Data Portability

Online services provide numerous incentives to use them. As compared with the traditional architecture, they can provide the following benefits:

• They are accessible from any computer (provided an Internet connection)


• Accessible through multiple formats (web browser, mobile phone, web services, etc...)


• Centralized storage of data

It is the third point in the list is likely to raise some questions. When data is stored in a central location it usually implies that it is stored outside of the immediate reach of the customer. The customer, while having access to the data through the application, does not usually have complete freedom with their data. For instance, many applications require the use of a user name and password in order to access personal information. Each application can implement this authentication differently from all the others. In this case, users of the systems are forced to maintain separate identities for each service they use. There is also the fact that some data is likely to be similar between usages of multiple applications. For social networks, profile data about the user and lists of a user’s friends is all structured very similarly between the different networks. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to join a different social networking site and not have to worry about recreating your profile data or friends list?

Enter Data Portability. As described on Wikipedia,

“DataPortability is an effort by a group of volunteers and Internet application vendors to promote the capability to control, share, and move data from one system to another. DataPortability is the idea that users should be able to move, share, and control their identity, photos, videos and all other forms of personal data.”

The DataPortability initiative has received support from many big names in the industry such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft. This initiative is driven by the need to eliminate duplication of data input between the many online services by bringing together companies and existing standards in such a way that it makes transferring data from one web service to another as painless as possible. In the example given above about handling different user accounts between services, DataPortability embraces OpenID - a decentralized authentication mechanism. Web applications which support OpenID allow users to access their account through a single set of credentials that will work for any other application which supports it as well.

The movement towards web based companies embracing this concept of allowing the users to maintain a higher level of control over their data is a good thing as far as both the consumers and the companies are concerned. Making it easy to move data from one service to another empowers the customer to easily migrate to another service if they so choose while businesses will like the ease at which the customer can move data into their systems.