I want all these inconveniences somehow solved, but I live in the real world and it's not gonna magically happen. So let me be more specific: I argue that one major reason these tools and integration I want don't exist is that people don't have easy uniform access to their data in the first place.

"Easy" is used here in two senses:

easy for humans to look at and browse through This bit is hard in practice as (typically) the more machine friendly something is, the less human friendly it's.

easy for programmers to manipulate, analyze and interact with Let's concentrate on this part for now. If this is solved, it automatically enables programmers to develop human-friendly tools. In addition, playing with data and building tools on it feels fun as it is (unlike getting the data).

So how would 'easy access to data' look in an ideal world? Let me present you my speculations on it, and I would be happy to hear your opinions on it!

I want an API that I can query and get any of my personal data. Ideally, it wouldn't really matter where the data is and it could be a web API.

Realistically, as of today, the easiest way to quickly access your data and more importantly, play with it, is when it's already on your filesystem.

Whether it's plaintext, sqlite or some sort of binary data – doesn't matter, already having it locally saves you from the whole class of problems (which I'm about to pinpoint in the following section). even better if it's already in your RAM and interpreter, but that's a bit too much to wish for at this point.

As you've probably noticed, it's almost never the case that you have your personal data locally at hand. You need to spend extra effort to achieve this.