Interoperability is better for companies, particularly small ones. But the idea here is to help people prevent companies from accessing their data willy nilly. I'd think the goal would be to decrease the number of access points and to require that strict, explicit, legally binding, criminally enforceable, consent be given for every access to a user's data.
If you want to help smaller companies compete, that's a different discussion that can be had. But securing the data of users and providing a great deal more privacy than user's have right now really is a completely reasonable effort in its own right. In fact, I would think for the vast majority of users, the effort to ensure security and privacy should probably take precedence over providing more companies potential access to their data.
Facebook and Google can implement a 500-page law.
A startup cannot.
So I think it's important to keep "How are we encouraging competition in the marketplace?" in mind as these proposals go through.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but letting marketplace needs influence who gets access to a user's data is how we got to this point in the first place. It's a separate discussion, and it needs to be kept separate. Besides, whatever people come up with in that regard, the commercial entities that want access to users' data can really have no reasonable objection to obtaining strict, explicit consent to access that data. With the concomitant legally binding and criminally enforceable rules attached.
Competition in the marketplace is good, but people are a society's priority. We can't lower the barriers to access on a user's private data in the name of, "this is good for business."
That's a reasonable position to take in the two joint discussions, but that's not "keeping the discussions separate", that's defining your priority and optimizing for it at the expense of other concerns. Dismissing those concerns because they are not important enough is fine, dismissing them as if they didn't belong to the discussion is dishonest.
I contest that the discussions are separable at all. The same regulation can be very good disregarding its effect as a barrier to entry, and very bad not disregarding it. Whether or not any particular regulation is good on net depends on pros and cons analysis that actually takes all relevant cons into account.
I'm okay with that. I worked on so many small e-commerce sites early in my career that just had a "CC" column in their user database, and it was all so sloppy and horrible. None of these would have been a big enough target for serious hacking, but also the security was never so good that an amateur couldn't walk off with 1,000 cards.
Now, payments are all handled by people who treat that data much more seriously. I certainly trust Stripe or Shopify over random web dev X.
If personal data starts being treated with that kind of care -- and the interoperability and exporting is also important -- I think that's only a good thing, even if it means that Google and facebook get a head start on that.
Just because a social network were build on open standards doesnt automatically invalidate a persons/platforms ability to permission their data.
It seems to me like there are two important issues currently. There's access to data, but there's also how influence works and who controls that. Right now, social media companies decide what rises to the top of your feed.
The current situation is that if you want to be part of the Facebook community (for lack of a better word), you need to let Facebook decide how you see that data. I could see an argument that some kind of federated system might allow different lenses where you could still communicate in a social media way but different things could rise to the top.
Anyway, the point is these two concerns seem to be at odds with each other. If you don't want one party to have the power they get from being the only party in charge of processing the data, then you need multiple parties to have access to the data.
The user being in control of access to his/her own data is not a concept that should frighten any legitimate business people. But businesses being in charge of access to a user's data is absolutely a concept that should frighten users. The power of determining access has to be shifted back to the user where it belongs. If some businesses that specialize in "data brokering" are harmed because users are suddenly able to choose to disallow them access, so be it.
Again, allowing businesses to influence and determine who gets to access a user's data is literally the reason we're in this predicament in the first place. Solve that stuff separately if you want, but under no circumstances can end runs around the user's ownership of their data be allowed.
It'd be great. But at the same time, interoperability brought us Cambridge Analytica scandal. I don't know who social networks could be interoperable without data leaks.
The actual coherent arguments are a) people didnt know what information they were sharing b) didnt understand how that data could be aggregated c) what the share data with a vendor button did d) should be trusted to wield this kind of power e) that entities should have been able to aggregate data like that without arousing suspicion. f) who is even responsible for this error in judgement (data sharers or friends, or facebook or ca)
The data leak here was people pressing "give away my friends data." Facebook designed the system that allowed it, hosted the data collector, incentivizing the bad actors to build their collection quizs and was responsible for communication of how the permissions system worked, but the data leaking itself was the sum of millions of people being careless with what their friends data. Facebook itself didnt directly leak the data. This was an aggregate human misbehavior.
E.g. You could export edges of the graph as well, but in encrypted form. Only when the owner joins and supplies the decryption key do they become usable and valid
Global network effects require consolidation. But there are many local network effects that add value with less scale.
In the real world, these local networks emerge as friend circles, interest groups, block associations, companies and industry networks. These local networks are either subsets of or correlated with the global network. But they produce value relatively independently of it.
Starting such a social media company today is hard because surviving amidst Facebook is hard. (See Snapchat, which could be considered, at its start, a local network of a certain age group.) Portability lowers this barrier for new entrants.
If I'm on facebook and want to export all my comments, that would require exporting all the status updates of the people who's posts I've commented on, which then also includes those contacts, too.
There's no such thing as exporting a single node in a network, you need the entire network.
I think the a Web itself already has had a 'network effect' larger than that of Facebook or any individual subnetwork.
What does this mean?
I appreciate the theory of your approach and how it can be used, and while it does directly respond to the immediate statement I made, I don't think it realistically captures how my statement applies to the broader context, when and if this law becomes implemented.
The bill [1] is ambiguous on the definition of user data (§ 2(9)). There is latitude with this definition, from rich portability (as you describe) to bare-bones portability (simply metadata, e.g. X commented on Y's post on such and such data).
> There's no such thing as exporting a single node in a network, you need the entire network
Graphs are divisible. My export need not contain every user in Kazakhstan's data.
A bill written by a bunch of clueless lawmakers to legislate technology - there couldn’t possibly be any unintended consequences.
This has been Silicon Valley's party line for why we can't be regulated by governments, and should instead be left to self regulate. While I agree with that for start-ups, it's patently failed with Big Tech.
Now freelancers in other industries who don’t want to be employees are having to jump through hoops.
I agree, it's a mess. But the solution isn't to bar all regulation ex ante as illegitimate.
I might have a photo of me on my Facebook profile. Does a friend of mine get to take that photo with them if they migrate to Gab?
I would regard that as a breach of my rights.
I'm not saying these aren't answerable questions, but I'm very skeptical that the answer is so obvious and non-controversial that we should legally enforce it against all social media platforms.
But to add my thoughts to your question: I have a photo, I uploaded it to my account, it's my 'data' and I've simply shared it with you (or made it public) such that it is displayed to you. That doesn't make it your data, meaning you don't get it in an export dump. Perhaps you have a client that makes copies of published posts from your network, but exporting those things you consumed (which are not yours, to which you do not have a 'license') should not be the intent of this export functionality.
Additionally, there is a difference between content published and any content commented on/interacted with.
I think most people just care about being able to export their “posts”