Data are considerd to be portable if they can be moved from one system to another. In order to do this standards have to be defined for particular types of data.

At present the data portability debate is raging over who owns your personal data. It is particularly focussed on social networking web sites which use personal data that we enter and share with others.

It is often difficult to extract information that you have added on one of these sites and use it on another site and the site creators are accused of deliberately trying to lock people in to their service.