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Filed under: Business, Web services, Social Software, Analysis, web 2.0

Scobleized : Why Facebook will never give your data back

Sorry, ride closed

Blogger/Internet socialite Robert Scoble has a problem. In attempting to scrape his personal data from Facebook (where he *had* several thousand "friends") he angered some of Facebook's internal monitoring drones and was forcefully removed from the service. True enough, what he was doing clearly violates Facebook's terms of service which state, "Thou shall not use automated means to scrape thine own data" but, should Facebook be allowed to collect the dossier you create through using the service, and then forbid you from getting a copy?

What's really at issue here is, who owns all this crazy social data you're constantly creating? Here's a tip; it's not you. All those clickwrap agreements -- or EULAs, also known as the Terms of Service document you never read -- say that Facebook can pretty much do whatever it wants with whatever data it manages to extort extract from you.

Still happy about the amount of time you spend on the most popular social networking site in the world? Or, rather, are you getting that icky, spine crawling feeling you get when you meet someone who knows just a little too much about you?

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Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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