Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• Scoble, Facebook and Data Ownership

  I've sort of ignored the whole Scoble/Facebook fiasco, with people arguing on both sides who "owns" the data. Jimmy Gutterman misses the point a bit , because Facebook has already opened up the social graph through the Facebook Platform API. What they don't expose - and why this script resorted to screen-scraping - is any contact information. He paints this as a "lock in" issue, but I doubt that's their primary goal. We already complain enough about the spam we get on Facebook, and I would hate it if someone in my network shared - accidentally or on purpose - that contact information with spammers. So, yeah, I think what Facebook did is a good thing, which seems to be the majority sentiment. Mike Arrington said Plaxo flubbed it and Jeff Jarvis agrees . Loren Feldman called Robert Scoble a corporate spy . Allen discussed how we should approach the data ownership problem . Dare says Facebook is right - since Scoble did not enter any of the contact information... Posted Jan 09 2008, 11:08 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Copyright, Privacy, Blogging, Law, Facebook

• Would you trust Zamzar with your data?

  Kevin writes about Zamzar , a free web-based service that converts audio, video and documents from one format to another (via Download Squad ). Sounds cool, but would you trust them with your sensitive data? I don't know about you, but I barely trust Google or Microsoft with this information. Should I trust what appears to be a UK-based startup whose company page provides little, if any, information about the company? In their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy , they make allusions to "respect[ing] the intellectual property rights of others" - though the language seems to be more related to a third party's protected work as opposed to any protected work you are personally uploading. The Privacy Policy also discusses, sort of, how the files are stored and accessible. Storage of User Files When users upload files to be converted Zamzar stores those files on its servers until such time as those files have been converted to the new file format. As soon as this has been done Zamzar removes... Posted Nov 03 2006, 08:37 AM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Security, Copyright, Web 2.0, Innovation, Privacy

• Identity Theft and Use of Social Security Numbers

  Marc Orchant at The Tablet PC Weblog passes along some good tips for preventing identity theft . Among them: 2. Do not sign the back of your credit cards. Instead, put “PHOTO ID REQUIRED”.. This highlights a problem in general with using the signature as a means of authentication. It relies on the cashier to actually look at the card and, more often than not, they don't. In fact, many drugstores and grocery stores now have machines where you swipe the card yourself - it is never even in the possession of the cashier. Case in point: When I got a new American Express card, I forgot to sign it initially. I noticed this after the first purchase, where the cashier did not check. As an experiment, I still haven't signed it and have used it extensively over the past three months. On a related note: These days, your Social Security Number (SSN) is basically the key to your identity. This is especially true because a lot of your other information is readily available these days (see The Curse of... Posted Mar 06 2005, 04:45 PM by Tim with | with 8 comment(s) Filed under: Intellectual Property, Law School, Privacy

• Of Dog Sniffs and Packet Sniffs

  Interesting article about the implications of the Caballes decision on matters of privacy on the Internet. I was actually thinking about this in terms of VoIP as a topic for my Computer Law paper. Update : Orin explains why Caballes won't impact Internet surveillance . Posted Feb 13 2005, 07:53 PM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Privacy

• Who's reading your e-mail?

  Your ISP can read your e-mail. That's what a federal district court decided in 2003, and what the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld last week. A little history: Back in 1998, an online bookseller gave free e-mail accounts to book dealers and then secretly copied all messages that came in from Amazon.com. While two employees plead guilty to wiretapping charges, a supervisor fought the charges. He said he wasn't aware of the scheme and should not be held liable, but even if he were, the federal wiretapping law didn't apply. Because the messages were saved on the company's hard drive while being processes, he argued, they should be considered stored communication. This distinction is important. The federal wiretapping laws ban a company from monitoring its customers' communications, but it does not apply to stored communications. The reasoning there is that there is an inherent loss of privacy once the e-mail is stored. By putting e-mail in this category of stored communication, the courts... Posted Jul 11 2004, 07:35 AM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Security, Privacy