We’re at the end of week 5 of 2020, of the new decade and I’m on a diet.
I’m back to using MyFitnessPal again. I’ve used it on and off for the last 10 years whenever I’ve decided that now is the time to be more healthy. The sporadic, but detailed history of data collection around my weight and eating habits mark out each of the times when this time was going to be the time when I really made a change.
My success has been mixed. But the latest diet is going pretty well, thanks for asking.
This morning the app chose the following feature to highlight as part of its irregular nudges for me to upgrade to premium.
Downloading data about your weight, nutrition and exercise history are a premium feature of the service. This gave me pause for thought for several reasons.
Under UK legislation, and for as long as we maintain data adequacy with the EU, I have a right to data portability. I can request access to any data about me, in a machine-readable format, from any service I happen to be using.
The company that produce MyFitnessPal, Under Armour, do offer me a way to exercise this right. It’s described in their privacy policy, as shown in the following images.
Rather than enabling this access via an existing product feature, they’ve decide to make me and everyone else request the data directly. Every time I want to use it.
This might be a deliberate decision. They’re following the legislation to the letter. Perhaps its a conscious decision to push people towards a premium service, rather than make it easy by default. Their user base is international, so they don’t have to offer this feature to everyone.
Or maybe its the legal and product teams not looking at data portability as an opportunity. That’s something that the ODI has previously explored.
I’m hoping to see more exploration of the potential benefits and uses of data portability in 2020.
I think we need to re-frame the discussion away from compliance and on to commercial and consumer benefits. For example, by highlighting how access to data contributes to building ecosystems around services, to help retain and grow a customer base. That is more likely to get traction than a continued focus on compliance and product switching.
MyFitnessPal already connects into an ecosystem of other services. A stronger message around portability might help grow that further. After all, there are more reasons to monitor what you eat than just weight loss.
Clearer legislation and stronger guidance from organisations like ICO and industry regulators describing how data portability should be implemented would also help. Wider international adoption of data portability rights wouldn’t hurt either.
There’s also a role for community driven projects to build stronger norms and expectations around data portability. Projects like OpenSchufa demonstrate the positive benefits of coordinated action to build up an aggregated view of donated, personal data.
But I’d also settle with a return to the ethos of the early 2010s, when making data flow between services was the default. Small pieces, loosely joined.
If we want the big platforms to go on a diet, then they’re going to need to give up some of those bytes.
Lost Boy 