Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter Partner For A ‘Data Project’ That Will Help You Easily Move Your Data Between Various Platforms

Google has joined hands with tech giants such as Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter to launch an ambitious initiative that will make it much easier for users to transfer their data securely between different services, ranging from social media accounts to music streaming service platforms. The initiative called the Data Transfer Project (DTP), will “allow the participating service provider to create channels that will let users seamlessly move their data in the cloud between different services without any security risks”.

First envisioned back in 2017, the Data Transfer Project is an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform which grants users the flexibility to transfer their data across different services. The official white paper says;

The Data Transfer Project uses services’ existing APIs and authorization mechanisms to access data. It then uses service specific adapters to transfer that data into a common format, and then back into the new service’s API

The DTP is still an underdevelopment project, which is “not quite ready for everyone to use yet,” though the existing code for the project has been made available on GitHub, along with a white paper describing its scope.

There are multiple case scenarios where the DTP might prove to be of great use to users. For example, users will be able to initiate a direct transfer of media files from their social media account to another service with just a few clicks. Users back up their data in the cloud and then download it on the new service they sign-up for, in case the old service provider raises data sharing violation and compliance issues.

Moreover, it will also prove to be extremely helpful for users who eventually find out that don’t agree with a certain privacy policy of a music streaming service and they want to stop using it immediately, but don’t want to lose the playlists they have created.

Using DTP they could use the export functionality of the original provider to save a copy of their playlists to the cloud. This enables them to import the playlists to a new provider, or multiple providers, once they decide on a new service.