Your Address Book Isn’t Yours

Your Address Book Isn’t Yours | PandoDaily:

When you agree to upload an address book en masse, you ignore this mish-mosh collection of agreements and are treating that data as if it’s yours, when it absolutely isn’t.

So, what do we do? We’re not going to come up with some magical replacement for good ol’ contact cards — it’s been tried before, and always falls to simplicity.

 

And if you stop to think about it, the company that understood this was Facebook, and it got roundly criticized by many in the tech elite for trying to limit people’s ability to slog this data around from service to service.

This was also something we tried to manage in Synergy in webOS, and we got roundly criticized for it, as well, because the mental model most people has is “my address book”, and it was a point of — discussion — I had with users and developers on a regular basis, because our decision to tie records to the service they came from made sense in some ways, but made it difficult to build the kind of PIM services people wanted. And part of the reason they wanted them was because those services existed long ago on Treos running webOS, and they couldn’t understand why they didn’t exist on webOS.

I’m not pretending that we got it 100% right (I don’t think we did, not close), but this is a problem that didn’t exist in the days of the Treo, where data didn’t live on 30 different services with 30 different terms and conditions.

This is a cat that needs to be belled, but I haven’t seen a mouse able to get close yet. Plaxo dealt with some of the micro issues, but not the macro challenges. The fact is, this is all brand new, and the rules of engagement (and disengagement) in a world where data is hyper distributed and not easily controlled by the owner.

And that’s my view of this — it doesn’t matter that the data lives in your address book, or on google, or iCloud or yahoo or wherever. It’s still MY data, even if I gave you permission to store a copy for your use. I should have the right to say how that’s to be used, and how it can be shared. Or whether.

Which means there needs to be some way to infinitely distribute that data while still having that data check with some authoritative point for both updates and access authorization.

You really want to be the service that controls (and monetizes) someone’s online identity? Solve that problem, and we’ll all use your service to manage how people access our personal information.

And until that happens, these fights and challenges will continue…

 

 

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