Attention data is an entirely different species to user-created content. One is owned by service providers, the other is owned by users.
Some of the posts about data portability have strayed from talking about user-created content, the central pillar of Web 2.0. Now they’re talking about attention data, and some people are claiming that users have the right to control access to their attention data. This all pollutes the question of whether “data portability” is good.
User-created content includes photos and blog entries. It was created by the user, and the right to publish, export or retract that content should remain with the user. You should have every right in the world to revoke Facebook’s licence to store it. It is unfortunate when opportunistic “terms of service” steal this copyright from you.
Attention data, on the other hand, was created by the service provider. It is just a log file, created by Facebook/Amazon/shops/banks. It is equivalent to the file notes that financial institutions keep on each customer’s file. It is equivalent to the emails that sales staff in business-to-business companies send to each other internally.
It is data about you, but it is not data that you created. It’s not your property. So what if it’s based on observing you?
The attention data is rightfully owned by the business that put the effort into generating it. Thus you have no right to tell Facebook/Amazon/etc that they can’t have it any more. You also can’t instruct them to disclose it to a third party.
I think data portability, especially in the sense that dataportability.org use it, is about freeing user-created content from service provider lock-in.
So implement data portability and set user-created content free. Everyone benefits from data portability.
