Data Portability on the Internet

Abstract

Data portability allows users to transfer data between competing online services. As data gets increasingly valuable for online services and users alike, the enforcement of data portability within the European Union by the General Data Protection Regulation will have important ramifications for the competition in online markets. Thus, this paper develops a game-theoretic model to examine firms' strategic reaction to data portability and to identify the ensuing market outcomes. It can be shown, among others, that although data portability is designed to protect users, they may be hurt because market entrants have an incentive to increase the amount of collected data compared to a regime without data portability. However, profits for new services and total surplus increase if the costs for implementation are not too large. This likely improves innovation and service variety. Consequently, the results provide important insights and case-specific recommendations for managers and policy makers in datadriven online markets. Keywords Data portability Á Competition between online services Á Economics of IS Á Switching costs Á Market entry and innovation This paper is an extended and revised version of Wohlfarth (2017).

Data Portability between Online Services: An Empirical Analysis on the Effectiveness of GDPR Art. 20

“…Existing academic literature evaluates data portability implementation based on theoretical mathematical modelling. These analyses argue that the amount of personal data collected by online services determines their market competitiveness as well as the size of the user lock-in effect [4]. This effect lowers the incentive for users to move from one service provider to another, as the costs for setting up a new profile with a comparable amount of data will be higher.…”

“…This effect lowers the incentive for users to move from one service provider to another, as the costs for setting up a new profile with a comparable amount of data will be higher. Examples for these switching costs can be observed in email or digital storage services, where besides general individual profile information, other documents such as files, photos or contacts need to be re-uploaded, or online banking accounts because bank transfers need to be re-entered [4]. Therefore, the RtDP is designed to counteract user switching costs and to increase competition among online services [24].…”

“…As data has emerged to be a critical competitive resource in the early 21st century [3,4], this rivalry in data collection provides strong incentives for dominant platforms that offer key online services to lock in consumer data and to deny individuals and competitors alike access to this data as a knowledge-building resource [1]. This corporate behavior of data siloing results in two main societal challenges [5,6]: one of concentrated epistemological power, i.e., who has the right to know the most and control accumulated information about a person [7], and another challenge of concentrated economic power, i.e.…”

“…Secondly, we investigate what scope of personal data online services provide via data exports by building on the data taxonomy of De Hert et al [9]. Drawing on Wohlfarth [4], we would expect that current market-leading services would have an incentive to provide data subjects only with the minimum scope possible in order to maintain their advantage in the rivalry of data collection over new entrants or smaller competitors. Thirdly, we examine how quickly, securely, and to what level of compliancy with GDPR Art.…”

Confidentiality Preserving and Data Portability for Secure Cloud Computing using LCC-AP and SP-GA

“…Additionally, the solution ought to reconsider the data portability, that is, users should be capable of encrypting/decrypting their data from any place and at any time [14]. The ability to move data amongst disparate application programs, CS, computing environments is called the Data portability [15,16]. The application's components, their relations, and management ought to be designed in a portable, machine-readable, and standardized format for facilitating the creation of portable cloud data together with the automation of their management and deployment [17].…”