I’m not sure that trust is the only issue here. Sure people are going to try to exploit any info that comes their way to their own ends. Just as true for an overheard conversation at starbucks as it is for an excel file.

My ’so what’ about data portability is this: if everything in your computer just follows you around, how is that at all useful in real life? There are isolated instances where say knowing your daily schedule (which you can write down anyway) transparently could be great, but being able to get at aunt dawn’s favorite puppy picture while waiting to cross the street seems a bit frivolous to living a human life. Call me old fashioned, but I think we need to have knowledge and wisdom portability, not just data. A deluge of your own ones and zeros doesn’t make it pragmatic.

By Anthony on Jan 9, 2008

You know I say about data portability? SIOOMA!

By Thomas Han on Jan 9, 2008

The people who care most about data portability are Silicon Valley techno-junkies who use a dozen different Web 2.0 services. Joe and Jane Sixpack don’t give a damn about this stuff.

By lux on Jan 9, 2008

Is there also brain portability?
Seriously, I’d be interested in that.

By Livia on Jan 9, 2008

couldn’t we use the .csv files to build something decentral and replace ‘them’ by ‘us’?

By kosmar on Jan 9, 2008

This is what facebook has done to us. Between friend feeds, beacon, and scoblescrapegate we now have this completely unfounded and rediculous data hyper-sensitivity. No one cared until Scrapegate and the hypesphere made people think they should care. Here’s the bottom line: YOUR DATA IS NOT SECURE, EVER, ANYTIME, ANYWHERE ONLINE.

It has never been any other way.

Now, here is the REAL question: WHAT IS DATA?

At work, data could be everything from a database of products to a list of 1,000 customer credit card numbers. But that’s not the data we are talking about is it?

In our personal lives data could be a list of booty call phone numbers, a list of medications, or even our home address. But that’s not the data we are talking about either, is it?

Aren’t we just pretty much talking about all the trivial “data” we make public in our socnet profiles?

How “secure” does this data need to be?

How “portable” does this data need to be?

How “cool” am I for wasting even more time on this fucking blog when I should be working?

Fuck you Loren, it’s like you are stealing my life from me. I was fine just getting work done until I saw this damn post and now I’m commenting.

By Bruce Prokopets on Jan 9, 2008

This good news that the industry is trying to work together. So the technology escalator has moved on 12 months and openid is now a base level. BUT it still has to be implemented. Kevin Rose promised it 12 months ago for digg and nothing yet! Microsoft has joined many industry forums in the past and never done anything after.

And yet I think the battle ground is not over identity (openid), authorisation (oauth will be the standard for 2008 to get adopted by Google, Amazon, Flickr) but the battle is for your attention.

The commercial game is for advertising dollars based on your attention. e.g FB Beacon

So the real question is even if you can move your identity and social graph, who will you trust to store your identity (FB, plaxo, google) and will your friends be there?

And will you give that trusted provider your attention for free so they can sell it to advertisers for their own value (FB Beacon, Google Trends) or will you eventually realise that your attention is the key value part of your privacy and it has immense value to these providers.

So openid etc are great building blocks but the game is for these providers to convince you to store your attention with them and then for them to make money from it via advertisers.

The REAL win for the dataportability group will be to get the APML standard adopted by all these vendors. Then we can trade (import/export) our attention in exchange for some value. i.e Google if I give you my attention (what I read, bought, viewed) what will you give me in return (Google points - they are coming).

By Sam on Jan 9, 2008

Loren - I always love your videos. Your cynicism and brutal honesty always helps shine a light on the real issues!

It’s not about data - it’s about people!

Look forward to more…

Chris - Co-founder/Chair DataPortability.org

By Chris Saad on Jan 9, 2008

Man, hilarious, i know its hilarious and i haven’t even watched it yet just reading ‘So your data is becoming portable, big fucking deal.’ is enough.

By Benny on Jan 9, 2008

Eh, it’s another step towards centralization. The sooner as my data is easily imported into other services, the sooner I can sync them all together and not have to check 15 sites every goddamn day.

By Coop on Jan 9, 2008

Thanks for the good post. It saves me the time of having to blog about it myself.

By S.P. Gass on Jan 9, 2008