If you want a free email service that doesn't use your words to target ads to you, you'll have to figure out how to port years and years of Gmail messages somewhere else, which is about as easy as developing your own free email service.
Customers need to be given control of their own data-not being tied into a certain manufacturer so that when there are problems they are always obliged to go back to them.
Our information lives will be better served when we are free to get to our information from wherever we are, with any device available.
All of my memories are now on hard drives. I'll change phones or I'll change my laptop, and all my photos stay.
Here is a guiding principle: If a business collects data on consumers electronically, it should provide them with a version of that data that is easy to download and export to another Web site.
Portability of lots of information should not be underestimated.
To effectively leverage the social graph, every company needs to understand that they need to make their information easily transferable.
In reality, quitting Facebook is much more problematic than the company's executives suggest, if only because users cannot extract all the intangible social capital they have generated on the site and export it elsewhere.
