Reporting out on the Data Transfer Summit
On February 29, we hosted an all-day event in Washington, DC, featuring original scholarship on data portability and conversations with key stakeholders in industry, civil society, and government working on this issue. We previewed the event in our newsletter and blog. And now, the team at Tech Policy Press has agreed to host our post-event report out piece, which you can find on their website here.
In lieu of a standalone newsletter/blog today, I encourage you to read the article at TPP. Here are some brief excerpts from it:
- Central to the thesis of the event was that portability is valuable on both data protection and competition dimensions, and that DTI as an institution is effectively positioned to bring people together to make progress. This thesis proved correct.
- The morning scholars panel included both a real-world look at the complexities of portability in practice, and a taxonomy approach to understanding portability. It also included a paper on portable trust, grounding portability in its privacy connections while taking a serious look at its inherent empowerment value yet also privacy, security, and integrity risks. The afternoon scholars panel looked further afield, with papers on portability’s connections to the metaverse and to artificial intelligence, and one on an implementation of continuous and real-time portability via webhooks.
- The morning discussion on the business case for data portability revealed overlapping and new angles of complexity. The speakers discussed the potential for privacy and security harm and some of the practical steps they take to mitigate it, such as delays in transfers and multiple pathways of user notifications to reduce the chance of fraud through an unauthorized actor gaining access to sensitive personal data. They made clear that portability was worth it though, not just as a legal obligation, but as a path to build user trust and confidence with people.
- Without doubt, law is contributing to shaping the future of data portability, notably the Digital Markets Act. It seems likely that other laws or government actions in the future will also have an impact. The civil society panel in the afternoon featured a lively and entertaining conversation with the heads of three of DC’s foremost tech and policy organizations.
- Collectively, the stakeholders engaged in portability have made progress in building a shared understanding of how to deliver portability tools that can serve end users. The Summit showcased this progress and furthered it at the same time through the event’s discussions. But there’s much more to be done; this single day was a beginning not an end.
Check out the rest of the article on my go-to destination for compelling tech policy coverage: Tech Policy Press!