Yesterday I went to the ODI lunchtime lecture on portability of reputation data. It was an interesting discussion which triggered a few thoughts which I thought I’d share here.
The debate was prompted by a call for evidence from the Department formally known as BIS around consumer data and account switching:
“The government would like to understand whether the reputation data earned by a user on a particular platform could be used to help them win business or prove their trustworthiness in other contexts. We would also be interested in views on the technical and other challenges that would be associated with making this reputation data portable”
The consultation includes this question:
“What new opportunities or risks for businesses, workers and consumers would be created if they were able to port their reputation and feedback data between platforms?”
It also asks about the barriers that might hinder this type of portability.
One useful way to answer these questions is to break them down into smaller pieces:
- Should consumers be able to access data they’ve contributed in a platform?
- Should businesses be able to access data about them in a platform, e.g. reputation data such as reviews
- Should businesses and consumers be able to move this this data between platforms?
- Should it be permitted for that data to be reused by others, e.g. in competing platforms?
The first two questions are about exporting data.
The third and fourth questions are really about portability and data licensing.
I would say that broadly the answers to all these questions is: Yes.
I think consumers and businesses should be able to access this data and, further, that it should be machine-readable open data. They should also be able to access any of their personal data held in the platform, but this isn’t really an area of debate. The new EU GDPR regulations requires platforms to provide you with your data if you request it, although it doesn’t (to my knowledge) require it to be in a machine-readable reusable form.
I think this also answers the last question, the data should be reusable. However I expect there to be resistance from platforms as where this type of data is currently made available it is done so under non-open terms. For example, via API agreements that prohibit some forms of reuse, such as use in a competing service.
The question on portability is trickier though. While I think that portability is something to aspire to, in practice it is going to be difficult to achieve.
Portability requires more than just creating a data standard to enable export and import of data, or APIs that enable more dynamic synchronisation. I think that’s the easy part.
Portability would also require platforms to agree or converge around how reputation data is collected and calculated. It’s no good moving data from one system to another if they have incompatible definitions. There are many ways in which platforms might differ:
- They can use a different rating scheme, e.g. 5 stars, 10 stars, or just “likes”
- They might allow, or require, a text review in addition to a rating
- They can allow anonymous reviews or require users to make themselves known
- They can allow anyone to review any service or business (e.g. TripAdvisor, Amazon product reviews), or they can enforce that reviews are only made when there has been evidence of a transaction (e.g. rating a supplier on EBay or Amazon)
- Related, they might allow both forms of review, but distinguish those that are based on a transaction
- Or they may not allow explicit reviews at all and measure reputation in some other way (e.g. completing transactions within an expected time period, or number of sales made)
- …etc, etc
And this is without even getting into the weeds of what users think they are reviewing. For example are you reviewing the restaurant, the service you received on a specific visit, the menu choice with respect to your preferences, or perhaps even a specific person that delivered that service. I think we’ve all seen examples of all of those variations even within single platforms.
XKCD has nicely summarised a variety of issues with rating systems in these three cartoons. And we shouldn’t forget the creative ways in which review systems get repurposed.
It’s important to highlight here that this type of variation doesn’t really occur with data like banking transactions, utility bills, etc. I tend to think portability there is much easier to achieve. These is variation, but this is typically around charging models not in the meaning and method of collection of the data.
Is all the variation in rating and review schemes warranted? Perhaps not. Some convergence might actually be useful. But these variations are also likely to be key parts of the user experience and functionality of the platform. So I’m personally very wary about restricting product developers in innovating in this area.
In my view rather than focusing on portability, we should be asking for this data to be published as open data. This will then open the possibility for the data to be aggregated and presented across platforms.
Enabling the creation of aggregated reference points for reputation data may be more practical that requiring true portability across platforms. In fact we have models for this already: price comparison sites and credit reference agencies. In fact if these data becomes more open it seems likely that credit agencies will be the first to benefit from it.
Lost Boy 