Today, Facebook submitted official comments to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ahead of its September 22 public workshop “to examine the potential benefits and challenges to consumers and competition raised by data portability.” You can read the comments here.
We are pleased to see the FTC devoting a full workshop to data portability, and we look forward to participating. We believe data portability can give people control and choice, while also fostering innovation.
Last year, we published a white paper that explores the privacy questions we’ve encountered as we build a new generation of data portability tools. Since then, we’ve had conversations with stakeholders around the world to get feedback about what data should be portable and how to ensure that we protect privacy when enabling data transfers. In parallel, we continue to develop products that take into account the feedback we’ve received, like our recently launched portability tool that allows people to transfer their Facebook photos and videos to other services.
In our comments, we encourage the FTC to examine portability in practice. We also ask it to recommend dedicated federal portability legislation and provide advice to industry on the policy and regulatory tensions we highlight, so that companies implementing data portability have the clear rules and certainty necessary to build privacy-protective products that enhance people’s choice and control online.