Valleywag
Rapleaf is bragging that founder Auren Hoffman is an early signer of the Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. That blustering broadside, authored by Plaxo's Joseph Smarr, Macromedia founder Marc Canter, videoblogger Robert Scoble, and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, wants to set your online profiles and friends lists, trapped on sites like Facebook, free. The central tenet of the Bill? That individual users retain "ownership of their own personal information" and that users have the "freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites." Which could come in handy as people begin to question Rapleaf's scraping of profile data from social networks — data these networks claim to own and have exclusive rights to.
Hoffman, of course, is being perfectly cycnical in claiming he's trying to protect users' interests, rather than profiting from them. Of course, it's not clear whether or not this Bill of Rights would allow Rapleaf's TrustFuse to profit from selling that individually-owned data. But that's the beauty of such lofty, high-minded Web manifestos: They count for nothing but the appearance of good intentions.
Comments
User retains ownership? Try this - go to Rapleaf and make up an email. It says "Hey, we haven't seen this email before. We'll have more information for you very soon. Either come back in an hour or click email and we'll email you when the results are ready."
Wait a second... Am I wrong or could you add someone to Rapleaf and then Rapleaf would collect all the info for you... info from social networks that you can't even find on Google...
The appearance of good intentions, from narcissistic imbeciles who think their lofty lucid-dreaming pronouncements can move mountains and develop matter from nothing -- by virtue of their royal Internet pedigree, it's bound to happen, right? And isn't this just a badly microwaved-warmed-over rehash of Captain Moonunit Steve Gillmor's, now discarded, Attention meme?
You have no privacy, get over it. People are demanding that Rapleaf prove that they don't expose email addresses or sell them. Perhaps those same people should prove that the data Rapleaf hold and show can't be found with a little detective work because it's already visible on the web.
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