"The Startup Bus" Heard about the Startup Bus? Learn more and take the Startup Bus Portability Pledge!

What is a Portability Policy, and Why Would I Want One?

The DataPortability Project encourages standard, plain language policies describing how data and digital objects can be moved from one product to another. It is our belief that people wish to know what they can do with their data and who can access it. We do not seek to enforce any particular business model or technology. Rather, we hope to create standards that simplify communication and help customers make informed choices.

In the same way that your Privacy Policy tells customers what you can do with information they provide, your Portability Policy tells them what they can do with it.

Your Portability Policy should be a single document that lays out your answers to questions like:

• Do you provide documented APIs and file formats?
• Do people need to create a new identity here, or can they use an existing one?
• Must a user import data into this product, or can you use data that is hosted elsewhere?
• Can other products use data that's hosted here?
• Can the user export everything they've done here?

The Startup Bus Portability Pledge

Participants in the startup bus have agreed to take a portability pledge. They each promise to create a Portability Policy for the products they're building, and to post them by July 1.

Overview of the DataPortability.org Policy Builder application

The policy builder application will be a free tool to help sites craft a portability policy. It will ask a series of questions about what kind of data portability that the service offers, and return boilerplate language that the site can use.

The policy builder is still under construction, but don't wait for us! A portability policy just tells your users what to expect. Write one today!

• Product design documents for the first release of the application