Data portability regulation has promised that individuals will be easily able to transfer their personal data between online service providers. Yet, after more than two years of an active privacy regulation regime in the European Union, this promise is far from being fulfilled. Given the lack of a functioning infrastructure for direct data portability between multiple providers, we investigate in our study how easily an individual could currently make use of an indirect data transfer between providers. We define such porting as a two-step transfer: firstly, requesting a data export from one provider, followed secondly by the import of the obtained data to another provider. To answer this question, we examine the data export practices of 182 online services, including the top one hundred visited websites in Germany according to the Alexa ranking, as well as their data import capabilities. Our main results show that high-ranking services, which primarily represent incumbents of key online markets, provide significantly larger data export scope and increased import possibilities than their lower-ranking competitors. Moreover, they establish more thorough authentication of individuals before export. These first empirical results challenge the theoretical literature on data portability, according to which, it would be expected that incumbents only complied with the minimal possible export scope in order to not lose exclusive consumer data to market competitors free-of-charge. We attribute the practices of incumbents observed in our study to the absence of an infrastructure realizing direct data portability.

For almost three years, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been granting citizens of the European Union the right to obtain personal data from companies and to transfer these data to another company. The so-called Right to Data Portability (RtDP) promises to significantly reduce switching costs for consumers in digital service markets, provided that its potential is effectively translated into reality. Thus, of all the consumer rights in the GDPR, the RtDP has the potential to be the one with the most significant implications for digital markets and privacy. However, our research shows that the RtDP is barely known among consumers and can currently only be implemented in a fragmented manner—especially with regard to the direct transfer of data between online service providers. We discuss several ways to improve the implementation of this right in the present article.

Privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union promise to empower users of online services and to strengthen competition in online markets. Its Article 17, the Right to Erasure (Right to be Forgotten), is part of a set of user rights that aim to give users more control over their data by allowing them to switch between services more easily and to delete their data from the old service. In our study, we investigated the data deletion practices of a sample of 90 online services. In a twostage process, we first request the erasure of our data and analyze to what extent public data (e.g., posts on a social network) remains accessible in a non-anonymized format. More than six months later, we request information on our data using Right of Access requests under Art. 15 GDPR to find out if and what data remains. Our results show that a majority of services perform data erasures without observable breaches of the provisions of Art. 17 GDPR. At 27%, the share of non-compliant services is not negligible; in particular, we observe differences between requests submitted using a dedicated button and formal requests under Art. 17 GDPR.

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