Facebook Published a White Paper Detailing Data Portability

Vice president and chief privacy officer, policy Erin Egan introduced the white paper in a Newsroom post, writing, “To build portability tools that people can trust and use effectively, online services need clear rules about what kinds of data should be portable and who is responsible for protecting that data as it moves to different services. Although some laws, such as the [European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act], already guarantee the right to portability, we believe companies and people would benefit from additional guidance about what it means to put those rules into practice.”

The white paper sought answers to the following five questions:

1. What is data portability? The term means different things to different people, so Facebook set out to establish a taxonomy enabling people to distinguish between different types of...