Fudge Sunday - Data Portability

This week we look at the world of data portability from 2005 to present. Along the way, we’ll examine how long it can take for the impact of data gravity to be felt in the consumer, commercial, and Enterprise markets.

What is data portability? Simply stated, data portability is the means of ensuring that data within a service is not prevented from extraction and reuse independently or with another service.

In practice, a simple example might be unstructured data such as a photo service allowing one to download all the individual’s photos associated with that service. In effect, an individual can extract what was placed into a service.

For a complex example, imagine a social photo sharing service. In this more complex example, data portability might mean access to similarly unstructured data such as the complete timeline of various photo artifacts in a raw format, social updates or comments relating to those artifacts, and related records relating to the metadata for those artifacts in a variety of open formats (json, html, tgz, zip, or similar archives) that are structured so as to be both accessible and more accessed independently with generally available software or for import to another service.

Let’s imagine that by 2005 you were a regular user of various online services and had a career of around 10 years. By 2005, that career might have meant around 10,000 contacts.

At that time, Plaxo was one of the more popular services for maintaining contacts online. Also, LinkedIn had emerged as a useful way to connect those contacts and the relationships that flow from them.

To be fair, one could crudely export from Plaxo to LinkedIn in 2005 — but not the other way around. Also, another challenge in these blitzscaling days was how to avoid putting anyone with a privacy concern into LinkedIn or Plaxo in the first place.

Looking back at the history of data breaches, it’s clear that these were the days when snail mail pamphlets and emails with subject lines such as “We Care About Your Privacy” detailed how financial service groups might sell or protect your privacy and personal information. So, for all the fanfare of the consumer SaaS market of the time, it wasn’t always clear how to get out of one service or if that data was truly being scrubbed in the process with a disclosed data destruction policy.

By 2010, there are clear trends emerging in the consumer web services market. Social networks spring to life, gather address books from mobile devices, and blitzscaling patterns.

By 2014, some of these blitzscaling patterns have become more obvious and dubious. The popular press takes note in the US but it will take a few more years before the dreaded term “regulation” appears on the horizon.

By 2015, there are rumblings of terms like privacy and social networks in more popular coverage. Data breaches are more commonly covered in the news as well.

As currents in the regulatory space swirl in Europe, the US and the rest of the world are still growth areas for online services. Soon, a wind of change with arrive in the form of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

By 2020, a lot has happened in the wake of GDPR. It seems as though a user of the web cannot reach a once familiar website without confirmation of cookies and agreeing to click “OK”.

In addition, within the US states explore or implement their own standards such as California Consumer Privacy Act. Keeping up becomes harder to do and, perhaps, favors the well funded and already established services.

It’s far to say that as of 2021, most services that launch will have a harder time with adopting some of these blitzscaling patterns used by the most successful established services in operation today. Indeed, regulation is a variety of moat too.

Regulatory moats might prevent new services from launching by limiting the blitzscaling patterns but the new services will launch. However, it’s less clear how mergers and acquisitions might impact the longer term viability of new services.

Oh, and in completely unrelated news…

If the consumer web user data portability was a big deal… just wait until the cloud data portability discussions around multi-cloud get into gear in the near future. Just like the silo of user data, the silo of enterprise data will be increasingly challenged as short sighted, limiting, and even anti-competitive in the coming days, weeks, months, and years.