Who owns your comments?
These days, I’ve been thinking again about the problems related with mining social network info. I’m still astonished at Facebook decision of suing Peter Warden because he gathered a massive collection of Facebook data. He was liable just because he wanted to disclose the set to researchers worldwide. Today, I read (via tweet from Ed Chi) an article on NYTimes saying that a growing number of companies are making business with end-user data. At least, their plans are clear… more or less. But I still wonder whether FB and Twitter users were aware of this side-effect: that FB and Twitter can discover a lot of things mining their public accounts. And sell results to private companies interested in them. After all, the best market study is one covering feedback from several million customers, right?
This leads to a natural question: who owns the content posted on social networks sites? Can other companies mine that data? What if my profile is public? How about someone collecting, say, one trillion of tweets from public streams? Could Twitter sue that person, just like FB attorneys did to Peter Warden?
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