Sharing Data and Privacy in the Platform Economy: The Right to Data Portability and “Porting Rights”

This chapter analyses the right to data portability and its peculiarities in the platform economy, where this right is fundamental for competition law, users’ protection and privacy, because of the presence of strong direct and indirect network effects and consequent high switching costs. In particular, it analyses the right to data portability as settled out in the GDPR, together with the interpretation given by the Article 29 Working Group, and the other “porting rights” in the Digital Single Market strategy and in the European Commission Proposals “for a Regulation on a framework for the free flow of non-personal data in the European Union”, “for a Regulation on promoting fairness and transparency for business users of online intermediation services” and in the proposed “Directive on certain aspects concerning contracts for the supply of digital content”. It underlines six critical issues related to the right to data portability: 1) a privacy issue, due to the huge sharing of data of other individuals; 2) the need to establish also the portability of non-personal data; 3) the need to establish the portability also for professional users that are not natural person; 4) the need to protect the rights of the controller and his investment when the data are not merely collected but also reworked; 5) the risk of decreased competition with a strong and non-scalable regulation; 6) the necessity to pay attention at the technical solutions available in order to assure practicable application methods, in particular considering the needs of smaller operators.