Sometimes I feel like the only person who doesn't think that data portability is a right. After all, when you willingly hand over your data to a service, say Facebook, you do so with the assumption that you've read their terms and conditions, which probably don't include data portability in your favor. You're exchanging your data for a service they provide--social networking--and is it really your RIGHT to force the business to build special software to then transform your data for export at your whim? Sure, it's icing on the cake if they do so, but I really feel like calling it a "right" is somehow demeaning the word. If you don't want your data stored in Google or FB's servers, just don't use them--just as if you wouldn't use them if you didn't agree with any other part of their TOS.
Take my own business, which is a social network for writers. Imagine someone coming along one day and complaining about their right to export the writing they've posted, and their personal profile, and hey, while we're at it, all of their private messages in a nice XML hierarchy, and why not an annotated list of the critiques they've written, because it's their data dammit! The cost to develop that kind of system because someone has the idea in their head that it's some kind of new-fangled digital Right-with-a-capital-R would put me behind for months. Sure I'll delete your data if you leave, but if you don't want my data stored on only my servers, then don't use my site.
Edit: This could easily be framed as a consumer-damaging argument. I suspect that many of the people who support data portability "rights" are also the sort of people who support anti-DRM campaigns (which I do too, for the record). But if you have the right to demand your data back from a company at any time, why shouldn't the company have the right to demand its own data back from YOU--music, books, movies? Remember the fuss that happened with Amazon deleted some people's purchased Kindle books--which is nothing but data a consumer has licensed--from their devices without warning?
Take my own business, which is a social network for writers. Imagine someone coming along one day and complaining about their right to export the writing they've posted, and their personal profile, and hey, while we're at it, all of their private messages in a nice XML hierarchy, and why not an annotated list of the critiques they've written, because it's their data dammit! The cost to develop that kind of system because someone has the idea in their head that it's some kind of new-fangled digital Right-with-a-capital-R would put me behind for months. Sure I'll delete your data if you leave, but if you don't want my data stored on only my servers, then don't use my site.
Edit: This could easily be framed as a consumer-damaging argument. I suspect that many of the people who support data portability "rights" are also the sort of people who support anti-DRM campaigns (which I do too, for the record). But if you have the right to demand your data back from a company at any time, why shouldn't the company have the right to demand its own data back from YOU--music, books, movies? Remember the fuss that happened with Amazon deleted some people's purchased Kindle books--which is nothing but data a consumer has licensed--from their devices without warning?