DataPortability - but just whose data is being ported?

Today news broke that Facebook and Google have joined the fledgling DataPortability.org (see our original post on this whole org here).

Damn good idea to be able to get our data off Facebook - we were disabled, so that whole Social Net we built up is lost to us and its been high hassle rebuilding it.

Let us also hope it becomes a larger democratic effort (with the BBC in there I am hopeful) and not just an oligarchy.

However, we eagerly await the discussion of who owns the data on the profiles of the people in "my" social net. As the Scoble Scandal emerged, it became clear many people did not feel happy with Scoble scraping their data off one SocNet to install on another that they had not signed up with, and had no intention of doing.

Also, as Dennis Howlett points out, European Data Protection law is considerably stronger than US law, so that is going to cause some interesting issues going forward.

Also interesting is thinking through what has persuaded Facebook and Google to join all this. Three possibilities are:

(i) Join for PR benefits
(ii) Join for Observation / Influence / Obfuscation purposes
(iii) Join because they deeply believe in the future of open social network portability.

If one were cynical, one would opine for (i) and (ii) as an initial hypothesis, and watch to see what they actually do

Funnily enough though, I think option (iii) may have had some influence on the decision too, for 2 further reasons:

- Both (for different reasons) may believe they will gain more customers if they are open - as an overall market and these two in particular

- The actual monetisable value of any social network is still (provably) quite small, despite the high valuations the actual Ad revenues are still pretty low - so collaborating on the behavioural data between them may create higher value for all collaborators.

Having been on and seen a number of standards initiatives run into the sand I'd say this is one to watch, not wave the flags just yet methinks......