Jim Morrison pronounces the opening stanza from Soft Parade in the homiletic voice of a preacher from a pulpit:

When I was back there in seminary school
There was a person there
Who put forth the proposition
That you can petition the Lord with prayer
Petition the lord with prayer
Petition the lord with prayer
You cannot petition the lord with prayer!

This lyric comes to my mind whenever I hear my fellows here in the blogosphere's virtual seminary call upon us to petition one or more of the Web's lords to give us what we want and deserve.

Among the latest are Dave Winer, Ethan Zuckerman, David Wienberger and Wendy Seltzer, all of whom in various ways call Facebook to task for taking advertising liberties with personal data we perceive as ours more than theirs.

Dave writes,

There are thorny issues here, but we want these companies to give up control of our information, and we don't want them to be overly scared of public opinion as they do it.

And this is hardly the most important giving up of control. Most important, I want them to give me control of my data.

MoveOn.org, in a move far outside their original mission, has created a petition for us to sign. The petition reads, "Facebook must respect my privacy. They should not tell my friends what I buy on other sites--or let companies use my name to endorse their products--without my explicit permission."

Dave, Scott Rafer and others rightly call on MoveOn to get back to its original mission and stay out of tech territory. But MoveOn has something right in its last four words: without my explicit permission.

And Dave nails it when he writes,

So before we overly politicize the leading edge of technology, let's get together on what actually does and doesn't serve the user's interest.

I want Netflix and Yahoo to give me an XML version of my movie ratings, for me to decide what to do with. I've been asking for this for a couple of years, I still don't have it. This is information I created. I want to keep a copy. I want to make sure that Netflix knows about all my Yahoo ratings and vice versa. I'd like to give a copy to Facebook (assuming they agree to not disclose it) and maybe to Amazon, so they can recommend products I might want to purchase (again keeping it to themselves). I want to begin a negotiation with various vendors, where I give them something of value, and they give me back something of value. Permalink to this paragraph

The leaders of Silicon Valley begrudgingly gave up their view of us as couch potatoes, now they think of us as generators of content they can put ads on (and pay us nothing). We still need to work on that respect thing.

The boldface in the first paragraph is mine. Because that's what we need to do. It's not enough to petition the likes of Facebook to give us our data. We need to create the rules by which our data can be used. When we sign on as "members" of some company's "social network", the agreements we make need to be on our terms as well as theirs. From the start.

For too long we've lived with "relationship management" that's asymmetrical and one-way. Creating the grounds for symmetrical relationships cannot be the job of Facebook, Google, Microsoft or any big company. They can't do it, and they won't. We can't petition those lords with prayer, blogs, or anything else. (Or we can, but it won't be enough.) We need to create our own new rules — ones that protect our privacy while making us better members of the social systems we create together. I say "better" because that's what's bound to happen when we cease being eyeballs and start acting like whole human beings.

This very topic, by the way, is at the heart of VRM.

A great place to talk about this whole topic, and to start doing the work Dave calls for here, is at the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, the week after next. Look forward to seeing many of ya'll there.