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It's Your Stuff? Maybe Not

John Dvorak: Google Pulls Plug, Everyone Misses Point. The scary part is that we are not talking about some flaky, small underfunded company. We’re talking about Google, a behemoth. This tells me that if Google can throw in the towel and abandon one of its online-related services, then anyone can do it—and they will. And then they’ll all point to Google. “Well, if Google can do it after it made promises, then we can do it.” It can happen anywhere. You have all your family photos online? Good luck with that. Your blogging software and blog are all online? Have a nice day. Your business is completely reliant on online systems? How does your insurance policy look?

The case here is about customers’ ability to use a service they purchased. Google is reneging on its promise. But the bigger issue is in the latter part of this quote — whether the photos, text, videos, financial information and other things you put online are yours, or whether they end up belonging, in practice if not principle, to the company you use to store and/or display them.

For citizen media creators contributing their work to a variety of sites, this is not a trivial issue. The portability of data is one of the absolutely crucial problems in a world of online-everything.

You cannot absolutely depend on online vendors to protect your information, despite their best intentions (and most of them have very good intentions). If you can’t download your data to your own computer, in a form that lets you use it elsewhere with not too much hassle, then you should be clear: It’s not really your data after all.

Should there be a law about this? I suspect, in the end, we may need one.

4 Comments on “It's Your Stuff? Maybe Not”

  1. #1 Sean Upton
    on Aug 18th, 2007 at 10:44 am

    With software-as-a-service models, portable data formats and open-source could offer the consumer a better hedge on a change in direction like this. Providers should offer all or the majority of the source code to the soon-to-die product with clear instructions for installation and references to competitors or vendors who can use the software (e.g. managed hosting providers), look for ways to make the data portable to competing services, etc: at the point where the consumer has a migration strategy. The question is really how to make this easy for consumer-facing services, but I’m sure there must be a “right way” to do this with the customers’ needs in mind.

    In the case of citizen media, I think providing static HTML output of “catalogs” of your own work is non-trivial to build (e.g. zip file of assets with HTML navigation that can be saved to a local computer). Providing open-source software to bridge these assets into consumer programs like iPhoto, Office (or OO.o), and other consumer software might help (a bit). Lastly, you need legal access to your own works: even in the most extreme case, Creative Commons licensing seems a reasonable exchange for copyright assignment to a traditional media company (I would think “reverse-publishing” to print will sometimes drive assignment instead of mere licensing).

    As an aside, sometimes killing a poorly performing online product might be in the best interest of customers. I hope, for example, that my employer (metro paper) can follow the example of the death of Times Select and give up completely on notions of subscriber-only archives and any unpopular notions of current “premium” content. This is bound to disappoint some readers, but benefit more readers with open online archives and more opportunities for advertising revenue funding unique services like hyper-local and subject-specific newspaper archives.

  2. #2 I saw this… » the billblog
    on Aug 19th, 2007 at 5:31 pm

    […] Center for Citizen Media: Blog » Blog Archive » It’s Your Stuff? M… – I’ve been saying this for ages, and Gillmor agrees: You cannot absolutely depend on online vendors to protect your information, despite their best intentions […]

  3. #3 infobong.com » linkdump for 2007.09.04
    on Sep 4th, 2007 at 12:18 pm

    […] Dan Gilmor: It’s Your Stuff? Maybe Not “the bigger issue is… whether the photos, text, videos, financial information and other things you put online are yours, or whether they end up belonging, in practice if not principle, to the company you use to store and/or display them. (del.icio.us tags: ethics google Web2.0 labor) […]

  4. #4 Luis Villa’s Blog / some free/open services links
    on Oct 7th, 2007 at 2:29 pm

    […] Good reminder that in the long-term this is way bigger than facebook and email. Dan Gillmor has some similar comments, in the context of Google’s shutdown of Google […]