Our beliefs about standards

Build for users Data portability tools should be easy to find, intuitive to use, and readily available for users.

Privacy and Security Providers on each side of the portability transaction should have strong privacy and security measures—such as encryption in transit—to guard against unauthorized access, diversion of data, or other types of fraud.

Focus on users' data Portability efforts should support and empower the individual user and how they shape their digital presence and activities. The content that a user creates, imports or approves for collection is to many the most obvious kind of data to transfer. Data generated by user activity can be more challenging to make available in a sensible way that adds value for the user, but some applications may be very compelling.

Respect Everyone We live in a collaborative world: people connect and share on social media, they edit docs together, and they comment on videos, pictures and more. Data portability tools should be respectful of a user's expectations of the context of their contributions. Careful understanding of use cases and respecting the contributions of all parties involved can inform choices about portability scope.

The Team

Driven by a shared passion for technology and positive change, our staff brings diverse expertise to our mission.

Chris Riley

Executive Director

Chris comes from the R Street Institute, a Washington, DC-based think tank, prior to which he led the Mozilla Corporation’s global public policy efforts for several years. His open source roots go back even further to his time working on the internet freedom portfolio at the U.S. Department of State, where he supported open source security and anti-censorship tools dedicated to advancing human rights online. Chris received his B.S. in computer science from Wheeling Jesuit University, his Ph.D. in computer science from Johns Hopkins University and his J.D. from Yale Law School.

Lisa Dusseault

CTO

Ms. Dusseault previously served as the CTO and Co-Founder of Compaas. Prior to Compaas, Ms. Dusseault served in technical roles at StubHub, Smule, and Microsoft among others, and spent several years as the Applications Area Director at the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Delara Derakhshani

Director of Policy

Ms. Derakhshani brings more than fifteen years of legal and policy expertise in privacy, technology, and telecommunications in the public and private sector serving in roles with Consumer Reports, Meta’s Reality Labs policy team, and the Entertainment Software Association.

Keep up with DTI

The scope of data portability is as broad and diverse as user data itself. We welcome you to join us in our efforts. To follow along with DTI’s work via our newsletter, please sign up below.

FAQs

We are committed to providing users with the information they need to make informed decisions about their data.

What are some examples of data portability?

There are many use cases for users porting data directly between services, some we know about today, and some we have yet to discover. A couple of examples of ones we know users want today are...

  • Moving one's private photos and photo albums to a different online hosting service permanently
  • Moving social media post history to a new location without having to start from scratch at a new URL
  • Trying out a new service with data from a service you already use, even if you don't decide to make the move
  • Importing content into a new short-form video social service and continuing to use it in parallel with the old service
What is DTP?

One of the projects that DTI (Data Transfer Initiative) helps support is DTP (Data Transfer Project). The project was started much earlier than DTI was founded, and is an open source project with contributions from several companies. DTP is hosted by companies and connected to their data services in order to provide portability services that work with the other platforms participating in DTP.

What kinds of data can be transferred through DTP?

DTP can be used to transfer photos, videos and posts or documents, depending on what kind of data the source can send and the destination can accept. Platforms that use DTP will offer available choices on their data management Web sites.

Who is responsible for protecting data?

Each organization is responsible for securing and protecting the data it receives, whether received via data portability or another way. Organizations must also ensure that data is protected in transit when participating in data transfer.

When data is transferred via DTP, who gets a copy?

Only the source and destination ever get access to data transfered via the DTP.

Still have a question?

If you have any questions that are not answered in our FAQ, please feel free to contact us.

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