Scoble broke the law by sharing our personal data with Plaxo.

Was that really so hard?

Now, I don’t know if that accusation true, but that I think is the accusation they are trying to make. If Dennis and Thomas do want to argue that then it should be a foundation of legal precedence — how plain Dennis finds the English isn’t how any of the legal work as far as I’m aware, nor does it respect the complexity of electronic data storage.

Still, I don’t find that is interesting as to whether Scoble broke our trust, which I hoped to challenge in my original article . It seems far fewer would argue that he had broke our trust if he had used a tool that didn’t provide the data to another service, in this case Plaxo.

In the process, I’ve demonstrated why a conversational approach isn’t appropriate for an accusation of legality

For the people that suggest that Facebook‘s Terms of Service describe either the legal or social contract, get your heads out of the sand! Terms of Services are clubs wielded by poor designs or when polite requests fail. The experience of your service is your tool for describing the contract.

I’m really excited to see what comes from the work of the wonderful people participating in DataPortability — the group includes a lot of people I greatly admire: Robert Scoble, Brad Fitzpatrick, Scott Kveton, Marc Canter, Dries Buytaert, Kristopher Tate, Blaine Cook, Chris Messina, and so many other appropriately experienced people considering these challenges.