Comments on: Who Controls Our Data? A Puzzle.

By: E.L.B.

E.L.B. — Thu, 31 May 2012 19:28:00 +0000

Nicely said and that is a very interesting idea.

However, how do you see the deals with users playing out?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 04:42:00 +0000

Agreed

By: David Webb

David Webb — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 04:43:00 +0000

I think Google’s taken a pretty clear (and admirable) stance here, by saying that the data is ours & we can take it out whenever we like. In fact, they have an entire website called “Google Takeout” which is dedicated to giving people an easy way to download their data. This is generally in a standard format such as JSON. While I don’t know of many other services that can interpret this data, that’s not Google’s fault. The point is, they are giving people a way to download all the info they have stored in the account. This is not an insignificant feature.

Of course, Google’s not perfect with data portability either. But they seem to be making a much more sincere effort to give users ownership of their data than most other large-scale internet companies.

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 05:33:00 +0000

check out http://diasporaproject.org/ as well

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:42:00 +0000

yes this is very interesting.

By: Joseph Smarr

Joseph Smarr — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 23:05:00 +0000

It’s definitely a challenge, but it’s ultimately what moves consumer companies to act. I think it will happen when a) users experience more pain resulting from lack of data portability, and b) they recognize it as such and get angry. I’m counting on informed, passionate journalists like you for the latter, and I do see more of the former happening naturally, e.g. SPYW and people asking why they couldn’t hook up external data sources, or Facebook shutting off Twitter’s friend-finder, and the list goes on…

By: Rollo

Rollo — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:36:00 +0000

Facebook won’t do it but there are other forces with a greater interest in and track record of openness (Google, Mozilla). We should be chipping away at them. I can’t believe that people still think it’s okay to have to go a single site to do their tweeting or photo sharing or whatever. It’s medieval.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:40:00 +0000

Interesting. Counting on consumers to drive this without a SOPA like “problem” to respond to seems unlikely…

By: Joseph Smarr

Joseph Smarr — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:24:00 +0000

John-you’re framing this problem exactly right. Users are not able to share their own data between companies that don’t have deals in place today (due to the Terms of Service attached to API usage); thus they don’t “own their own data” in any meaningful sense of the term. And, if you think about it, statistically speaking most users will have their data stored in large services, and most large services aren’t talking to much other large services (due to competition), so most users will suffer this pain for most of their data, which will increasingly be stored online behind these APIs.

I previously thought that defining the right open standards would be enough to fix this problem (e.g. if/once OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, etc. became commonplace, companies would be expected to support them and thus users could mix-and-match data and services as they saw fit), but clearly there hasn’t been enough “user demand” (or “vocal protest”) to compel companies to follow through by providing API-based access that is not just open in protocol but also non-discriminatory in where the user takes that data. It’s ironic that most APIs now use OAuth, yet the social web is not really any more open since each implementation comes with a proprietary TOS that wants to know “who’s asking?”.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 19:26:00 +0000

Thanks. Look forward to hearing more.