Why can I port my posts but not the profile platforms built from watching me?
Opportunity
GDPR Article 20 gives you the right to take your data to a new service, but it explicitly excludes inferred and derived data. The preference scores, behavioral segments, attention graphs, and interest models that recommendation platforms build from years of your activity stay with the incumbent when you leave. A 2024 Computer Law and Security Review study found this asymmetry is structurally entrenching: a competitor who receives your raw data still has to rebuild years of signal from scratch while the incumbent retains the refined interpretation. A 2025 arXiv study on recommender profile portability confirmed that even when raw interaction histories transfer between services, recommendation quality does not follow.
Why it matters
Portability rights that exclude derived profiles leave the most valuable part of your digital life permanently locked to whoever first processed it.
How I score the opportunity
The Opportunity Score is my own read, not a measurement: how much it hurts, how often it bites, and how little exists to solve it today. Higher means I think it is more worth building.
How much pain it causes when it shows up.
How often people actually run into it.
How little good tooling exists for it today.
More problems worth solving
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