websites have integrated with Facebook Platform More than
100 million Facebook users engage with Facebook on external websites every
month

That is why FB put Burson Marsteller on an anti-Google campaign recently,
Google was scraping FB data for its "Social Circle".


>
> I have no idea what would be a suitable forum for effectively 
> addressing this topic.

It has already been addressed IMO,

If you want to interact with FB, you are free to do so, if not, then don't
(and build your own thing).


-- 
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route
indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel
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