Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability is a 2021 Electronic Frontier Foundation paper by Bennett Cyphers and Cory Doctorow. It argues that privacy and interoperability can coexist, and that the platform-led framing presenting the two as opposed is a strategic move by platforms to avoid interoperability requirements rather than a technical inevitability.
Authors: Bennett Cyphers, Cory Doctorow Publisher: Electronic Frontier Foundation License: CC BY 4.0 Date: 2021-11-28 Source: eff.org
Summary of argument
The paper develops a framework for interoperability with privacy guardrails and shows how various interoperability mandates — data portability, mandatory APIs, and federated identity — can be designed to preserve user privacy. Cyphers and Doctorow contend that dominant platforms present privacy and interoperability as a trade-off in order to resist interoperability requirements, and that this framing reflects platform interest rather than a technical constraint.
Reception and relation to AI-policy questions
King and Saade's HAI brief on foundation-model privacy is treated as the contemporary AI-specific companion to this paper; Cyphers and Doctorow provide the broader interoperability-privacy framework that predates and informs the foundation-model-specific analysis (Data Privacy and Foundation Models: Can We Have Both? — King & Saade (Stanford HAI Issue Brief, April 2026)). The framework is also engaged against existing privacy regimes, including General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California CCPA Regulations (Title 11, Division 6).
In the AI context, the paper bears on questions about data portability between AI labs, training-data attribution, and user control over AI-deployment data. The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the AI Industry — Alex Reisner (The Atlantic, March 2026) documented Meta's claim that its open-weight models should not be redistributed online despite being described as "open"; the Cyphers and Doctorow framework supplies a policy-doctrinal anchor for the question of whether platform self-protection trumps user portability rights. Doctorow is a widely cited voice on tech-platform policy, and this paper is one of his most-cited single contributions; Cyphers and Doctorow's institutional home for the framework is the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Relationships
- supports: Data Privacy and Foundation Models: Can We Have Both? — King & Saade (Stanford HAI Issue Brief, April 2026) (contemporary AI-specific companion), AI and Privacy, Data Portability (planned)
- related: The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the AI Industry — Alex Reisner (The Atlantic, March 2026), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California CCPA Regulations (Title 11, Division 6), Cory Doctorow (planned), Bennett Cyphers (planned), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
- instance-of: Responsible AI Deployment