Uno de Waal

Uno de Waal’s online space covering everything about web2.0, social networks and internet related developments in South Africa and how it fits in with the rest of the world.

Questions around dataportability

Uno as Identity, Social Networks, Web2.0

Apr|16|2008

I really liked the post on RWW today about dataportablity by Josh Catone. It’s something that I’m struggling to get my head around – who owns that data?

I’m a believer that while you own the data, the activity, i.e. what you did on the site and what you put on there, is partially owned by the site. Just because you uploaded a photo to Flickr, and you used all the cool nifty uploading, tagging, rotating, sorting, organizing tools that Flickr offers, you should now be able to port all of that to Facebook? Same, Facebook has friend tagging as a feature, and it’s a piece of technology that they pioneered, and now you want to take that over to Flickr?

That part doesn’t sit well with me. I feel that the services/sites have invested quite a lot of R&D time into building these features, and for you to now be able to up that data and take it somewhere else…

The example Josh used is quite a good analogy – can I take my data from Store 1 to Store 2?
Store 1 has brilliant data capturing, sorting and customer research. Store 2 is a mom and pop shop, no technology, but they can tailor a lot of niche services to you, if they can get that data. Yes, I would like that data portable, but Store 1 has heavily invested in that data, and it would not have been possible to get to that data without the infrastructure that they built.

Now, with some dataportabilty chucked in, we can quickly take the attention data from Store 1 and plug it into Store 2?

Is that attention data owned by Store 1? Yes, I believe it is. Unless they agree to making that Attention Data public, it would be a breach of service to take that data out. Unless there are laws governing it. Principle Six in New Zealand does exactly that embodies what I want to happen.
(thanks for the link Pete! )

Why do I say “Yes, I would want that”? It means that I don’t need to input that data again, and the new service would just start working automatically.

This is something I’m struggling with so far – I know it’s a good thing. But how do you keep the technologies safe that companies have invested in, and promote more research and innovation? No site would like their users to be able up and off to another site.

Should I be able to select what data I want, send that over to the new service? I believe so. oAuth is going to help me.



3 Responses

  1. Stefano

    16|Apr|2008

    Referring the the 1st half - when I spoke to Andre, he made an interesting point regarding openess of services / companies….. It’s always the small okes who want things to be open, as they have no interests to protect.

  2. Tim Shier

    16|Apr|2008

    Great post and an interesting point.

    I have longing for the day of true data portability. That said, I see a massive advantages which couples to form a potentially devastating situation.

    By allowing true data portability website will be forced to invest a great deal more in user interfaces and the overall user experience (as the barriers of entry/exit are effectively destroyed). While I think this would be great and would amount to constantly improving experiences there is of course the other side of the coin.

    Small players will have the ability to hit very niche markets and provide very specialised needs they will therefore have the ability to VERY quickly hit critical mass but the draw back is that as soon as the “big boys” see they are loosing customers to a particular service then its simply a matter of them developing that niche product which their users will simply “port” back into. While this is useful and certainly great for us users it may result in MASSES of startups going belly-up - which is terrible for the overall development of the internet.

    Very interesting discussion to be had here…

  3. Pat

    17|Apr|2008

    This will help you with your dilemma: attention data is an entirely different species to user-created content.

    User-created content was created by the user, and the right to publish, export or retract that content should remain with the user.

    Attention data, on the other hand, was created by the service provider. So what if it’s based on observing you? The attention data is rightfully owned by the business that put the effort into generating it.

    I think data portability, especially in the sense that dataportability.org use it, is about freeing user-created content from service provider lock-in.

    OAuth will only help you move your user-created content. Nobody will help you with your attention data.


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