I guess not surprising that in the hysterically macho atmosphere of the show the panel struggled to articulate the cultural and psychological issues involved with changing communications and social practices, but hey ho.

I’m not wholly convinced that additional levels of permissions – your check box idea – is necessarily the way to go, although I guess it could work as a kind of Creative Commons comparative solution. You hit the nail on the head though with
“The user is the only one with a clear rational statement about their own data, and there is no good default setting”.

Thanks for the thoughtful contributions.

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Forget about loud whiny A list bloggers, remember the little people. Remember your average every day person, scale up to the people who are active on the social web, but just because people want to make money bringing the data portability conversation out of data portabilities forums doesn’t mean you have to change your position.

BTW: I’ve learned a lot about Data Portability and as you know I am continuing to think about the future. (bit further out than most people) I’ve been working on some cool stuff I plan on introducing as soon as all of the hyper hype dies down.

I am pleased to see your comment about the front end of what I call granular information ownership.

I say ‘front end’ because, as Richard Cunningham mentions, “It’s a bit all or nothing at the moment”.

What dataportability needs to incorporate on the way to data ownerships is data traceability in the hands of information producers, authors, social networkers, etc.

See:
http://pardalis.squarespace.com/blog/2008/5/12/data-portability-traceability-and-data-ownership-part-iv.html

But I like the direction you are taking. Want to hear more and am subscribing to an RSS feed from your blog today.

For instance if Alice restricts photos taken of her in the API and Bob adds an application which reads this information then the application will not be able to see pictures of Alice, even if they were taken by Charlie.

It’s a bit all or nothing at the moment but that probably makes it easier for most people.

I know this because I have already bumped into people using this feature whilst I’ve been developing friendbinder (a, not yet launched, lifestreaming site).

I’m sort of a permissions skeptic still. Are we ultimately saying “Add DRM to all data?” I just wrote up some thoughts here:

http://masonlee.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/arringtons-email-address-unusable-in-andromeda-galaxy/