Data Portability? Let’s Get Rid of It

May 11, 2008 in Data Portability by Carsten Pötter | 3 comments

DataPortability, Data Availability, Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, DiSo,… Did I forget any initiative? Probably. Can you tell without cheating who is supporting those initiatives? Which technologies are used? Are those initiatives even trying to solve the same problem? And if so, why are they called different?

From the outset data portability wasn’t easy to explain. And not just to your average end user, by the way. It seems like every company has its own idea of what data portability is and should be about. Despite press releases filled with claims about openness, portability, and general user friendliness, companies still want to protect their most precious assets: users and their data. They might join working groups but still they rather play by their own rules. It is disappointing to say the least.

All the mentioned initiatives just lead to confusion. We can’t be sure if we mean the same thing when talking about data portability anymore. It’s probably best to abandon that term and just focus on single issues. Can I export my profile or can it just be accessed by a third party? Are open standards used or proprietary technologies? You get the picture.

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  1. Dan Donald’s avatar

    Dan Donald on May 12, 2008 at 12:58

    Hi Carsten,

    Good post.
    I think there are a hell of a lot of issues to be figured out, least of all the technical side. In many respects anyone that has any opinion on data portability needs to be throwing it out there for debate.

    Who should host any of this stuff? How can we simply tell a store they can use our likes and dislikes to recommend stuff to us? How do we know what will be shown and that our privacy is considered?

    As a web developer I’m hoping that the community as a whole can find some consensus on the ideas and through everyone’s initiative and experiments we can find something we can build sites and apps on top of or else the general public will never see any real benefit and surely that’s the point ;)
    Cheers,

    Dan

  2. Carsten Pötter’s avatar

    Carsten Pötter on May 12, 2008 at 13:28

    Dan, maybe the community (=early adopters, advocates of open technologies,…) will find consensus on technologies to be used, on privacy issues, and other related topics regarding data portability. Maybe we will even see some kind of reference implementation. But I am highly skeptical by now if any big vendor will implement it.

    Probably we will see implementations that feature small aspects of what data portability is about (and in one way or another the announcements by Facebook and MySpace indicate that) but the whole concept won’t be implemented. On the other hand there are services like Dopplr which seem to do many things right. Maybe I shouldn’t be too negative. ;)
    Though it doesn’t help if big vendors join the DataPortability.org group, publish press releases about it but don’t actively support it (I read from a Facebook manager that they will just watch it; can’t find the quote anymore, though). They hide behind that group and make every tiny step as if it was groundbreaking in any way. It just leads to confusion and false assumptions.