I ran across this factoid today on Twitter (H/T @marc_meyer): Australian courts have said distributing legal documents via Facebook is acceptable. I had no idea. After doing some additional research, I found that New Zealand (New Zealander? Zealandish?) and Canadian courts have also ruled that posting a document to a Facebook account is fine. (Link here.) US courts have not held that to be the case, but the idea that Facebook–a for-profit, American, public company run by non-elected employees with their own set of interests, ideas and agenda–should be placed in the position of distributing legal documents in any country just doesn’t seem smart to me.

I’m sure some would think that’s a little overboard; after all, why should Facebook be any different than UPS or Fedex or a bicycle messenger or a process server in distributing legal documents? In principle, I don’t disagree with that. But then I ran across this story that has received very little notice in the press. That’s right, Facebook was socked with a $9.5 million judgment in a class action suit for divulging user’s private information through its misguided (and now defunct) Beacon project. And these are the folks that should be handling legal documents?

This is in no way an attempt to single out Facebook or its employees as irresponsible or bad. Someone made a boneheaded decision and Facebook is being asked to pay for it. But the payment is being made through a civil proceeding, not criminal, so it means that consumers were responsible for policing this part of the social networking world. (Sadly, the affected class of consumers are getting next to nothing while class action attorneys, as is usually the case, are getting about a third of the judgment. Nice.)

I’m no fan of criminalizing everything, and I don’t know that a criminal case against Facebook would have yielded any better results or encouraged Facebook to rethink its privacy standards. These two cases simply underscore my growing feeling that it is up to consumers to be vigilant in monitoring their online presence and the data that is being used to define them more and more. I’m going to revisit this topic in my next post because the sheer volume of data that is collected, analyzed and distributed is mind boggling. Don’t worry, it’s not an anti-big-brother screed. In fact, I think consumers are now better positioned to understand and control their ‘data fates’ than ever before.

There’s a new sheriff in town and that sheriff is us…

(And before you send me an email that the correct usage is ‘we,’ don’t bother. I know. I’m just paraphrasing the famous saying. Relax, ok?)

A year plus into a recession caused by a banking near-meltdown and those charged with regulating and legislating are still looking at the issue as a regulatory or legislative problem. To the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail. Watching news on Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd’s new bill to increase Wall Street regulation reminded me of a post I wrote about a year ago regarding a Wired story. It still makes sense. Enjoy….

This story from Wired is the kind of story that could make me totally get my geek on. Unfortunately, it would seriously drive away a number of people. It’s about tagging financial data so that the reams of data churned out by public companies in their filings can be made more usable by regulators, analysts and investors. Here’s the crux:

The revolution[in financial reporting] will be powered by data, which should be unshackled from the pages of regulatory filings and made more flexible and useful. We must require public companies and all financial firms to report more granular data online—and in real time, not just quarterly—uniformly tagged and exportable into any spreadsheet, database, widget, or Web page. The era of sunlight has to give way to the era of pixelization; only when we give everyone the tools to see each point of data will the picture become clear. Just as epidemiologists crunch massive data sets to predict disease outbreaks, so will investors parse the trove of publicly available financial information to foresee the next economic disasters and opportunities.

That paragraph is pure poetry. If this is the way we’re moving in financial reporting and oversight, I’m excited. I wonder, however, if that will happen given the prevailing mood in DC. This type of attitude may lead almost inexorably to less regulatory oversight, not more. After all, if you make everything easily accessible and understandable, you get things like food labels. You get the FDA, not the FBI. That’s not what “the people,” or at least the politicians who purport to do their bidding, believe is necessary right now. They don’t want smarter ways to churn through data, they want more people at the SEC with stronger mandates to do something, anything.

Read the article. It’s actually very well written and will not make your eyes glaze. I promise.

Here’s an opening sentence that tells you everything you need to know about the piece that will follow it:

“No one can deny the Internet is a life-changer.”

In one sentence it says, “You are about to be treated to the blatherings of a person so confident in her opinion that she will start her piece by speaking for the entire human population.” It is straight out of a high school journalism class. (I wonder if she tossed out the original opening, something along the lines of “Webster’s Dictionary says “change” is….”)

It comes from this fluffy piece of opinion at US News. It is so very, very bad for so many, many reasons. It boils down to the shockingly new argument that (get ready!) the Internet and bloggers are (here it is!) destroying newspapers and respectable journalism! (Grab the smelling salts.)

Here’s a sample:

“[The Internet] is causing the demise of American journalism—as we know it or have known it for centuries. The Internet is single-handedly responsible for the death this year of the Rocky Mountain News of Denver, and the conversion to online publishing of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor.”

Get that? The Internet is single-handedly responsible. That’s right: The Internet did it. It walked up behind the Rocky Mountain News while it was straightening a picture and shot it in the back. The Rocky Mountain News never had a chance. Shame on the Internet! (I also love the line about the centuries old history of American journalism. I can picture a young Ben Franklin being taken to task by a hard-driving editor for not have two sources for his story.)

Here’s the best part:

“[Bloggers] are the technology age’s equivalent of reporters and columnists, but without the degree of separation that used to protect readers and consumers from being targeted for commercial or political purposes, that old-fashioned edited newspapers and magazines used to (and to a limited extent, still do) provide.”

and later:

“Consumers need a filter.”

Isn’t that great? Consumers need to be protected! They don’t know when they’re being manipulated. It’s up to the sage warriors of journalistic truth to protect them.

And here’s the punchline: This wonderful insight is being written in a blog! (“Only other bloggers are unreliable. Not me!”)

I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to find out it’s a parody.