Thursday, October 1, 2009

What would you do if...

Your service provider of a collaborative nature decided to lock you out or disable your account...permanently.

What about your data, your emails, your photos, RFP's, lists or whatever you have stored there?

Someone on Twitter that I follow was told by Facebook they will be shut out of Facebook.

So what does this person potentially lose that is so important to him?

This is just some of what he stands to lose from this account which he has had for over 2 years:

* Thousands of personal correspondence messages in his inbox
* Thousands of his posts throughout Facebook
* Control of approximately 40 groups and pages with hundreds of thousands of combined members
* Membership of over 200 other groups and pages
* 30 photo albums containing hundreds of images
* Nearly 4,000 friends acquired over the years, due to his hard work


Some of this may not be of interest, but how would your customers feel if they were locked out of Gmail or any other service in the Cloud because the company went under or hey opted to lock you out.

Who owns your data?
What choice do you have?
Who do you complain to?
Is there damages to sue for?
Is a social network a data centric network?
If so, how do you protect your data and back it up?

Something to think about before you go storing your data all over the place.

2 comments:

  1. So what was Facebook's reason for shutting down his account?
    The pictures should not be a big issue. When you upload pictures to Facebook, Myspace and similar communities, the picture get converted/resized anyway. Only a fool would not keep a local copy inthe original format/size. Even for photos uploaded from a phone to Facebook, you have the pictures in the phone and transfer them to your computer on a regular basis. Right?
    All the mail is a different issue. But if it is business crucial mail (though how Facebook could be considered "business critical" I don't really understand), perhaps a real mail service with support for POP/IMAP should been used instead, or his own mail server.
    Is he some kind of marketer? 4000 friends, all the groups he control, etc indicate that he is not just there to connect with old classmates, ex-coworkers and real-life friends, like I imagine Facebook is intended to be used...

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  2. It was a mix of politics, religion and perhaps spamming on his part given all the groups.
    Don't know all the details but was interested in the process and thoughts of how it could affect a person or their business potentially.
    Especially if they were a virtual business so to speak.

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