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Comment by Aaronontheweb | Hacker News Reader

Do users just not get a say in where their data lives anymore or what? Why in the hell don't these companies stop freaking out over whether or not a user can port his or her data someplace else and focus on WHY a user would want to in the first place.

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They absolutely get a say - they can choose to put it on posterous, or not. They can also choose to put their data wherever they want.

What they don't get to do is force a business, unless it's part of a paid-for contract, to spend it's own resources and bandwidth to help an unrelated competitor (or anyone else).

If a user wants to move from TwitPic to Posterous and TwitPic decides to block the simplest method of doing so, they are clearly in the wrong. Do you really think Posterous-generated traffic is significant compared to their usual traffic?

That wasn't really the point I was making - do I think it's a traffic problem? Probably not.

My point was that it's not about user's "rights" about their data - none of those are really being taken away - I don't like the sense of entitlement everyone wants - it's just going to breed gigantic TOS documents and legal hassles. Twitpic may very well be making a very bad PR move here (rather than spending the money innovating and competing)

Ok, I see what you're saying. I think the expectation that users will be able to get their data back out of a service if they choose to do so is a good one, and that services that don't meet that expectation should be criticized and avoided.

It's own resources and bandwidth being a public facing RSS feed. A public data feed! If they don't want people to use their data feeds to, oh, I don't know, get data, then maybe something else is up. They are digging deep to find excuses rather than digging deep to compete. It's like if your girlfriend wants to break up and move away and asks for a ride to the bus station. Don't tell her to walk, show some class and help her go.

Spot on. If TwitPic is satisfying its users, they won't export to Posterous and stay put. This just looks bad on the part of TwitPic, as they're using legal threats to prevent users from making this choice.

Which if I was a TwitPic user might be the thing that provokes me into leaving their service.

"Oh, they're trying to crack down on users exporting their data? Better export mine now then..."

I say most TwitPic users won't care about this at all.

In the UK, the Data Protection Act does give users control of their data. Unfortunately it isn't much comfort when so much of Web 2.0 lives in the US.

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