The future of generative AI is personal – and portable?
Generative AI news fills all inboxes. But a key question of its future isn't yet being asked -- will users be locked in, or will their data be portable?
Blog
A framework for trusted, safe third-party data transfers
At DTI, we're looking to build a framework to establish trust between data hosts and recipients, keeping users safe and empowered at the same time.
Global developments in data portability law
Five years after GDPR, policymakers around the world have a new, or renewed, interest in data portability. DTI is engaging in this growing landscape.
Metrics for success in data portability work
How do you measure success? It's more than the KPIs or OKRs. At DTI we're articulating outcomes, capacities, and outputs to tell our story of impact.
Building a more portable future for text-based social
At DTI, we’re starting to dig into portability solutions for something we’ve been calling “text-based social media” – think Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, and the-service-formerly-known-as-Twitter. In a social space, the problems are both technical and social problems, and the solutions must be as well.
Data portability serves multiple goals
Competition is a compelling narrative to support data portability policy, and with the implementation of Europe’s Digital Markets Act taking headlines, it’s often front of mind. It’s important to remember that competition is not the only lens...
Publishing the newsletter as a blog
Our newsletter has been going out by email without our own permanent page and link, but here we are with a blog section at dtinit.org now.
Data is binary, but that doesn’t make portability simple.
Data sometimes feels like the simplest thing in the world. It’s just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, right? Often we treat all data the same. For portability, however, we cannot.
Law isn’t code. The vote is just the beginning.
In the data portability world, foundational laws like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and California’s privacy laws provide users with the right to request their data from businesses, and the Digital Markets Act in Europe imposes additional portability duties on designated gatekeepers. But tech policy doesn’t stop being relevant when laws are adopted; to the contrary, that’s when the real work begins.
Data Transfer Initiative Welcomes Expanded Team & Launches Newsletter
It is hard for me to believe that it has only been a few short months since the launch of the Data Transfer Initiative. Since I started, I’ve traveled to DC and Brussels, spoken on panels and government workshops (check out my slides from the European Commission’s “The DMA and data related obligations” workshop here), published a policy one-pager and written new articles on data portability, and met with policymakers, civil society organizations, and industry stakeholders. And I’ve done it all as DTI’s sole full-time employee.
It's hard to measure the value of data (transfers).
Data’s fundamental characteristics, including its non-rivalrous nature and its ability to capture key learnings about the past and present – and even, as we see clearly through today’s explosion of large language models, predict the future – allow for an incredible range of valuable use cases, including through the combination of data across sources and across users. But some of the most valuable data is personal data, in which people have privacy rights and (in many countries) robust legal protections.
Communications, information, tools, and pathways
Thoughts on how to communicate DTI's work effectively, and how the multiplicity of channels landscape parallels data portability.
The complex problem space of data portability
Articulating the landscape of portability-related problems as classic data portability, protocol interoperability, bulk data transfers, and continuous and realtime portability.
Data Transfer Initiative Launch
Since its founding in 2018, I’ve watched DTP with interest and enthusiasm [...] I’m pleased to announce the creation of the Data Transfer Initiative (DTI), a new non-profit organization that will house DTP and support the work that DTP started, with DTP remaining an open source project as part of DTI.