Interesting, thanks Daniela.
I imagine the efforts of Creative Commons would cover a lot of this. But I think you raise a good point: personal information - the kind we debate about on social networks as well as health - is merely only one side of the data portability coin. The other side, is media - and to date, we've had minimal discussions on this.
For example, photos. I've been meaning to write a blog post of this, but ideally I would LOVE it if
- I could store my phones in Amazon's/Googles/Microsofts cloud
- I could have my facebook account 'pull' those photos within the album so that m friends can tag me and I can tag them
- I could pull those photos into Flickr, so I can show of my travel photography and get involved in the community
- I could use an online photo editor that can pull my photos enabling me to make edits.
Flickr, one of our early supporters, already does part of this. They allow you, through third parties, to edit your photos - which is a great example of interoperability and creating more value to us as users.
It's an example, where the business case for data portability is clear: no one 'loses' out here, and inf act, more value is created in the ecosystem. This one-dimension view about having to acquire users to host their content, and not allow them to export it, is stupid. It's not recognising, the information value chain[1] and that derivative products can be created, that generate new value. Our recently ratified vision[2] recognises this: "Data portability enables a borderless experience, where people can move easily between network services, reusing data they provide"