Why does moving my data across platforms still require trusting the exporter?
Opportunity
The EU Digital Markets Act now mandates data portability for designated gatekeepers, and a May 2026 European Commission factsheet highlighted Apple and Google's cross-OS transfer work as a DMA milestone. Yet the technical reality is that every export format today is a vendor-defined archive, a ZIP of JSON files whose completeness, accuracy, and freshness cannot be independently checked by the receiving party or the user. Interoperability obligations address format and API access but say nothing about attestation. A user migrating from one platform to another cannot know whether the export is complete, whether it reflects state as of the request timestamp, or whether the receiving platform ingested all of it correctly. The portable data transfer protocol work from Google, Apple, and Meta covers transport, not provenance.
Why it matters
Data portability without verifiable completeness is just a different kind of lock-in, because the user still has no way to know what was left behind.
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.
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