I want to rate my books, music and DVDs once on netflix, Amazon, Facebook visual bookshelf, iTunes and I want the data shared across all of them.
However, I want complete control over how each of them uses every bit of that data and I want to approve who gets to see it, even among my friends. I don’t want to have to give any service my login for any other service in order to share that data.
I want to eliminate all my current log ins for each service so that I can use the OpenID service I created for myself.
However, I don’t necessarily want anyone to be able to track me around the net using that single sign-on.
I only want to map my social graph once, and I want it to be available for any service that I use.
However, I want to control who in my social graph has access to what information on each website that I use.
Until the privacy aspects of the different data portability are really well thought out, I can’t support any of them. I haven’t seen a single proposal yet that adequately balances utility with privacy. I honestly don’t know if there would a proposal that would offer users decent privacy since that would come at the expense of companies’ ability to market to them.