
Data-Transfer-Project - roommini
https://engineering.fb.com/security/data-transfer-project/
======
strogonoff
Could someone either change title to “Facebook joins the Data Transfer Project
(2019)”, or change the URL to
[https://datatransferproject.dev](https://datatransferproject.dev)? It’s not
about a product or feature of Facebook, it’s about Facebook joining an
existing initiative so the title is between confusing and misleading.

I’m curious about the incentives. On one hand, it must be expensive to
implement this kind of universal data importer/exporter across your products;
on the other hand, this allows your users to switch to a competitor more
easily.

~~~
cxr
> I’m curious about the incentives.

If it's anything like Google Takeout, it's possible that it was employee-led.
(The contingent within Google that created Takeout is called Google Data
Liberation Front.)

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kfk
I think comments here are missing the point. Integrations are complicated and
expensive and this is a small step in making this easier. It competes with the
likes of zapier, blendoo and stichdata. The fact that ms, fb, apple and google
are doing this is in my opinion more revealing than the current state of this
product. Integrations are so painful for enterprise customers that companies
could build a significant competitive advantage on this. If this data transfer
takes off it could be a serious threat for software vendors that are knowingly
hard to integrate like SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.

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deanCommie
Genius. Open source it so that only the most committed nerds like us would
actually use this.

God forbid they actually put a BUTTON somewhere in the actual UI to initiate
the transfer. God forbid, people might actually USE THIS.

No build or usage instructions in teh README: [https://github.com/google/data-
transfer-project](https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project)

All the Documentation is instructions on how to build custom data transfer
projects for YOUR service rather than how to actually use it with Facebook and
Google Photos: [https://github.com/google/data-transfer-
project/tree/master/...](https://github.com/google/data-transfer-
project/tree/master/Documentation)

~~~
njsubedi
They seem to be still working on it. Other providers are still working on it,
so there's a possibility of everything you asked for. Documentation can be
added, and hopefully those buttons too.

~~~
PeterStuer
One has to wonder then: is this coordinated stalling?

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shubidubi
If you want to transfer your FB photos and videos to Google photos without the
extra work, just use this tool:
[https://www.facebook.com/dtp](https://www.facebook.com/dtp)

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nafey
Can't help but think the impending Antitrust investigations have hastened such
initiatives at FB.

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ersiees
I don’t understand. Why would Facebook or Twitter support that? Isn’t it only
bringing their monopolies in danger? Could someone explain, please.

~~~
ssss11
They need to _appear_ to have their customers’ (oops I meant users’) interests
in mind.

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flipbrad
GDPR Article 20:

"1\. 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, where: [...]

2\. In exercising his or her right to data portability pursuant to paragraph
1, the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted
directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible.

[3. ...]"

~~~
dane-pgp
I wonder if an EU court or anti-trust investigation might determine that this
right should allow for continuous data transfer between accounts, rather than
one-off transfers.

In theory, anything you post on Mastodon could be automatically cross-posted
on your Facebook page, so that your Facebook friends don't need a Fediverse
account and you don't ever need to visit Facebook.

The difficult part is that you really want to be able to see replies from your
Facebook friends, and Facebook will argue that these replies are "personal
data" belonging to those friends, not to you, so you can't ask for them to be
exported.

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treve
It looks like this is not a protocol, but maybe? a Java project with adapters
for different services.

I'd call it a step in the right direction, but given that this can live
entirely outside of Facebook infrastructure and tied to one language it's a
bit hard to see how much weight is put behind this.

I could be misinterpreting what I'm reading though.

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njsubedi
Isn't it interesting to see contacts and playlists as the first thing that
they mentioned? As far as I can remember, they allowed importing contacts from
other providers, and from user's devices from maybe day one.

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amelius
I want something that brings "events" outside Facebook's walls.

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fomine3
I'm curious what motivates but anyway it's awesome.

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ChicagoDave
This seems like one of the pieces of Skynet taking over the world.

~~~
harshitaneja
How is becoming a part of an open initiative to allow easier migration to a
competitor a piece of "Skynet taking over the world"?

~~~
ChicagoDave
"Easy transfer to a competitor" could also be easy merge of two multinational
corporations and their spy data. Easier access for the NSA.

Mostly I was joking.

