Should standardised personal data format be law?

[RT_]

I am finding it increasingly frustrating how large Tech companies take so much control over your personal data and life. While using their products and services your aggregation of data is increasingly valuable to your life. If you decide you want to stop dealing with one of these companies, for many it is an enormously difficult task, as all that valuable data that has been built up (contacts, message history, locations, pictures, etc) will either be lost or at great expense in time and effort migrated by hand to alternative companies.

Don’t you think it would improve Tech competition if these companies, on request, had to give you all the data they have about you, in a standardised digital form, so that it can be migrated easily to a competitor, and so that any data held about you by the company is completely deleted?

Without this kind of autonomy, I think there is too much of a tendency for companies to become monopolies, purely because it is too hard to change Technology supplier. What do you think?

[felgall]

@RT_

Don’t you think it would improve Tech competition if these companies, on request, had to give you all the data they have about you, in a standardised digital form

Yes but any law could only enforce them handing over information they have stored about you in that country. Any information they have on you stored elsewhere would not necessarily be subject to that law. You’d. need a law that is the same in all countries in order to enforce it. Otherwise you’d just get the same situation as the big countries currently do with their profit and move it to where they get the best result for them.

[RT_]

Yeah I agree, very hard to implement.

But it would be good if it could be implemented wouldn’t it!