The new Open Social standard was created to help share data among social networks. There are a number of networks today and more growing by the day that track every possible detail of a user. From what a user is doing at a precise moment to what their friends are doing or who their friends are.

It’s a good name for network standard: Open Social. Users of the social networks understand the information they provide is public, and that there is a potential for misuse or other types of abuse. Basically, don’t post anything you don’t want everyone to know about.

Open social opens all this social information to any person or machine that is interested in this information. If you can identify the user (by an id or name), you can gain any information available from the host in a format that is easily parseable. Instead of scraping the host, a request is made and the data is returned in a standard format. No need to pattern match for the text desired.

The thing is that users don’t have knowledge of who is scraping this information. Some websites let users know how many views their information receives, but automated retrieval doesn’t get included in this statistic.

Like all information posted on the web, once it’s published, it is very difficult to retract it. The automated services that scrap this information will be long gone and will assume this information is still public knowledge to be displayed for eternity. A user has no control of outside uses.

When automated retrieval is possible, this consumption of information can be speeded up. The information of thousands of people (through the connections each person has) is possible with a very limited number of links from the first person.