Web Apps - IP and Privacy

At FOWA, the speakers talked about Ruby on Rails; inter-op; open social; cloud computing; Google Gears and Amazon S3. They emphasized API's and keeping it simple. Leah Culver spoke about API's consuming data and API's to view the mashed up data. But the one thing missing in all this, was the IP.

I don't mean internet protocol either. I mean the Intellectual Property. Who's data is it? When you sign up for a social networking site and upload (or give access) to your address book, usually the site spams your whole book with some generic message. Not only do you look like a jerk, but now your address book is inside another website database. Who owns it?

When Marta from Organic was telling me about the type of data available on Twitter's system about all the conversations going on, I was shocked that this data was stored. (First for privacy reasons, but secondly that's a LOT of data!) The Marta tells me she would like to buy a data stream. Now that's when it gets scary.

One of the issues I have with sites like Jigsaw is that my address book shouldn't be available to the general public. The rolodex has historically been a person's one asset that they would try to take home when leaving a job. Back then, it was a physical thing. Today, think about all the data on your company phone, your company laptop, your corporate Exchange server!! If you get canned (and it happens more and more every day) how do you get at that data? If the device fails, which is likely to happen also, have you backed up any of the info?

One way to sell backup services is Insurance and Peace of Mind, but not many people I know use backup. Without film negatives today, what happens if your photo-sharing site is sold or closes and/or your company laptop is taken or your home PC hard drive fails? We are in the middle of a conversion from a paper office and home to an electronic office. These issues will need to be confronted.