How Much Data Do You Really Want Portable?

I've been following the barrage of news regarding Data Portability with a mix of excitement and trepidation. I've been a proponent of OpenID, and regularly use services like PassPack to keep track of the ridiculous number of log-ins I seem to have accumulated. At the same time, I worry about what data is essentially mine, and what doesn't rightfully belong to me. I'm still not convinced that Robert Scoble owned the contact information for his 5000 “friends” on Facebook, and that is the facet of Data Portability that worries me, at least a little.

David Petar Novakovic spoke to the issue of privacy as it relates to Data Portability just today. In his post, he states that “Dataportability does not give any more or less users access to your personal information than before.” I'm fairly certain that he's correct. After all, if you already have the information out there, it's out there, but not all conveniently packaged up for you to move around.

However, as Chris Saad states in his comments on this post, “There is no silver bullet for privacy - in reality it will take a multi-faced approach to solving the issues.” In other words, there isn't an answer right now. The plan is that privacy won't be an issue, and I would assume that they would allow different levels of privacy settings based on the site you are sharing your data with.

However, we have the apparently imminent arrival of Google Health. Google has already joined the Data Portability Workgroup, and the sheer amount of data that Google has for me already keeps me up some nights, but the screenshot alone should set off alarm bells in just about anyone. If you use Calendar, they know where you are. Use Maps and they probably know where you live. Use Checkout and they have at least a portion of your financial information. Use Gmail and they have scads of personal information, from family interactions to passwords sent to receipts for online transactions to work-related information. And how they are going to store my health information? A list of any medications, doctors, or health problems stored in the Google data centers?

I'm finding that the more avenues I have to share my data online, the more I find myself wanting to pull what I already have out there back. I find it hard to imagine that I'm the only person who worries about the over-reaching umbrella of Google linking up to every other site who joins the Data Portability Workgroup and the sheer amount of amassed information any one entity could end up possessing about me.