Why You Should Think Twice About Opting-In to the Delicious-AVOS Transfer | Hacker News Reader

Why You Should Think Twice About Opting-In to the Delicious-AVOS Transfer

zdnet.com

78 pointssamoa24 comments

I only thought once.

The del.icio.us API would allow them to grab pretty much all of it anyway. I've already migrated mine out to a couchdb-based clone: http://xlson.com/2011/01/13/out-off-delicious-and-into-your-...

This has the nice benefits of always being local and being impossible to take away from me. :)

(well, I did break my couchdb build with an experimental branch on an experimental OS, but I'll sort that out later)

The API does not give access to other people's accounts.

Yeah, but I don't get to decide what terms other people opt-in to either.

Cool. I made a web-based pinboard-ish clone instead. http://yukmarks.com

(Not that anyone will sign up, but if you do, it's mostly just personal tool that isn't exactly full-featured. To wit: Don't forget your password.)

It's pure Python built around Django. It's a super thin wrapper over a postgres db. It's honestly little more than a web interface for the database. If anyone wants to make their own, all the code is here:

https://github.com/mattdeboard/Yuk

Sounds like fear mongering. There aren't any terms in there that you won't find on other sites that allow users to post content. The company is protecting itself from misuse in a way that might not have been necessary when the Delicious service first launched in the early days of Web 2.0.

I don't think so. I had my flickr account deleted without warning for posting pictures of Abu ghraib abuses, and they weren't the worst pictures either.

  > The company is protecting itself from misuse

No. They are re-defining what the term 'misuse' means (from one agreement to the next). If posting 'obscene' links is not forbidden, then how is it a 'misuse' of the system?

Also, this is the same argument that gets used by large tech companies like Microsoft for building their patent portfolios. It's 'only for defense,' so long as there is no reason to use if offensively.

Would you allow the government to put CCTV cameras inside of your home so long as their promised to only use them in case someone breaks into your home (as evidence in a trial)? Once they were installed, and their 'foot is in the door,' how long do you think it will be before that usage is expanded beyond the original promise through a series a baby steps?

Overly broad legal wording as a 'defensive' move is a cancer on our society.

No, I agree with the fear-mongering. I guess the author needed to fill article space, this week.

I'm a privacy-nut type of person and I hate restrictive and absurd licenses. I'm a fan of telling the man to eat it. Note that I'm not justifying restrictive or broad legal agreements, either. I think it's stupid. I just don't think it's any more stupid than similar agreements for similar sites that provide similar services that most of you (including the author of that article) already use every day.

However, I don't see anything in the agreement that you wouldn't normally see on any other social networking site. Unlike some other online bookmarking services, Delicious is a social-networking/bookmarking service, which would explain the concern over content and age and so on. It would perturb me if I was having to agree with something like that for a service which was only me saving bookmarks with comments and tags for my own use that only I would see or access via my own account for myself, but that isn't what Delicious has turned into. Very possibly, they may have even bigger "social networking" ambitions for the service after the purchase, which may further necessitate such stringent clauses.

Besides, if one cared much about that sort of thing, chances are that they wouldn't stop using Delicious now, because they would have already stopped using Delicious when Yahoo! bought them, for similar concerns over privacy and agreements.

I don't think the author wrote the piece to fill article space because she is sitting across the dinner table from me and we've been discussing it all evening :)

The issue - which has already been reiterated above - is that the Ts & Cs that the existing service operates under are changing to a far more restricted set.

Your argument kinda meanders around being a privacy nut and sticking it the the man, then you say you are not justifying a stupid agreement then you say all agreements at all sites are stupid anyway. I've no idea what your point is, frankly.

But you do say that the new terms are totally like all other social network sites. Well the old/existing delicious is a social network (as you state) and the new terms are very much not like the old terms. Clearly not all social network terms are equal.

Besides, if one cared much about that sort of thing, chances are that they wouldn't stop using Delicious now, because they would have already stopped using Delicious when Yahoo! bought them, for similar concerns over privacy and agreements.

Except that the Ts and Cs didn't change much when Y! acquired them which is why there was no need to opt-in like there is now.

It snot changing to a more restrictive set just a more defined set of TOS terms rather than being ignorant of things in the USA such as DCMA, etc.

What in the DMCA covers offensive or obscene material? I thought that it only covered copyright.

Really, I didn't figure "I'm a stickler for privacy concerns, but this example doesn't particularly bother me since it's on par with others of its kind, especially when they may be trying to make it an even more social service than it already is" was particularly meandering. If you're baffled by the idea that I can be generally concerned with privacy and bad user agreements, but not take any special exception to this one over others, then I don't know what to tell you. Some stuff is worth losing your shit over and some isn't. This isn't.

I guess no one should bother taking any lessons away from the Facebook DMCA fiasco of the past week, then? If you don't want to lose control of your data, don't stick it into walled gardens. (Though obviously exporting delicious info is much more straightforward than disentangling one's self from Facebook.)

You cannot export your "friends" to import them in another network, that is right. Still the "download your data" function in Facebook is the best I've ever seen. Produces a zip with plain HTML, it's just so easy to navigate, review, print, copy, etc.

I find it hard to disagree, but after "mindlessly" opting in to the transfer, I was skimming the terms and saw heavy protection on the bookmarklet of all things. That little bit of javascript that pops open a window and sends the URL, selected text, and some other stuff in the query string. Why is that worth protecting? It's javascript!

I also preferred the "if you find stuff you don't like, go away" position as opposed to the "now users, don't do stuff people might find offensive" position.

They also don't seem to want me to be able to devise my own way to crawl their site, which has implications for backing up my own bookmarks if there isn't a convenient mechanism to export going forward.

While the policy change does fundamentally allow the company to determine what content to keep and to remove I'm not sure how that provides you with a valid concern about opting in your data for the transfer.

IE, if you don't opt in you're basically self censoring yourself as none of the data will get used. If you do opt in, then the majority of it may remain [or be stricken depending on the content you favored bookmarking].

Rather your statement should read "Think twice about opting-out of the delicious-avos transfer. If you opt out then NONE of your data will be kept".

The issue is control and safety. I expect my bookmarks to be complete, to not disappear silently and randomly.

I'd rather build my own little bookmarking system on a LAMP server (I will probably do that) than subject my digital life to a company that threatens to cut holes in it.

I think it's a good question to ask AVOS. It could well just be broilerplate legalese.

That said, it's quite easy to backup your Delicious links. Probably a good idea to do that regularly regardless of the terms.

sweet little command to dump your delicious bookmarks (copied/stolen from the Scrumptious setup guide):

    curl -u <user>[:<pass>] -o mine.xml https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all

That's now running hourly on my computer. I'll write myself a "loss check" too, to see if any of my "questionable" (private) bookmarks start disappearing.

unfortunately this currently returns:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> <result code="api temporarily unavailable" />

It sure seems like the new South Park episode got people to read terms and conditions ;-)

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