Who owns my data in social networks? Who decides what is allowed to do with my data?

My answer is still: It’s me!

I remember that facebook tried to change the privacy terms last years without success in the first attempt. They tried to convince their users that nowadays we have a completely open society and therefore you did not need to care about your data.

For companies it is always a question how to earn money and which business concepts to follow. It is my impression that facebook is using it’s market power to go in a direction that may be a helpful (at the beginning) to earn money by selling data or aggregated information to third parties – but at the same time they will lose users that have a different idea of privacy. See also:

• Sharpen The Pitchforks. It’s Almost Time For Facebook’s Privacy Wake-Up Call
• Facebook’s Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For
• Facebook Foreshadows New Features With Privacy Policy Tweaks
• Social Science Research Network: Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies
• The four U.S. senators Charles E. Schumer, Michael Bennet, Al Franken and Mark Begich ask facebook to fix privacy policy
• Why I left Facebook
• Sophos survey: 60% of Facebook users consider quitting over privacy
• Update 16-10-2011: Facebook failures

German articles…

• Facebook Datenschutzrichtlinie
• Datenschutz bei sozialen Netzwerken mangelhaft
• Facebook will Nutzerdaten automatisch weitergeben
• Facebook will Benutzerdaten automatisch weitergeben
• Update 05-02-2011: FTD: Partnerbörse klaut eine Million Facebook-Profile
• Update 03-07-2011: Verbot von ausufernden Facebook-Partys gefordert

I’m quite sure that this behavior will open the market for competitors, for self hosted systems and open source.

Update 16-10-2011: One serious competitor is now on the market: Google with the product Google+. Is Google+ better – compared to facebook? To be honest: I don´t know. Both companies are collecting user data as this is an asset for them. Nevertheless competition will help to improve products and the privacy policies. On the other hand you could create your own social network with your own policies and hosted on your own server.

Goodbye facebook. Want to do the same but did not find how to do it? Here is a description: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703

As you have to make sure not to log in for the next two weeks to complete the process, don’t forget to deactivate your accounts on additional apps like IM+, Nimbuzz etc. that use your facebook account.

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