See I told you that all it would take to have something to talk about this weekend was for Robert Scoble to step up and say or do something and the shit storm would indeed be sure to follow. To that end with his Plaxo/Facebook hijinks has without a doubt succeeded in keeping all kinds of conversations going.

At the root of all of them though is this concept that your data belongs to you - you own it and therefor you get to decide what to do with it. Well under normal circumstances I guess this is true as long as you stay away from social networks and things like them. Because this appears the be the big sticking point in some of the conversations going on about data ownership. People seem to think that even though they have handed over their informational soul to places like Facebook; or aggregators like Plaxo you still own your data.

Well I hate to break it to you - you don’t and there is no argument regardless of how warm and fuzzy of a Web 2.0 ethos you might be hiding behind the simple fact is that once you click that join button you have signed over the pink slip to your data to the monster known as Facebook and all its copycat stepchildren.

As BL Ochman says in a post:

The real issue is who owns your information,

Unfortunately BL, the fact is that you only own your own data up to the point where you click the Join or Submit button on any number of social networks or sites pretending to be one. Chances are if their TOS is anything like Facebook’s you have just given them your data and it no longer belongs to you. There is nothing to argue about here … the facts are the facts.

No amount of whining and crying about what they are doing with your data won’t make one iota of difference for the simple fact it is now their property and they can do whatever they like with it.

You want to fight this, you want to get them to change then the answer is quite simple don’t join the frikken things and if you already are a member then delete your membership - not that that will make one bit of difference because they already own the data you have given them up to that point.

This whole argument over who owns what data is nothing more than a mugs game because we are so pre-occupied with wanting to be a part of the cool early adopter crowd that we don’t realize until too late that we’ve sold our informational soul down the river … and for what.

Absolutely nothing that is what.

[graphic by Hugh MacLeod]

Listening to: Blondie - Beautiful: The Remix Album - Union City Blue (Diddy’s Power And Passion Mix)