{"id":141,"date":"2008-04-20T22:09:46","date_gmt":"2008-04-21T03:09:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/?p=141"},"modified":"2008-04-20T22:09:46","modified_gmt":"2008-04-21T03:09:46","slug":"the-ethics-of-web-apps-or-ever-try-to-get-a-list-of-your-contacts-from-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2008\/the-ethics-of-web-apps-or-ever-try-to-get-a-list-of-your-contacts-from-facebook\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ethics of Web Apps, or, Ever try to get a list of your contacts from Facebook?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jagged<\/a> Even before I worked at Google, I was pretty impressed by the “don’t be evil<\/a>” motto.\u00a0 Not that I think any company is perfect or that anyone can hire only saintly employees – but it’s impressive when anyone recognizes the ethical implications for what we do as programmers and web developers.<\/p>\n

Now that I work there, I can tell you that everyone really seems to take it to heart (disclaimer:\u00a0 this is my personal blog and I am not representing my employer in any way).\u00a0 At this point, you may be asking, “programs are just lists of instructions, web sites are just products, what’s the ethical dilemma?”<\/p>\n

I’ll give you an example.<\/p>\n

I’m a big fan of Facebook, I think they’ve really done a great job building a social networking system, and it’s been very useful for keeping up with friends all over the world.\u00a0 But I also have an account at LinkedIn<\/a>, and Flickr<\/a>, and Yelp<\/a>, and an address book in Thunderbird, and another on my iPhone, and…\u00a0 you get the picture.\u00a0 So I’m trying to collect all my contacts together in one system (Gmail) so I can just import\/export to keep all these different social networking systems up to date.<\/p>\n

But Facebook doesn’t have a function to export a list of contacts and email addresses.\u00a0 What’s more, they’ve apparently actively blocked attempts by developers<\/a> to build systems to do it and disabled people’s accounts.<\/p>\n

They are, of course, not legally obligated to let you export your contacts.\u00a0 And if I were building a social networking site, it probably wouldn’t be the first feature I would implement.\u00a0 But ethically, I think, they should do so.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 We can refer to Kant’s categorical imperative<\/a> or Jesus’ golden rule:\u00a0 They should build open systems because they would like other systems to be open. <\/strong><\/p>\n

They certainly take advantage of the openness of other systems, allowing you to import contacts from Gmail.\u00a0 Google’s social networking site, Orkut, will happily export your contacts, and I don’t think that’s an accident.\u00a0 The engineers and product managers at Google make conscious choices to do the right thing.<\/p>\n

But wait…\u00a0 am I really asking them to make it easy for their users to take their data and go over to a competitor?\u00a0 Isn’t that a bad business practice?<\/p>\n

It’s possible, but beside the point.\u00a0 I’m sure you and I could think of plenty of things that are profitable but morally repugnant.\u00a0 What’s more, I don’t think it is a bad business practice at all.\u00a0 I think that the walled garden approach is a sign of desperation rather than innovation.\u00a0 Orkut is not the only one that lets you take your data with you – LinkedIn allows exports, for example.<\/p>\n

Paul Graham wrote a really interesting post<\/a> about this recently:<\/p>\n

When you’re small, you can’t bully customers, so you have to charm them. Whereas when you’re big you can maltreat them at will, and you tend to, because it’s easier than satisfying them. You grow big by being nice, but you can stay big by being mean.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you’d like to read more about this subject and see what some developers are doing to make your data more portable, check out DataPortability.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even before I worked at Google, I was pretty impressed by the “don’t be evil” motto.\u00a0 Not that I think any company is perfect or that anyone can hire only saintly employees – but it’s impressive when anyone recognizes the ethical implications for what we do as programmers and web developers. Now that I work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[249,246,65,247,224,80,245,248,195],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-categorical-imperitive","tag-data-portability","tag-ethics","tag-facebook","tag-gmail","tag-google","tag-linkedin","tag-orkut","tag-social-networking"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}