I've personally never felt comfortable with having my social life online and that's why I've opted out of using Facebook, Google+ or any other social networking services for that matter. My social life doesn't suffer because of that at all, in fact, my bond with the people who are close to me has become even stronger due to a lack of social noise in my life. I see my best buddies a few times a week anyway and when I really need to talk to someone else, I can just email them or give them a call. The whole Facebook/Google+/[throw in random SNS here] thing is a joke.
Europe's Data Directive applies to all users outside of the US and Canada. The data directive gives me the right to ask them all data they have on me, and the right to have them remove it.
As a European they have given me that right by setting up a company in Ireland.
It does not guarantee any kind of automated access (and in fact, only at least once per year do you have free access), but in theory lets you retrieve all data associated to your person from any company (and allows you to correct wrong information, respectively require deletion of data that is no longer needed).
If you try to apply it to Facebook, they'll however just redirect you to their data download tool (which only gives you access to a a limited subset of the data). It lacks some enforcement, unfortunately.
Facebook wraps up every status update, picture, etc in a .zip file that you can download.
My main point is that the barrier to entry for making a new social network/reader etc is not one of innovation. Search for instance is hard to compete with because the bar has been set so high. Facebook is impossible to compete with because of its walls. I don't feel this page brings those walls down.
As far as I understand, the first few people to try it got more complete responses, but the data was still incomplete.
So, while technically it is your right, good luck getting anything more than you can already download.
I'm in the UK, and Europe has a nice set of data protection laws. Enforcing those laws is sub-optimal.
To paraphrase Joel Spolsky from his Startup School session, "grandma's gonna be calling".
How do you decide who has to comply with it? Every time I build a website that collects any data from users at all, do I have to also create an API for accessing that data?
Bigger companies such as FB and Google would most likely just move stuff offshore to get around this anyway.
They can be found here: https://www.google.com/settings/exportdata
One of them is that all data I create, which is stored, I should have access to, programmatically preferably. If I sign up for a site like Facebook, and create data such as friend connections I should have direct access to that data. Without access, there's an anti-competitive atmosphere. It is near impossible for me to create a new social network today on a similar scale to Facebook, because people's data is locked up. Even Google+ with google's resources, and popularity couldn't get people to detach from Facebook. I watched as people enthusiastically went to Google+, but then left as they found everything they wanted to do with it was locked up elsewhere. It is true that Facebook has this data available on their API, however it also has the ability to choose who can use it. That's the problem. I feel this data should be available for the express purpose of allowing competition to flourish.
of course there's other examples. Linked in has almost exclusive access to my resume + business contacts. Gmail has my life's history. Literally. I probably talk to my girlfriend on gchat more than when we're home. By the time we get home, there's nothing new :D Almost every big decision we've made has been while chatting at work. I can go back, and look at the record of our conversation I had when we came up with the name for my dog. Or when we decided to move to a different state, or when I told her my mom was hit by a car. No one company should be able to wipe out my life's memories. No one company should have exclusive access to this data. It is MY DATA (i realize the law doesn't recognize this as true yet, but it will).
Every day as we move to digital lives, the services we use go from being fun things we do, to critical infrastructure. Those gchat logs are really important to me. Those facebook status conversations are important to me. I didn't choose facebook based on their features. It kind of just happened. But now its a part of my life (a lot of our lives). I want control over it.