Data portability was always likely to become a major issue among the Web 2.0 crowd in 2008, but it has come to the fore sooner than most expected.
Arch blogger Robert Scoble has managed to get his Facebook account frozen by trying to export his contacts to another service.
Here’s the message he received from Facebook Customer Support:
“Our systems indicate that you’ve been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script. This kind of Activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.
As a result, your account has been disabled. Please reply to this email with a description of your recent activity on Facebook. In addition, please confirm with us that in the future you will not scrape or otherwise attempt to obtain in any manner information from our website except as permitted by our Terms of Use, and that you will immediately delete and not use in any manner any such information you may have previously obtained.”
Mr Scoble was trying out a new feature of the Plaxo online address book that allows its users to import and merge Facebook contacts’ information with their other data.
John McCrea, Plaxo’s head of marketing, told me he at first suspected this was a deliberate Facebook policy to block data portability, but he now hopes it is just a malfunction of its system, which Facebook’s latest response seems to confirm.
Joseph Smarr, developer of Plaxo’s Facebook Import, said the feature is still in its “alpha” stage and Plaxo had not yet consulted Facebook on introducing it.
But he said he took recent pronouncements by Facebook that it wanted to make its service more open as a green light to proceed.
Facebook is certainly protective of the value of the contact information it holds on members.
I have used a Facebook application called FriendCSV to export all my contacts to a spreadsheet. However, this does not export their email addresses as Facebook shows them as image files rather than text. Plaxo has now got round this obstacle by using optical-character-recognition technology.
Mr Scoble seems to be the only one of Plaxo’s Alpha testers to have been fingered by Facebook, which is understandable. With his 5,000 Facebook friends, the importer would have been “highly active” indeed in pushing all of them into Plaxo.
Meanwhile, he has stirred up a storm on the blogosphere and is backing dataportability.org, as the movement for free movement of personal information on the web gathers momentum.
