The last few years, people got “socialized” over the web. Someone might say that the web looks exactly like real life. You have an identity, a house full of photographs/videos/messages/books and you can share your data with your friends or new people you are looking to meet. That is definitely a good step but also causes many problems. The biggest problem of all is who holds our private data and how and when they are transfered to someone else.
The first part of the problem wouldn’t exist if the internet was a single social network. In real life though we have facebook, myspace, linkedin, and many other social networks. Each one serves it’s own purpose and most of the people need to use more than one social networks. This is the part of the problem that dataportability.org is trying to solve. Basically, there will be “trusted” banks of data where users will be able to grant access in order to share their data with other social networks. It’s a great idea since it will allow us to control which data we want to share on which social network. Moreover we will have a permanent identity on the web. We will be a live part of it no matter what happens to a website or a social network.
In real life though there is a quite significant problem: Will people trust those data banks that will be holding their data? From the first point of view I would say yes, because there is no difference than giving your data to facebook or myspace. However, on the other side I would say that the ultimate goal is that every person holds his own data and decides if and how he wants to share them. This could be a perfect solution but there is a huge problem! People are not connected on the internet 24/7. If I hold my data and someone searches for me, nothing would appear if I am offline at that time because my data would be with me. In a few years though I am pretty sure that everyone will be connected 24/7 either by his cell phone, his computer or even his car.
Saying so, we will have a world of always connected people who will be holding their private data. Practically, we will be able to build a p2p network where only a map/filesystem of people names (very basic data) would be hosted on a data bank and all their private data they want to share would be served by them directly.
As a conclusion I should say that technology is not there yet. It might take several years to make the internet so reliable that this whole thing could work flawlessly. But the data portability project is a good way to start with. It will make things a lot easier for everyone.
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