[bobthepanda]

We need to blow the gates open and mandate that

1) a person has the right to export their data and receive it in a usable format 2) a person has the right to use this exported data and give it to a competitor

There is no reason why switching between, say, Spotify, Google Play Music, Apple Music, and Amazon Music should be any harder than switching a cell phone carrier. Imagine how much faster Myspace or Digg would've imploded if you could just export to a competitor with a click of a button.

[tensor]

You can switch today by just cancelling one service and signing up for another. If, however, you are suggesting that somehow your internal "profile" of likes can be easily moved, then you should first learn a little bit about how these services work.

Each uses internal IP, unique to them, that won't work with a competitors technology even if they could get access to it. And of course that ignores all the issues of trade secrets and patents that your suggestion would bring up.

You can switch cell phone carriers because of a few very simple standards. But when you do you are not taking the majority of data about you. You are only taking your number.

I also challenge that all of this data is "your data." Let's take hacker news as an example. What is "your data"? Your username, passwords, comments, those all seem pretty clear. But what about your upvotes and reports? Is that your data? An upvote involves you, but also someone else's comment or story, so it's hard to argue that it's yours alone to do with as you please. Also, what about website log data? Is that your data? Logs about web requests that you make are definitely trigger by an action of yours, but the log message itself is produced by ycombinator software, so why should you get to "own" it?

[stickfigure]

I'm pretty sympathetic to this! But for the most part you pretty much can? AFAICT Google Takeout lets you download pretty much everything.

The only big controversy I'm aware of is trying to download your social graph from Facebook. You can't even export your friends' email addresses! But... this was a big controversy a few years ago when Google was pissed that Facebook would import all your Gmail addresses but FB wouldn't let them be exported back out. It seems like the privacy advocates argued Facebook's side of this.

You can have data portability, or you can keep data private. Without crazy DRM schemes, you can't have both.