Show Us the Data. (It’s Ours, After All.) | Hacker News Reader

Show Us the Data. (It’s Ours, After All.)

nytimes.com

57 pointseplanit15 comments

Sometimes I feel like the only person who doesn't think that data portability is a right. After all, when you willingly hand over your data to a service, say Facebook, you do so with the assumption that you've read their terms and conditions, which probably don't include data portability in your favor. You're exchanging your data for a service they provide--social networking--and is it really your RIGHT to force the business to build special software to then transform your data for export at your whim? Sure, it's icing on the cake if they do so, but I really feel like calling it a "right" is somehow demeaning the word. If you don't want your data stored in Google or FB's servers, just don't use them--just as if you wouldn't use them if you didn't agree with any other part of their TOS.

Take my own business, which is a social network for writers. Imagine someone coming along one day and complaining about their right to export the writing they've posted, and their personal profile, and hey, while we're at it, all of their private messages in a nice XML hierarchy, and why not an annotated list of the critiques they've written, because it's their data dammit! The cost to develop that kind of system because someone has the idea in their head that it's some kind of new-fangled digital Right-with-a-capital-R would put me behind for months. Sure I'll delete your data if you leave, but if you don't want my data stored on only my servers, then don't use my site.

Edit: This could easily be framed as a consumer-damaging argument. I suspect that many of the people who support data portability "rights" are also the sort of people who support anti-DRM campaigns (which I do too, for the record). But if you have the right to demand your data back from a company at any time, why shouldn't the company have the right to demand its own data back from YOU--music, books, movies? Remember the fuss that happened with Amazon deleted some people's purchased Kindle books--which is nothing but data a consumer has licensed--from their devices without warning?

Why would writing a simple export feature set you back months? Sounds like something that could be done by one person in an afternoon.

Data export is not that easy. I've looked into it for my own project. You have to determine which database fields you need to include in the export, what format those fields should be in, and then format of the export.

After you do all that, you need to code and test the export process. I estimated several days if not a week or two to get a workable system in place.

Edit: This is for a Rails project. If it was PHP, I wouldn't even bother thinking about it.

Not to mention the need to set up the actual page layout, markup, and related code... this is a PHP app so it's not that easy. Since I'm the only developer/everything else guy, my time has to be split between customer support, development of cashflow-generating features, and everything else needed to run a business. Maybe you're the "check out the Turing-test-passing AI I developed in a weekend" kind of programmer, but I'm not that good :)

I don't know about you, but if the requirement is simply "give me my data if I ask," I'm going to do as little as possible to get them that data, and then let them do what they wish with it from there—if it's not in a format they understand, then let them hire a third-party to write a converter; that's not my job. In this case, I think I'd just expose a single API endpoint that just spat out SQL dump statements.

> But if you have the right to demand your data back from a company at any time, why shouldn't the company have the right to demand its own data back from YOU--music, books, movies?

Remember though, exporting my data from e.g. Facebook doesn't mean that Facebook doesn't have the data anymore. The same as selling me an mp3 doesn't mean that the record label or Amazon doesn't have one less unit of inventory to sell to someone else.

You're completely right that

> if you don't want my data stored on only my servers, then don't use my site.

and your writer customer is also free to state that he will prefer sites that allow him to export his data.

Also, I'd like to know what you think about the cellphone plan example in the original example? It seems like a good example of an informed customer being able to get a better deal, but there is little incentive for the providers to supply this data. I posit that this is where it crosses the line from "nice to have" into a right.

I think the sense of "right" that people are going for here is "inalienable right"—they don't want sites to be able to have such a we-own-your-data clause in their TOS, even if the both the individual and the company agree that that's the best trade to make, because the society writing the laws knows much more about the aggregate welfare of all the individuals who have chosen to make such a trade, while the individual is only aware of the few trades they are offered in their own lifetime.

If data ownership were an inalienable right, companies that currently trade on it would be forced to find some other commodity to exploit, or to fold. That, I imagine, is how data-portability advocates would have things.

This is a really good idea, but it seems somewhat unlikely to happen in the USA - not least because of how valuable that information is. It's not just something that's used by individual companies, it's something that they can trade and sell. Giving consumers the ability to take their data from one company and give it to another (in exchange for a discount, perhaps? Someone would definitely try that) would have the potential to cut into the profits of companies, and so I would expect them to lobby against it.

Recently NSW government and DataNSW sponsored a hack day where the government provided tonnes of new data for the development of apps, including live city bus location.

This particular dataset was very popular, and many of the participants chose to spend their time building apps about buses.

The next day the state repealed access to the data with no plans for it's future availability, thereby wasting the time of the event organisers and participants.

"Show me the picture you took of me on the street. It's mine, after all." How is this transparently foolish demand different from the one in the article?

This is one reason I like Netflix. It keeps track of every movie you've watches and which you've rated. It makes me less likely to switch should another competitor come along. If my supermarket gave me access to all the junk I'd ever bought from them I'd have much less of a reason to shop around--the data is much too useful to abandon once you've built up enough if it.

Good point. Although a your grocery shopping data, for example, wouldn't be as hard to replace; shop at a new store for 2 months and you've probably purchased all the same stuff again.

If recent experiences are anything to go by (I'm thinking stuff like Startup Britain, 2010 DEA, etc.) then while this might be a nice idea in theory, by the time it becomes law it will be a depressing reminder of how badly our governement deals with anything technology-related.

Umm, please spare us the kneejerk anti-government rhetoric. Governments sometime have resounding failures and resounding successes, but it isn't the fact that a government is the agent or not.

I'm being anti- UK politicians, not anti-government (perhaps you meant them as one and the same, but if you're not from the UK, then over here "government" can refer to just the party(ies) in power).

My issue isn't with the current government, after all the DEA passed just before the last general election.

But I don't see what's wrong with having the opinion that, if a group of politicians have shown incompetance in technology issues, to not have any faith in them until such a time as they buck the trend and show that they can do good too. It's not kneejerk at all, if a company or an individual person were to screw up multiple things in one area I'd think exactly the same of them.

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