This is likely my last post in Robert Scoble vs. Facebook saga but I think there are some subtle points being lost because of the typical blog feeding frenzy where people either choose to flame Facebook, Scoble or both. Robert Scoble has a post entitled Plaxo: the social monster? where he writes

Judi Sohn rips into the trustworthiness of both me and Plaxo for attempting to import email addresses, names, and birthdays.
...
What if I wrote down Judi’s email and then manually put it into my Outlook’s contact database. Wouldn’t that have been exactly the same thing that I tried to do with Plaxo’s script?

There are a couple of things wrong with Robert's analogy.

When I entire my personally identifiable information (PII) into Facebook, I am entering into a social contract with two entities. I am trusting Facebook to protect my data so it is safe from malicious hackers and not sell it to malicious third parties like spammers or telemarketers, in return I provide Facebook with accurate data which improves their service and the user experience of the people in my social network.  In addition, I am implicitly trusting the people in my social network not to abuse the privilege of having my personal information (e.g. by prank calling my cell phone, giving my personal details to third parties I don't trust).

There is a key difference between Robert taking my personal information I shared with him on Facebook and importing into Outlook versus importing it into Plaxo Pulse. In the former case, Robert is taking data I shared with him and viewing it in a different application. In the latter case, Robert is additionally sharing my personal details with a corporate entity; Plaxo, Inc. This is an entity that is synonymous with spam and at the time of writing this post there 209,000 hits returned for a search for "Plaxo Spam" on the Google search engine. This is the key difference between Robert importing my personal details into Outlook and importing it into Plaxo Pulse.

Lots of geeks have focused on the fact that since it was possible for Robert to manually extract this data, then then people sharing data with him shouldn't complain since they gave him access to the data. This ignores the fact that just because something is technically possible doesn't make it right even if it is legal. Just because it is technically possible for you to read the RSS feed for my blog and republish it on a splog so you can make money from AdSense ads doesn't make it right. Just because it is technically possible for you to view my photo albums on Windows Live Spaces doesn't mean I'd think it was OK to use Omar's Send to Smugmug script to republish these photos on Smugmug. Just because you have my phone number doesn't mean I think it is OK for you to share it with all your drinking buddies that want to work at Microsoft and need a recommendation. And so on...

In all of these cases, there the social contract between us would have been broken. This is independent of whether it's technically possible for you to do these things by hand without needing a script or whatever.

Taking my data and sharing it with a third party without my permission isn't cool. Just because I shared information with you doesn't give you the right to share it with others.

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