The New York Times has a good story today about the near impossibility of getting your data off Facebook or closing your account.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/technology/11facebook.html?pagewanted=...

I went through this with Facebook. They claimed the data was so spread out it was not easy to remove it all. As many have heard, they won't delete your email because they think you'll want back in some day. As far as I know, after three imploring emails, my data is no longer in Facebook. In spite of the popularity and noise, Facebook is what it always was, a toy social network with a lot of momentum and nowg-here to go.

Does this have a parallel in the brick and mortar world? I've often wished my grocery store membership would give me access to the same data about me that the store has.

If this is true, does it mean that all companies that make money off of social data (e.g. Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo, this site) are then obligated to share revenue with every single user on the site? It's a good sound bite, but a lot harder to implement.

The complexity here is that the network is often the glue that provides the social data or social graph - the connections are made as you use a network to connect and interact with others. So you may own the data, sure, but it makes no sense outside of the network it resides within. Do you own the data of every connection you made - or is it owned 50-50 between you and that data subject? Or 33/33/33 to include the network that provides the connection framework?

At least the big players are now serious about implementing OpenID - I blogged on this issue February 7 at http://digitalbiographer.com/2008/02/07/google-ibm-microsoft-verisign-an...

I posted a couple points on this after and during the DataPortability meeitng last week.
http://thesocialnetworker.com/tsn/tsn.nsf/dx/what-DataPortability-offers...

and

http://thesocialnetworker.com/tsn/tsn.nsf/dx/data-ownership-offers-porta...

LET US UNDERSTAND THAT THE SOCIAL NETWORK SERVICES ARE NOT PROVIDED BY GOVERNMENTS . THESE ARE THE COMMERCIAL ORGANIZATIONS AND ARE HERE FOR BUSINESS. WE WANT TO HAVE A GREAT SERVICE, AND ALSO NOT PAY FOR IT , THEN WHY WOULD THEY PROVIDE THE SERVICE. ECOSYSTEM HAS TO SURVIVE. TOMORROW SOME ONE SHOULD ASK GOOGLE TO PAY THE SHARE OF THE AD REVENUE , AS ITS THE ONE WHO IS SEARCHING PUTTING THE EFFORT AND HAS RIGHT TO EARN OUT OF WHAT GOOGLE EARNS THROUGH HIS EFFORTS. LETS BE FAIR GUYS.