Paris and Lindsay’s private photos are all over Valleyway this morning. The photos were obtained via a Yahoo! hack that allowed Valleywag to access the girls private areas on MySpace. The folks at the Wag have used this as an opportunity to take a swipe at Data Portability, calling it wrongheaded.
Perhaps Data Portability is wrongheaded, or perhaps not. However since there are no privacy standards, legislated or fiat, there are no guarantees that can be made that your personal data, once it has migrated from one service to another, can be adequately protected by the recipient service. Moreover, who are the other parties in Paris and Lindsay’s pics, and is their privacy being violated also?
Perhaps before working on data portability, MySpace, Yahoo! et al should focus on getting privacy right.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
