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Comment by distances | Hacker News Reader

> It means making it easier for consumers to move their data from one company to another

I think this would be absolutely brilliant. The ability to readily move data from one service provider to another would provide a much-needed boost for competition in the digital space.

I don't know how common it is, but at least in Finland one can move their mortgage from one bank to another if they get a better deal elsewhere [1]. Or, one can move their mobile phone subscription and keep the old number. I find these kinds of service transfer entitlements essential for efficient competition.

[1] Or technically: one can always pay their Euribor bound mortgage off without extra cost, and take a new mortgage from another bank.

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What type of data are you wanting to move? Would you just want a huge movable block of space that you could mount somewhere?

All data associated with my user account, perhaps with some kind of a schema if applicable. Other services could then implement data import features for this, or for just the part of the data that concerns the service they are providing.

Basically, it should be clear that all data connected to a person is irrevocably theirs. Any provider can build services for taking advantage of the data -- but it'd be the user's right to migrate it at their pleasure.

Standards happen so slowly. By the time people agreed on what should be in this, that agreement would be antiquated.

We need something like what happened with OpenID and Oauth. OpenID may be gone, but one company made a few bucks on it and OAuth is largely inspired by it. Someone needs to find a way to make a buck moving profile data around in a meaningful way then that becomes a de-facto standard that gets copied and used all over.

Then the government can regulate something that already exists rather than regulate something shitty into existence.

What standards? For sure there can't be any standard that would lend itself to all of the various ways your data is used and stored.

Does this mean that before I can add any features to my product, I have to wait for them to be part of the data standard?

It is possible to make a schema such that you can add whatever you want. And this only applies to exporting the data anyway.

Ok, so you can export it, but only in a format that is useful to a programmer.

Yes, I didn't mean it would have to conform to a standard of any kind. You'd get the data; it would be up to you (or a service you choose to use) what to do with it.

Of course this wouldn't lead to any magical inter-operation of services, but that wouldn't be the point anyway.

Whatsapp history from Iphone to Android for starters would be nice.

I'd be fine with getting my data out. Importing would be a plus, but that can't obviously be required from a business.

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