Cottus Info, Data Broker

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.com
http://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