Is the idea that this would fuel competition by allowing people to migrate their history over to decentralized/federated alternatives?
"Under the bill the companies would be required to maintain an interface to facilitate interoperability. Or users would be allowed to choose another company to manage a user’s account settings, content, and online interactions, the statement said."
Think of this requirement less like a "Facebook export" and more like what AOL Instant Messenger was once forced to do: They were legally required to allow other messengers to communicate with AIM users.
Imagine me being able to be on Mastodon, but follow my Facebook friends and tag them and be tagged by them.
Like Net Neutrality? Ok, just make a law that all bits must be treated the same by pipe providers. Boom, you're done. But no, instead what's suggested is that the FTC start managing this stuff under Title 2. Right after that, you can bet we'll start hearing calls for a return of the Fairness Doctrine.
Want users to own their data? Great. Write a law that says that users have total control over their data, where it lives and where it goes. Furthermore they can delete or access it at any time. Also boom. It's a simple concept. But no, we're going to split the baby yet again and talk about exporting data. Next up an argument on CBP.
We seem incapable of actually fixing tech matters, instead trying to chop off some small part where we can do stuff that sounds good but has possibly severe unanticipated side-effects down the road. I don't know why that is, but I know that it makes trying to figure out which laws or policies to support quite difficult. Maybe that was the intention all along?
Note: all laws have side effects, but optimally you should set things up that the side effects are shouldered by the people involved in the activity, not the voters. You're not fixing a problem if all you're doing is setting up the next argument we're going to have. That sounds more like a recipe for endless conflict.
To some of what you talk about, there is by no means universal agreement on whether you ought to be able to purge your content from the Internet.
That might be a great way to get a law passed, but it doesn't do much in the long run towards fixing the underlying problem.
Which is arguably, at least in part, actually in opposition to this. To the degree that data can be better exported and spread around, it's more likely to be persisted than if it's locked up in a single company's system.
Disagree. Today, questions about persistence and portability are made by companies. Users have virtually no say.
Giving users say in the matter may mean some make bad portability decisions. But there is nothing fundamental to user-initiated portability that interferes with user-initiated deletion. Today, I can do neither with Facebook.
Well, that's true. Because once content by or about you is out there, neither you nor anyone else really has the power to force anyone to delete it. That's not so much a company making a decision but a collective decision that you don't generally have a "right to be forgotten."
But that's not so much individual companies making an affirmative decision to always preserve data as no one providing individuals any real rights to erase what they've made public.
If you port your data to every social network on the planet, an act tantamount to publishing, yes, your data will be public. That isn't an argument against granting users this right.
Social media companies distributed users' data when it was in said companies' interests. Letting users make that decision themselves may mean bad decisions will be made. But that's better than companies making users' decisions for them, with zero regard for what the users themselves want.
> a collective decision that you don't generally have a "right to be forgotten"
There is no right to be forgotten in America. (There can't be without gutting the First Amendment.)
There is a difference between the right to deletion and the right to be forgotten. Right to deletion is "I gave you these data, these data are mine, please delete them." Right to be forgotten means "you have these data, they concern me, please delete them".
Say you tweet something. That tweet, under current law, is Twitter's. Let's say a right to deletion is enacted. Now, you can require Twitter to delete the tweet from its records. This is great!
Now say that while the tweet was up, a newspaper quoted it. Now, when someone searches your name, that article comes up. A right to be forgotten means you can require search engines de-list that article from your search results.
Rights to deletion don't necessarily interfere with the First Amendment because they concern your first-party data. Rights to be forgotten, by dealing with third-party data, often public, published data, are more problematic.
I'm under the impression, in the USA, that I wrote the tweet, therefore I'm the copyright holder, and I've only licensed it to Twitter. Further, I'm under the impression that the smart publisher is going to reach out to me to republish my tweet (under license.) If I'm mistaken, please correct me.
Given that I created the content and I hold the copyright, I can revoke the license I gave to Twitter. However, Twitter's TOS probably requires a 'non-revocable license' and a law requiring services to offer deletion would presumably remove the ability of these companies to insist on a non-revocable license.
Personally, I'd be on the side of 'allow deletion' rather than 'right to be forgotten' but I also feel like cementing the concepts of content ownership ("no, $service, you don't own user-generated content") and licensing ("no $service, you cannot insist on a non-revocable license") would go a long want to enabling either deletion, or rights to be forgotten.
The first amendment does not talk about copyright or distinguish first with third-party data.
The Constitution talks about copyright and a series of court cases have circumscribed commercial speech within the First Amendment's projections, e.g. you can't commit fraud and call it free speech.
I don't see these as being in opposition at all.
Are they thinking in defensive terms - I mean how can this be weaponized?
That's a good question. And how would it work.
A couple cases I can see - photos and email. Export my email from gmail, import it to protonmail, delete gmail account. OK. How about incoming email though? That's not content I created or own the copyright to. What about emails I sent to people that are copy pastes of news article material or attached photos determined to be copyrighted by someone else. Perhaps these should be filtered out so it's only the user's personally created content that is downloaded. Now photos from one service to another have that same check that should be done. But the matter of comments on the photo. Some comments are responses from the photo owner. Others are comments by random people. Those comments should not be exported since they don't have the rights to transfer them. So I upload this to some other photo site and have a bunch of one sided conversations. Fair enough though I can see how that works.
Then I want to export all my conversations from Hacker News and import them to Reddit. Hacker News will give me a zipped set of xml files or perhaps a SQLite database. Then I create some custom subreddit and upload these comments there. But they'll all be one-sided conversations of course since the people I'm replying to or who reply to me can't be part of the data dump. So I've done this, but why is it necessary this be supported at all? How about reverse? I tell Hacker News, hey the law says you have to let me import my comments from reddit here. So I do that. And what is that supposed to accomplish. Not sure. Maybe people will then say hey I want to upload my photos from Instagram to the Steam Store's comments section. Or upload all my email there.
Also of interest is that every site will have to support every conceivable possible export format generated by every other site. Complex job for those of us who have struggled with similar data migration problems with a finite set of formats and possible errors in the data. And what about the data that has errors? Will the exporting company by liable for costs by the importing company due to errors in the exporting company's export job?
Also the article suggests the bill is a bit more extreme than this. The user will not actually download the data and reupload it somewhere, instead they will go to Facebook and pick "Hacker News" from a drop down menu and then Facebook will be required to send all the user's data to Hacker News automatically and Hacker News will be required to accept it and do something with it, presumably provide similar functionality that the user is accustomed to. Perhaps Hacker News will then be legally required to implement a clone of Facebook, gmail, Instagram, and every other social media site simply to be able to handle these import requests. And every other site likewise will be required to do the same.
What about illegal content and content that violates the importing services TOS? Will they be forced to accept the data and yet responsible still for hosting it even if they don't want it? Someone wants to export their homemade videos from their YouPorn account to YouTube or maybe to the comment section of the New York Times which should now support and host video. Can they refuse to interoperate under this bill mandating interoperating?
Everything should be interoperable and all formats exportable from every site and importable to every other site, automatically. Is this a sensible goal.
I have a suspicion that the senators supporting this bill really just want to be able to export their email from gmail and yahoo for free and import it to some other email service so they want to pass a law. And then they were brainstorming and someone said hey let's make this law apply to all forms of data, not just email. And they all thought that a great idea. Then the masses hear about this and think "Wow this is great, I'd love to get all my data from every site and upload it to every other site." without actually realizing that a law mandating companies support that is probably not a good idea.