flickr hiccups

So I got this message the other day when I was working on flickr and just like that I had no access to my photographs.

I’ve had similar experiences with Yahoo! Mail, Facebook and twitter.

This is obviously a challenge and freemium services should be held more accountable for down-time.

Total loss of [Personal] data is completely unacceptable.

But there’s more than that, I think, when we talk about [Personal] data (remember that [Personal] data is data we own or create, particularly data about ourselves).

Using [Personal] Cloud-based services is to build a home on cldwrld and then furnish it with our belongings.

Being denied access to this data is as though, living at home, we can no longer walk into the study to view our family photographs or read the books we bought or even gain access to our financial records.

In a funny article on internet evolution in May of last year Nicole Ferraro wrote about SNAD (Social Network Anxiety Disorder) and “Internet Addiction Disorder” is hotly debated on Wikipedia.

But an increase in anxiety caused by a fear that any random time access to our [Personal] data might be withheld is not being discussed (as far as I can see).

But there’s even more to it than that I think. In April 2009, The New York Times reported that:

“In what the French government denounced as a “sad comedy,” lawmakers on Thursday rejected President Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to bolster the movie and music industries by cutting off the Internet connections of persistent copyright pirates.”

(I would give you the link to the original article but the Times has cut-off direct linking to their archive – you have to go through a primary search at the NYT site, thus denying advertisers eyeballs if people don’t bother to follow through, or potential linkers do what I just did. This seems strange. But what do I know? If you want to find the original article look for “France Rejects Plan to Curb Internet Piracy” by going to the NYT site, putting the title of the article into the Search box, clicking Search and then, when the results come up, changing the Search criterion to Past 12 Months and then clicking Search again. Don’t forget to study all the advertising. Good luck. By the way I won’t be offering all these instructions again.)

Well, that’s interesting. The idea of “cutting off Internet connections” for “wrong-doers” is now on the table. And what would the unkindest cut of all be? Banning people from social networks. What does that amount to? Exile from a digital country. Which brings in all the issues surrounding exile into the digital realm.

Once again the need for a digital world foundation or “cldwrld foundation”- which I wrote about in June – comes to the fore. Because we need to get ahead of this issue, to start thinking about it before the Real World forces it on us in fits and starts.

update: added reference to T-Mobile data loss.

Note to subscribers: I’ve added a new item in the navigation bar, “cldwrld,” to act as a quick introduction to the blog.