Cottusinfo.com, Data Broker
I have been using a site for
researching people (www.cottusinfo.com)
and a quick search of the company will show a few forum posts by users that
don’t appreciate what this site is trying to accomplish. To me, these posts
raise a few questions. When you publish information about yourself can you have
an expectation of privacy (people claiming information is personal and private)?
Is that information copyright protected? If you publish facts about yourself
can you tell people they are not allowed to use those facts? Lastly, is this
company bringing accountability to people who publish information about
themselves?
Is there an
expectation of privacy?
In my opinion this question seems silly. If I post
information anywhere, for the public to read I automatically accept that
information can never be considered private. It is similar to a researcher
publishing information about a mountain. Mt. X is so many feet high, has
average temperatures of some degree and has snow on top. Lets say the publishing
researcher then wants that information to become private, yet the public
already started using the published facts in books, comparisons, weather
studies, flight charts and more. Can the researcher really have an expectation
to privacy with this information? No. Opinion is not good enough though, what
really matters is what the courts think of this topic. In a case, Romano v.
Steelcase INC., you can read about the case here http://www.nixonpeabody.com/118536. The Plaintiff had posted information to the “private”
area of social networking sites and claimed since this information was not
posted for the public then it could not be used in the case. The court ruled
against her,
“The court
held that plaintiff had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the content she
posted to Facebook and MySpace: Thus, when Plaintiff created her Facebook and
MySpace accounts, she consented to the fact that her personal information would
be shared with others, notwithstanding her privacy settings. Indeed, that is
the very nature and purpose of these social networking sites else they would
cease to exist. Since Plaintiff knew that her information may become publicly
available, she cannot now claim that she had a reasonable expectation of
privacy.”
Another story caught my attention on this topic. You can
read the story here, http://mashable.com/2012/07/03/twitter-privacy/. This case is interesting as it is in regards
to Tweets made on a popular social networking site Twitter. The judge stated,
“There is no proprietary interest in your tweets, which you have now gifted to
the world… If you post a Tweet, just like if you scream it out the window,
there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.”
From these cases we can say definitively that there can be
no expectation of privacy to information one posts to any public forum, even in
the event that information was published to a so called “private” area of a
social networking site. If Cottusinfo indeed “scrapes” its data from social
networking sites as suggested in forum posts, then that information cannot be
considered private.
Is this information
copyright protected?
The real question here is if the information on
Cottusinfo.com is facts or creative works. We can see in the case of Feist v.
Rural that facts are indeed not protected by copyright, you can read about the
case here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural.
I have put some time into trying to convince myself that the information provided
on cottusinfo.com is not facts about people, but I have been unable to develop
that argument. Facts can change, just like the content in question in the Feist
v. Rural case, phone numbers change all the time but that does not make them
any less factual. This also leads me to the convention that one has no control
over published facts about themselves. Looking back to the Mt. X example or if
you scream your name and address to the world like Tony Stark does in Iron Man
3. You cannot have the expectation that such information will not be used.
Likewise you have no control to dictate how that information is used. As Judge
Matthew Sciarrino said, it is “now gifted to the world.”
Conclusion
From my review of this topic it seems very clear that the
“angry” posts on forums about Cottusinfo.com are just that. Emotional responses
from individuals that are not getting their way, they have no real argument or
basis. Anything collected from social networking sites, as long as it is not
creative or proprietary, can be republished. It seems Cottusinfo is bringing
some accountability to a sector of the internet that desperately needs it.
People must be more diligent with how they choose to publish their life and
information. Trying to build a small business by doing things others are not is
a very big challenge, and I give Cottusinfo credit for their effort. Not
everyone will believe in what they are trying to accomplish or see the value
they may bring others, but I believe Cottusinfo is bringing value and I look
forward to more products and features from them.
Note about the author,
I am not a lawyer, just a professional that enjoys writing about my experiences and opinions. This post is an opinion piece.
Links:
http://www.cottusinfo.comhttp://www.cottusinfo.com/contact
http://www.cottusinfo.com/TermsOfUse
http://mashable.com/2012/07/03/twitter-privacy/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
http://www.nixonpeabody.com/118536
