Catalin Cimpanu* says Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have announced they will work together on an initiative to create data portability between platforms.
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter will collaborate on the Data Transfer Project (DTP), an initiative to create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that users of their sites and others can easily migrate data from one platform to another.
After open-sourcing the code, the four tech giants hope that other platforms will adopt their new technology and help create an interconnected web where users can easily move data from platform to platform without headaches and avoid situations where they have to set up profiles over and over again at each site they register.
But the DTP framework is also useful for other things.
For example, the four companies say it could be leveraged to build tools and software to extract and back up data stored in social media profiles, or for creating tools that wipe out a user’s social presence.
DTP leverages existing APIs
According to a scientific paper released by the four companies working on the DTP, the framework will work on existing application programming interfaces (APIs) and authorisation mechanisms to access and convert data into a common format and will require minimal modifications from participants.
Security features are baked in, and a governance body will also be created to oversee the framework’s future development.
The DTP framework’s source code is available on GitHub.
DTP already supports a few export types, online platforms
“Our prototype already supports data transfer for several product verticals including: photos, mail, contacts, calendar, and tasks,” said Brian Willard, Software Engineer and Greg Fair, Product Manager at Google.
“These are enabled by existing, publicly available APIs from Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, Remember the Milk, and Smugmug.”
“For people on slow or low bandwidth connections, service-to-service portability will be especially important where infrastructure constraints and expense make importing and exporting data to or from the user’s system impractical if not nearly impossible,” said Craig Shank, Vice President for Corporate Standards at Microsoft.
“These are the kinds of issues the Data Transfer Project will tackle,” said Steve Satterfield, Privacy & Public Policy Director at Facebook.
“The Project is in its early stages, and we hope more organisations and experts will get involved.”
“This will take time, but we are very excited to work with innovators and passionate people from other companies to ensure we are putting you first,” said Damien Kieran, Data Protection Officer at Twitter.
* Catalin Cimpanu is the Security News Editor for Bleeping Computer. He tweets at @campuscodi.
This article first appeared at www.bleepingcomputer.com.
