There’s a lot of talk lately about ownership of content, but there isn’t a lot of substance. In this post I want to tell you what providers of Social Media Services should do to make things very, very clear for YOU regarding YOUR content.

It’s called Dataportability, and this is what it means.

Data portability is the ability for people to reuse their data across interoperable applications. The DataPortability Project works to advance this vision by identifying, contextualizing and promoting efforts in the space.

The fun thing about definitions is the fact there usually are many. The one I gave you is the one supported by the Dataportability Project in which I participate.

The key concept here is ‘who owns the data, and what can YOU do with it’. Companies should be perfectly clear in their communication about this so You know what to expect. That’s why we believe that they should have a portabilitypolicy, just as they have a privacy policy. (the privacy policy states what They can and will do with Your data). As an idea, it’s actually quite logical, don’t you think?

And this doesn’t necessarily mean that you should be given any control over your data whatsoever, it just means that you should know what control you have. Then you can make educated choices which companies to be a client of. This, as many other things, is just a matter of selection.

To aid companies in creating these policies there is now a website with example policies for inspiration. There will be services to aid companies further in there efforts to create these policies in the future. This hopefully removes some of the barriers of getting this not only accepted as a good idea, but also implemented as a standard procedure. I guess you head overthere and give us some feedback, either on the dataportability google groups or (my personal preference  ) here in the comments.

If you’re interested in following this fantastic project, be sure to read the Dataportability Blog.