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?
Read more…
No, this is not just a play on words. So far, I’ve collected some background examples to illustrate this apparent contradiction: public data on the Internet may be not so public. To be more precise, data privacy rights and other interests from some companies can play a major role in this problem.
From Wikimedia Commons
As a researcher on open on-line communities (and open here is a synonym of publicly accessible virtual groups), this is a key concern for me. Likewise, it should be important for many other colleagues in this field, and the myriad of companies collecting and mining huge data sets on a daily basis. Let me show you some examples.
On March 26-27 I attended the CPOV conference in Amsterdam, organized by the Institute of Network Cultures. In the same session, Stuart Geiger presented an overview of the influence of Wikipedia bots in the editorial work of the community. One example quickly got my attention: HagermanBot. This bot was created to look for unsigned comments on Wikipedia talk pages, then automatically insert the signature of the corresponding author next to them. The bot raised a strong controversy among users, since many of them thought that the guideline of signing comments on talk pages was just that, a recommendation, not a rule to be enforced. Some could be embarrased by login names displayed next to comments. Wait a minute: isn’t that information public? Yes, of course it is. Just click on the history tab and you get the revision history page, tracking all comments and their corresponding authors. Read more…
Recent Comments