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Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter Launch the Data Transfer Project (venturebeat.com) 59

Posted by msmash from the uniting-for-once-in-life dept.
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter have teamed up for a new open source project that strives to make it easier to transfer your data between online services. From a report: The Data Transfer Project (DTP) was officially founded last year, and there have been whisperings about it on the likes of GitHub, but the initiative was officially unveiled today with its first four members. The DTP is actively seeking other members too. The ultimate aim of the Data Transfer Project is to improve data portability, allowing users to not only download their data but transfer it directly to any other service.
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Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter Launch the Data Transfer Project More

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter Launch the Data Transfer Project

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  • EU Antitrust? (Score:3)

    by saibot834 ( 1061528 ) on Friday July 20, 2018 @10:45AM (#56980138)

    Is this to avoid antitrust rulings such as we've seen recently against Google? If so, great. Looks like the pressure was working.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by smbell ( 974184 )
        I don't think GDPR is an issue here. This is just companies providing a consistent export format for existing data. I can only think of two possible GDPR issues that should be easy to deal with.
        1. 1) If they start using this format to share data without permission. Clear violation. Don't do that, you're breaking the law.
        2. 2) If somehow the format of the data forces a violation of the requirement to keep data pseudonymous. Should be easily avoidable.

        • Re:EU Antitrust? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by kubajz ( 964091 ) on Friday July 20, 2018 @11:56AM (#56980532)
          Perhaps it is the other way around. GDPR Article 20 states: "The data subject shall have the right to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance from the controller to which the personal data have been provided." (emphasis mine)

    • No (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 ) on Friday July 20, 2018 @11:54AM (#56980516)

      This is four competitors who each hold siloed data about their members trying to create a giant datapool, where the each volunteer information into it and then pull information out. So all of them can serve more targetted ads. It's the admission of these four companies that they're not competing on selling ads on third party sites (Google pretty much owns that), they're selling ads on their own. Which means they all get better ad targeting and higher payouts.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • >> "DTP Data Models represent the data when being transferred between two different companies. Ideally each company would use interoperable APIs (e.g. ActivityPub) to allow data to flow between them. However in many cases that is not the case."

    I am not making this up. See https://datatransferproject.dev/how-does-dtp-work

    >> "Ideally, a Vertical will have a small number of well-defined and widely-adopted Data Models. In such a situation, the generally accepted standard will be used as the Data Model for that Vertical across companies. This is not currently the case for most Verticals because Data Models have emerged organically in a largely disconnected ecosystem."

    No shit. Huh.

  • If these companies really try hard, they might come up with something as good as rsync or scp. Let's hope.

    But you know they won't.

  • would be a lot more useful. Maybe you can pull your chat history out of Facebook, but unless you convinced every other person to do the same you still can't message them so how will it help you to import the history into Skype, Hangouts, etc.

    Email is probably the only useful transfer here and that is Google & Microsoft only, if they actually support it...

  • No thanks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Friday July 20, 2018 @11:09AM (#56980288)
    I'm somewhat resigned to the fact that Google knows way too much about me, but at least I can take comfort in the fact that Facebook apparently knows almost nothing about me. I feel zero motivation to just volunteer information to them that they haven't been able to figure out for themselves already.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday July 20, 2018 @11:25AM (#56980354)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • How about keeping them all blind with different identities for each so you can know who sold your data to a Spammer or worse?

  • This will be awesome for data theft (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Bookwyrm ( 3535 ) on Friday July 20, 2018 @11:10AM (#56980294)

    Now, when there is a security breach, there will be one standard format of personal data for criminal and intelligence agencies to process. This will streamline the process of mass identity theft and dissident profiling and improve efficiency.

    The new DTP standard will no doubt include a recommended machine learning front-end to easily allow organizations to slurp up people's information in a standardized way, correlate identities across different services, and target them with advertising, thus improving advertising revenue. When users allow the 'share my data with 3rd parties' option, now there will be a standard format for the data to be shared, allowing a greater proliferation of services ready to consume it.

    (Yes, this is mild sarcasm.)

    • Isn't part of the standard having the data stored in a public AWS bucket?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by malkavian ( 9512 )

      Yeah, I think humanity did this once already.. Standard format was called "Paper" or something. :)
      But yes, you're essentially correct, we need to be careful.. I suspect that's the new social pressure that the younger generations are going to grow up with. Having to be a bit more sensible, and think a little more critically than their parents had to.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mssymrvn ( 15684 )

      Sarcasm? Oh, I thought this was paraphrased from the press release.

  • To quote Ted Ts'o (Score:3)

    by snapsnap ( 5451726 ) on Friday July 20, 2018 @11:46AM (#56980472)
    "The security implications of this are awe inspiring."
  • Can you get them to transfer your data to /dev/null? I sincerely think that's the best option for everyone.

  • It would be more useful to own and control your data and not just transfer it from one greedy big corp to another (all of which will sell you out to the highest bidder).
    Something like Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project for a decentralized web (https://github.com/solid/)

    From Github:
    Specifically, Solid is:

    A tech stack -- a set of complementary standards and data formats/vocabularies that together provide capabilities that are currently available only through centralized social media services (think Facebook/Twit

  • Perhaps some motivated individual will come up with a way to use this ideal to overwrite your data on every major service with zeroes. A standard API for personal data might be a good thing, if it comes with a delete function.

  • Seriously, this is a problem? I thought the data got transferred with no problem. I thought I was the only one who had trouble accessing my data.

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