Rights to data may depend, says Bruce Schneier, on what type of data it is and who provided it. He provides a useful enumeration:
1. Service data. Service data is the data you need to give to a social networking site in order to use it. It might include your legal name, your age, and your credit card number.
2. Disclosed data. This is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on.
3. Entrusted data. This is what you post on other people’s pages. It’s basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don’t have control over the data — someone else does.
4. Incidental data. Incidental data is data the other people post about you. Again, it’s basically same same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that 1) you don’t have control over it, and 2) you didn’t create it in the first place.
5. Behavioral data. This is data that the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with.
See Schenier’s post for discussion. Via a pointer on Rob Styles’ blog, in turn via Rob’s tweet.
Have you come across other taxonomies for social networking data?
Here’s a simple but far less expressive one way to characterize data on social networks. Is it “about you” or “from you”? Either the first, the second, neither, or both. “Aboutness”, however, is ontologically challenging. Any use for this?
Collaboration/shared control isn’t considered in this taxonomy. For instance, “entrusted data” doesn’t capture the notion of “shared data” in a collaborative system such as wave, a wiki, or perhaps even email.
For behavioral data in libraries, see also “intentional data”, as used by Lorcan Dempsey, back to 2005 (and many times since) [for instance, in discussion with “emergent knowledge”]. I prefer “behavioral data” since much data about intention is by no means deliberate/intentional!
How does the stuff you type into a search engine fit into this scheme? Certainly what you search for provides clues about you, your interests, etc. Does that make it from you, about you, behavioral, or all of the above?