Lindsay Lohan

Today pictures of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are splashed across the front page of Valleywag. Nothing unusual in that, except for the fact that both Paris and Lindsay didn’t consent. These were obtained through a fairly simple hack into their MySpace profiles, via Yahoo! Notably: the hack didn’t involve any illegal passwords, just typing in URLs.

ValleyWag used this as an excuse to launch into an attack on the principles behind Data Portability as part of their coverage. We discussed it, and concluded that the model has to begin with privacy, and ensuring that privacy contracts between services are honored, before any discussion of portability.

We also talked a little about what to expect on Monday at the Apple WWDC. Aside from Steve Job’s dress, not much is known. Assuming the keynote is simulcast, we’ll move the SquawkBox until directly afterward.

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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.