Tag: dataportability.org

Terms and Cons

 

Not written about TOS DR or Terms of Service Didn’t read.

“I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web.  We aim to fix that.

ToS;DR aims at creating a transparent and peer-reviewed process to rate and analyse Terms of Service and Privacy Policies in order to create a rating from Class A to Class E.

A long time ago while the Data Portability group was in full swing, we talked about doing something very much like TOS DR but the issues of trying to get a unified system across all End User Licence Agreements (EULA’s) seemed like a total nightmare. The suggestion was to use a traffic light system to alert people of the bogus stuff ahead of time. This also meant it wouldn’t replace the EULA, it would just highlight some of the questionable stuff.

In the end it was far enough off the main focus of the group to make it a that would be nice rather than essential. Its a shame but it was the right decision for the time.

Hope the TOSDR guys get as popular as Creative Commons and team up with the likes of the plain english campaign.

To be honest if I had more time and wasn’t already doing lots of other stuff, I might be tempted to join in and help where I can.

Kevin Rose talks about Data Portability on Diggnation

So it started off about the facebook applications on any site and their global javascript library. But before long Kevin Rose is informing Alex about the advantages of this move for Facebook and some of its users. Kevin then points out that its disadvantage is for the users because its still tied to Facebook. He briefly mentions OpenSocial then starts talking about DataPortability. During the following 3-4 mins Alex challenges Kevin about Digg.com and its Dataportanility stance and to be Kevin admits he's all for dataportability in Digg.com. This is obviously very fitting looking forward to the announcement a while back that Digg joins the Dataportability group.

For someone whose one of the founders of the Dataportability group, I've been quite quiet about it. Don't get me wrong I'm lurking a lot and I already have my fingers in certain dataportability pies. You may have seen some data portability videos around, well I'm glad to say I have completed mine and I'm just trying to edit mine with Kdenlive and Pitivi but not having much luck. It seems Kdenlive doesn't like my Sanyo's Mpeg4 audio format. So I need to convert them first into something else using VLC. Pitivi is strange and does weird things to the video, which means it won't play in much including the great VLC.

Big thanks to Kevin Rose for allowing me the permission to clip this video and put it up on Blip.TV. Originally not only was I having problems with encoding but Blip kept removing my video because I was breaching Revision3's Copyright. So after a brief email to Kevin directly, he replied yes but he would have liked to have seen the video first. I told him if he doesn't like it I will take it down.

There is also now a Geekdinner about Data Portability in London. If your interested in this subject and in the area of London on Wednesday 27th Feb, come along for a good debate about the whole project and subject.

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Data Portability Video


DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.


CREDITS:
Written, designed and edited by Michael Pick, smashcut-media.com

Music – “Bongo Avenger” – Eric & Ryan Kilkenny: CC Attrib. Non Commercial

Hands photo: Scol22 – Stock.xchng

Additional images: istockphoto

Animated Flourishes: Andrew Kramer

So I was impressed with the production value of the video but felt it needed more snap. Chris asked what I meant by “snap?” But I think you will know what I mean and agree, it certainly needs more snappyness. Not that I'm slagging it off, actually its really good and well worth sending around to people who don't know or understand the whole data portability movement.

I've also finally put in a Xtech 2008 proposal for Data Portability at long last. Here is my short description.

Data portability is in a way one of the greatest freedoms users and developers can have. Portability of data underpins the web of data, apis and the ability to move data to other services, platforms and devices. It is silo busting and is deeply weaved into the debate over social platforms, identity and mobile data. In this talk, I will explore the problems, solutions and gamut of policy decisions

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Facebook, Google And Plaxo Join The DataPortability Workgroup

Dataportability

Forget Open social, this is huge! This a huge win for interoperability, portability and fair use. Chris told me a while ago but promised to say nothing till now. It also shows how much influence characters like scoble have, but I'm sure these companies were looking at Data portability long before scobles account got suspended.

After publishing an invitation to Facebook to join the DataPortability Working Group January 4, we never thought that Facebook would accept it. Today changes everything you’ve ever thought about social-networking data and lock-in before, because today Facebook, Google and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup.

Google and Plaxo joining are a positive, however given that both have previously joined together for platforms such as OpenSocial it’s not that significant, but Facebook is another matter. On January 4 Michael sort of defended Facebook’s stance against Plaxo pulling data from Facebook on the grounds that “Facebook also has a very good reason for protecting email addresses – user privacy.” Today, by joining the DataPortability Working Group Facebook is embracing open standards and open access, and that is a huge fundamental change from its previous stance on being locked in to closed standards.

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Scoble calls for dataportability

Thanks Tom for the heads up… Straight from Scoble. A very good reason for dataportability. You should be able to export your data even when your account is disabled.

Facebook disabled my account

If you are trying to contact me on Facebook, please don’t. My account has been “disabled” for breaking Facebook’s Terms of Use. I was running a script that got them to keep me from accessing my account. I’m appealing. I’ll tell you what I was doing as soon as I talk with the developers who built what I was using and as soon as I talk with Facebook’s support (I sent an email in reply to the one below, but haven’t heard back yet).

I run this stuff so you don’t have to. 🙂

UPDATE: Rodney Rumford, who runs the FaceReviews Blog about Facebook says that all traces of me have been already removed from Facebook too.

UPDATE2: Tonight I learned about DataPortability.org and signed my name to that effort.

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