We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

This seems like the right way to go to make people comfortable about using the freely use the system to transfer ideas that may contain pieces of intellectual property.

Kudos to Twitter for the straightforward rules over content copyright.

I happened across a great blog post from Chris Bucchere, founder and CEO of BDG – the folks behind The Social Collective.  In response to a post about Robert Scoble losing his Facebook account because it was mistaken for a spam account, Chris wrote:

If you think there are safer or better places than Facebook to put “your data” on the internet, you’re also mistaken. Take a peek at Google’s TOS. In particular, read section 11, where you hand over all rights to “your” content to them (except basic copyright, which you automatically have any time you produce an original work and put your name on it). You’re basically giving Google a free license to use your content — even for their own commercial gain!

For your reading ease, here’s the part of Google’s TOS in particular that Chris was referencing:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence [sic] to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

(Yes, Google’s TOS agreement does indeed include a misspelling of the word license.)

Chris goes on to point out that this is because Google intends to parse the content and make it available to advertisers so that they’ll know what advertisements to display to you.  The exact section of Google’s TOS doesn’t indicate that you lose any rights over the content that you enter.  You still retain a irrevocable license over it.  But it is clear that Google claims a right to reuse it as they need, and to transfer that right to anyone else.

This brings up an interesting scenario, although probably somewhat unlikely.  Imagine if you posted some great ideas about a product you were building on Google Docs, and you had no intention of disclosing this information with any of your competitors because it was so fantastic.  What would happen if Google either purposefully or accidentally stole that very idea and started building a competing site?  This gets into a legal area that I’m totally unfamiliar with, but would love to find an IP lawyer who might be able to work out the possibilities.  It would seem, though, that Google could make claim that the work you posted was prior art, making any claim to a patent you might have (or be in the process of filing) void and null.

I’m no fan of software patents, though, but I am curious what might happen.

Oh, and remember that Google promised if they do use your ideas, you’ll at least get a shout-out on their blog.

Imagine, for example, if instead of a lot of political posturing and politeness, my vendor just told me straight up that my ideas were dumb and suggested better ones instead.  It’d take bravery on the part of the vendor to tell me the truth, and maturity on my part to not be insulted and dismiss the critical feedback.

Am I wrong to want the world to change?  I’m probably just being too much of an idealist. 

The reality is that these cases highlight the flaw in the default privacy level set by social networking sites today – especially Twitter, where it seems like most people don’t realize that anyone can view your posts unless you lock it down, and that if your friends don’t also lock their feeds down, their replies to you would be visible to the world.

I do believe, though, that operational transparency in the enterprise is a great way to give employees the opportunity to serendipitously discovery the information that might make the deal, save the day or otherwise make the company successful. (I love that phrase, so I’ll repeat it: “serendipitous discovery”.)

So while social transparency on a very personal level is probably going too far, there is a benefit to be had by keeping your co-workers in the loop on what you’re busy working on.

Come to think of it, the one person who comes to mind who tends to be very transparent and open about himself is Howard Stern.  I’m not so sure that’s worked out in his favor over the long run.  He’s famous, but it seems like it’s taken a pretty hard toll on his personal life.

MySpace is now following Facebook’s example, and has blocked access from Power.com for almost the exact same reasons.

Power.com failed to do a few key things that would’ve saved themselves from this embarrassing situation, both technical and non-technical:

• First, Power.com really should’ve engaged with the social networking sites they wanted to support as business partners first, rather than trying to go the renegade route and writing their own interfaces.
• Assuming that worked, they should’ve worked with those sites to come up with solutions for single sign-on rather than storing user credentials in their own database – storing the user credentials puts undue responsibility on Power.com to keep additional sensitive data secured.
• If the partnering approach didn’t work, and companies like Facebook ignored Power.com’s requests, Power.com could’ve used the opportunity as a way to promote the idea of the "openness of social networks" and pointed out how companies want to monopolize your social data, etc.  Instead they’re now going to need to fight the possible misconception that they are just a rogue site that shouldn’t be trusted with user credentials.

As someone that uses a lot of emerging social networking sites, I would love to have something that gives me a single dashboard to all of them.  So I would like to see the idea of Power.com succeed.  But having them be an aggregator means they must be trusted to perform that function securely.

Amongst them:  it costs money to transfer existing purchases to DRM-free tracks, you can’t choose to upgrade just a part of your current iTunes collection – it’s all or nothing.  But perhaps the most distressing part of the DRM-free iTunes tracks still contain personal information about yourself, namely the email address that you use with iTunes.

I’m not sure how to feel about this.  I still believe that Apple’s move was largely one of fashion: DRM is un-cool, and Apple is all about selling hip consumer products.  I also believe that Apple was trying to improve the experience for users, which seems to be a part of their core beliefs as a company.  But I’m not sure what Apple’s aim is by including the email address in their iTunes tracks.  This appears to be a left-over piece of tracking information that has been noticed since 2007.  I suspect that the goal of including the email address in the iTunes track is to identify if you’re a repeat broad-sharing offender: someone who buys tracks from iTunes and then shares them frequently with others.  But what happens if your laptop gets stolen, or if someone you know and share files with gets their data taken from them?  I wonder how Apple might approach situations like that.

In a way, it seems like Apple has potentially gone further in transferring the responsibility of preventing file sharing from themselves to the consumer.  I’m not sure how that will play out with consumers if that turns out to be accurate.

[More iTunes details at CNET News]

As many critics have pointed out, this may actually be worse than being a defendant in a lawsuit, since in a court of law you are innocent until proven guilty.  With the new system, the RIAA doesn’t need to produce any evidence, and your ISP will likely comply with their request to avoid any legal shenanigans.

Meanwhile, in Australia (where they are still planning to ban the entire Internet, more or less), trials of the effectiveness of the Internet filters are underway, with Australia’s Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy indicating that BitTorrent and peer-to-peer traffic would also be entirely blocked by the new filter. (Maybe he read about the Australian duo that shared over 10,000 terabytes of movies?)

While it’s undeniably likely that the mass majority of traffic on the Internet today is BitTorrent and P2P traffic, it’s already been proven in the US that tools like Sandvine (which Comcast was using much to the annoyance of their customers) manage to block out lots of other types of traffic beyond just BitTorrent,  including Skype and IPTV.  In addition, it’s impossible to tell legitimate sharing of content, such as the sharing of various Linux distributions and OpenOffice, from illegal file sharing of copyrighted materials.

Let’s hope that the economic conditions of 2009 ultimately lead to the end of these kinds of discussions.  It wouldn’t make any sense for Australia to continue forward with plans to install expensive filtering software and equipment, and to maintain it, given the current global economic situation.  In the same regard, it’s unlikely that the RIAA will continue to have the economic influence necessary to persuade ISPs to annoy their customers with guilty-until-proven-innocent warning messages and potential blacklisting.  What ISP would want to turn away a paying customer?

Loopt

Loopt, as with Loki and Yahoo’s FireEagle service, are all in the same category of sites that I feel actually go a little too far in terms of transparency, into that highly subjective realm of “TMI”.

Who are these people that need to know where I am at all times?  Yes, I use Twitter, and sometimes I share with my friends where I’m heading or where I am at, but it’s selective, and I don’t need to give them exact the geo-location.  I would certainly never Tweet “In the bathroom, GPS location: 37.0625,-95.677068.”  I know that the services let you specify how exact you want to be (ranging from just displaying what city you are in to displaying your exact position), but I still don’t quite understand when or why I would want to broadcast my location to everyone all the time.  It seems like something I would do so selectively that Twitter could do the job nicely without giving away more than I am comfortable with.

Am I crazy?

When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.

It probably didn’t include anything that we’d all suspect (like campaign staffers exchanging emails about Palin’s $150,000+ shopping spree), but it may offer insight into the final moments of the campaign.

It is rather ironic that they’d forget to wipe the device clean, given that a McCain’s advisor claimed McCain was responsible for inventing the BlackBerry.

Read the full article at MyFox Washington DC.

Of the companies surveyed, of course the majority of the blame was laid upon the hip youngsters using Facebook:

"Their wide-ranging use of the Internet can expose the company to malicious software attacks," said Mike Ferron-Jones, who directs an Intel program that monitors new computing trends. "This is a big deal now, and it’s going to get bigger as more Gen Yers come into the workforce."

Damn those kids and their crazy whatzit-doodad networking sites.  Of course, no where in the article did it bother to mention that email phishing (identity theft scams) and spam are far more of a real threat at this point than Facebook or MySpace-spread viruses, despite the recent news of the koobface virus that was spreading through Facebook video posts. 

According to Symantec MessageLabs, roughly 70% of all worldwide email traffic in June, 2008 was spam, with between one and two emails in every 280 being viruses or phishing attempts.  Furthermore,  since 2007, CxO positions are increasingly becoming the target of scam and virus attacks.  But despite the relatively low risk presented, one commenter from made the claim that Facebook served no business purpose whatsoever and should rightfully be banned:

I know hundreds of engineers in [Silicon Valley] goofing off at social sites for hours during the work day. And more people are getting viruses. A well run companies [sic] would have blocked all but the business related sites. Facebook and Myspace [sic] certainly should be blocked.

It simply doesn’t add up.  Facebook and MySpace usage represents a drop in the bucket compared to the frequent and varied threats that email presents.  But like email, social networking sites are a form of communication that can and often does include business-networking.  Despite the fact that employees spend time today reading through personal emails from their friends and shuffling through spam and virus emails, no one would dare suggest blocking access to email at work.

How will this fare for Facebook’s effort to spread the gospel of Facebook Connect?  Imagine, for example, if Salesforce.com suddenly said they were supporting Facebook Connect as a method of authentication?

The answer: it won’t affect them at all.  IT will need to play catch-up, or else risk becoming (more of) a dinosaur (than they already are today).

Despite some (perhaps irrelevant) fears that hordes of Facebook users will be converted into mindless zombies wasting away company time and exposing them to data-loss related atrocities, corporate IT will have to respond with new and advanced security tools to limit company data exposure, while at the same time allowing their employees to communicate with the rest of the world. 

For every employee who spends time updating their status on Facebook, I know another five who use it as a way to network with people that either help them get their job done faster (by sharing development tips, or links to interesting tech news articles), or help them sell products (by connecting them with new sales prospects).

All too often I have seen IT organizations knee-jerk in response to one or two stories that make their way around the office, especially when it comes to things that they may not fully understand yet.  The result is always the same, although it is nearly impossible to quantify: 1.) the users find ways around the blocks, 2.) the users suffer and lose contact with key data or sales prospects. 

Blocking communication, whether it be access to instant messaging services or social networking sites, is equivalent to blocking access to email or the telephone.  IT cannot afford to do it for long, if at all, or else risk appearing out of touch with the way the world really works. 

The other real world risk that wasn’t mentioned once in the article is actually the risk of corporate IT departments losing their relevance in an ever-accelerating fast-paced world.  Inflexibility and a “block it all, consequences be damned” mentality will ultimately lead to a more speedy shift to corporate adoption of SaaS and cloud computing alternatives, perhaps diminishing IT’s role in the corporate environment permanently.

But now it’s become commonplace for the press to search and shuffle through social networking sites and publish details about a person found on places like MySpace or Facebook, without even referencing in the news article what MySpace or Facebook is.

Case in point: the recent story of a married couple from Tracy, California accused of holding a 17 year old boy hostage in their home.  In the article published in the San Francisco Chronicle, towards the bottom of the article, was a quote from the home page of the wife of the accused couple:

On her MySpace page, Lau said her four children were ages 1 to 9. She described herself as a stay-at-home mother, a Daisy Girl Scouts leader and die-hard Oakland Raiders fan who is "happily married to a man who I love to death."

Schumacher, she wrote, "is my best friend and a wonderful father to our four kids and I wouldn’t trade him for anything in this world."

Is that type of information really relevant to the overall story?  Perhaps.  But is it true?  Neither the press or we could possibly know for sure.

Another more high-profile instance of the press looking at MySpace pages was when the story about Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol, getting engaged to the father of her baby, Levi Johnston.

Without questioning whether or not the page was legitimately owned by Johnston himself, the press repeatedly used quotes from what they believed was his MySpace page, including all the gory and embarrassing details that he had supposedly posted about himself.  In later interviews with Johnston, he claimed the page was generated by his friends at school, which whether you believe it or not, is at least a plausible story.

There are a lot of possible inferences to be made by these cases.  It could be argued that the press is relying too strongly on services that anyone could use to create bogus user profiles.  On the other hand, it shows a need for better tools for individuals to sign and own their user profiles with a kind of digital signature that proves its their own.  And finally, and really I think this is the most important one: don’t leave your profile public if you ever think you might end up being investigated by the press, especially if there are things on your profile that you would be embarrassed for the world to see. (You know, like that picture of you dressed up as a pirate holding that light beer in your hand with your arm around an anonymous stripper…)