You can derive a number of these things - hometown, education, religious & political affiliation, and relationship status - with just a couple dozen lines of co

You can derive a number of these things - hometown, education, religious & political affiliation, and relationship status - with just a couple dozen lines of code from someone's Likes, which is more innocuous anyway: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/social-apis-for-social-evil http://caseysoftware.com/blog/social-apis-for-social-evil But in all seriousness, this is the logical progression. As long as all of those things are locked down, the likelihood of exporting your data to a rival platform - if there was one - is basically nil. Their goal was to become the center of gravity that pulls everyone in and now they're protecting that. I believe the idea that users want to download their own copy of "their data" is a fallacy. Sure, the people here think in those terms but average users don't. Remember, these are the same people a generation ago would have though AOL was the Internet. They don't think in terms of "my data" and don't see the value of it.