Who Owns Your Social Identity? 190
wjousts writes "Who actually owns your username on a website? What rights do you have to use it? An IEEE Spectrum podcast reports: 'What happens if Facebook or Twitter or, say, your blog hosting service, makes you take a different user name? Sound impossible? It's happened. Last week, a software researcher named Danah Boyd woke up to find her entire blog had disappeared, and in fact, had been renamed, because her hosting service had given her blog's name to someone else.' And as important as they are, what protects our accounts are the terms of service agreements. If you read them — and who does? — you'd learn, probably to no surprise, that they protect the provider a lot more than they protect you."
Re:money (Score:4, Informative)
Or whoever has more clout: by the time this article showed up on Slashdot, Danah Boyd had already been on the phone with Tumblr's CEO, and the account had already been reinstated.
her account has been restored (Score:4, Informative)