Let My Data Go

The current disagreement between Facebook and Google brings to light the the bigger issue of data portability which was summed up quite well by Steve GIllmor over at Techcrunch. This is a HUGE issue which needs to start being talked about outside of the tech world. I’ll try to sum up the situation in simple terms for those who don’t know about it (or as my wife would put it, not as nerdy as me).

Your personal information is spread out all over the web. Your email provider has it, as well as other sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, WSJ, NYTimes, Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc…). You might not be signed up to many sites where you have a username and password but you definitely have a few. What these sites did with your information could sometimes be ethically questionable. Some sites sold the ability to market to you (you might know it as junk mail or spam). Others were more responsible and kept the data private but might have kept your personal information on low security servers which made your information ripe for the hackers taking.

The problem here is that YOU did not control your data and how it was treated. And because every place that would need our information is now becoming digital, this lack of responsibility of managing our information is quite the cause for concern. Because of these issues, the idea of you having control over who has your personal information and what they do with it has become a popular concept called Data Portability. Here, watch a video.

This Data Portability issue is becoming a hot topic lately because of the Google-Facebook controversy. Google and Facebook both understand that users are going to start demanding their data be portable. So both companies create programs that allow you to take your information outside of their walled gardens. Regardless of whether you think it is within Facebook’s right to bar Google from using Facebook’s API, there is one thing we have to acknowledge. Neither company is providing true data portability. They’re just changing their walled gardens into walled tunnels that allow us to traffic what they feel we can share, not what we think we should share.

For too long, companies have made money off of our personal information. It’s about time companies are forced to provide good quality services to get our eyeballs/business. Feel free to support Google and Facebook’s new approach to letting data outside of their sites. But understand that this has to be just one step towards true data portability. Otherwise, our data is still held hostage by a corporation that is only interested in its own bottom line.