Data Portability: Who Controls Your Social Media Data?

Who owns your social media data? Do you? Can you easily access it, and should you choose to do so, can you download all your data to back it up or to move it to another site?

As more and more of us begin to store more and more of our personal information online, the question of "data portability" is becoming increasingly important. While social media makes it incredibly easy for us to share information online, it is not always so easy for us to transfer that data to another site or service. In fact, sometimes it's impossible.

Take Facebook, for example. There is no simple method to export your Facebook data - your profile information, your status updates, your friends' contact information, your "likes" - to another site. The information you upload to Facebook, including all those photographs, are "stuck" on Facebook (unless, of course, you download them one-by-one). If you leave Facebook, your data doesn't leave with you.

The Data Portability Project is a grassroots organization that advocates for better technology tools and standards so that people's personal information can be easily moved from service to service, without privacy violations or data loss. Founded in 2007, the project brings together people from the tech industry to push for open standards, so that regardless of application or platform, data is portable. These standards include OAuth - which allows users to share their data stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their username and password - and OpenID - which is a standard for identifying and authenticating users' information.

According to the Data Portability Project, open standards across the industry would benefit users in terms of ease-of-use and privacy. "With data portability, you can bring your identity, friends, conversations, files and histories with you, without having to manually add them to each new service. Each of the services you use can draw on this information relevant to the context. As your experiences accumulate and you add or change data, this information will update on other sites and services if you permit it, without having to revisit others to re-enter it." Service providers also benefit, the project argues, as new customers can easily join services and have complete profile information at-the-ready.

While some companies have been reluctant to embrace these standards, others have tried to incorporate them. Google, for example, formed a Data Liberation Front, a project that helps make sure people retain control over the information they store via Google's products.

As the Data Liberation Front notes on its website, the onus is now on users to be responsible about the decision to store data with a particular service. It notes, "People usually don't look to see if they can get their data out of a product until they decide one day that they want to leave For this reason, we always encourage people to ask these three questions before starting to use a product that will store their data:

1. Can I get my data out at all?
2. How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?"

The Data Portability Project hopes to encourage the tech industry to shoulder more of this burden and to adopt standards so that users can fully control their personal data.