Why Data Portability?

@lachlanhardy has thrown down the gauntlet to us folks involved with data portability and explained that the dataportability.org site is remarkably uninformative and I agree. Here are the problems I see:

• The need for data portability is a user need for geeks to solve. The current site is too geeky and academic. Geeks are motivated by making things people need.
• The data portability mission needs to be about binding a multitude of disparate, technical standards together into a single user proposition - an idea that makes the world better. The current site is still about lots of separate ideas.

Let me have a go at describing why I am talking to everyone about data portability towards finding a call to action for this thing. I’m going to float up to a high level…
I think we need to gather people around a single problem to solve and how the internet, and how we use it, will be better if it is solved.

So, here’s the context as I see it. Increasingly, we store our digital world online instead of locally on our PCs. This is my digital world:

Explicit Data (All the stuff I chose to store)

• Email addresses/contacts: Some in Outlook, some in Facebook, some in LinkedIn, some in Gmail, some in Twitter.
• Relationships: Some in Linkedin, some in Facebook.
• Photos: Some on my hard drive, some on my phone, some on Flickr, some in Picasa web albums.
• Documents: Some on Zoho, some on Box.Net, some in Google Docs, some on my hard drive

I have to remember where everything is. It is very hard to move data between them. If I want to stop using Google for Docs or Flickr for images there is no common way to move things around. The internet companies control my stuff. Regardless of rhetoric from the likes of Google, my stuff is in the hands of others. Facebook owns my address book and the relationships between them (my ’social graph’). Period.

Implicit Data (The stuff that’s stored whether I chose to or not)

This is where it gets really interesting. What do I like? Where do I go? I’m talking about the data Google uses to show me contextual advertising, that Amazon uses to show me books I might like, that Pandora uses to play me music for my taste. This is ‘data’ as much as my address book is and Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Twitter, etc has bucket-loads of it. And I have NO CONTROL WHATSOEVER other than what they say in their privacy statements.

I want to move what these guys have collected about me somewhere else as easily as I move my photos. In fact, I want to be in control of it. I want to delete it if I need to, or remove their access.
The evolving internet is giving us incredible power to do things we were never able to do on our local PCs at a terrific price (usually free). The downside is that we have lost control of our own data - possibly the most valuable thing you own in the modern world. So, there are privacy issues there… And ethical issues… But there are also practical issues.

Here’s some things I want to be able to do.

• Synchronise my photos between Flickr and Picasa
• Copy and paste a document between Zoho and Google Docs
• Import my profile in discreet chunks to a new service that I can’t be bothered retraining to my interests as I’ve done a thousand times already
• Connect automatically to my address book and social graph when I log on to a new site
• Ban a contact across all services
• View my Facebook friends in Skype
• Save a spreadsheet to my choice of provider on the internet from within Excel

There are literally thousands of other examples. What do you want to do today but can’t because some company has your data locked up?

The efforts at dataportability.org are to evangelise different standards as a single open solution that returns the control of a user’s data to the user. We want to tear down the walls that contain our siloed data. Like the anti-DRM movement found it unacceptable that music could only be played on certain devices, we find it unacceptable that address books only ‘play’ on certain sites…

Another outcome from this kind of work is that more sites can natively interconnect without needing to formally support each other’s API. This is when we can truly begin to ‘build the web’ as well as building our own specific apps. Then we all contribute to a web that is greater than the sum of its parts, providing users with incredible power to do things they could not do before.

OK, so its massive and utopian… but that’s the kind of effort I like to be involved with.

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