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Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter Launch the Data Transfer Project (venturebeat.com)
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.
Is this to avoid antitrust rulings such as we've seen recently against Google? If so, great. Looks like the pressure was working.
>> "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.
Can I delete my data, like my porn hub account data? Not that I'd have any reason to want to get rid of that, or even an account, haha.
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I'd be more willing to admit to having a PornHub account than a Facebook account.
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...
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.
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How about keeping them all blind with different identities for each so you can know who sold your data to a Spammer or worse?
Trading data is currently hard because we all use different formats, we will all save money selling^H^H^Htrading your data in a single compatible format. We can make it open source so those poor smucks can help us make money on their data while providing free labor.
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.)
Facebook sends you a confirmation email after your data is deleted.
Whether you trust it or not is not an issue you brought up
"The security implications of this are awe inspiring."
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.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Not really, you don't need to share your internal data structure. thats what interfaces are for.
Can you get them to transfer your data to /dev/null? I sincerely think that's the best option for everyone.
After seeing the crazy stuff other people found when they did the personal info download thing from Facebook i tried it myself, and it was practically empty. So either:
1: Facebook is lying about what they put in the report and everybody else is colluding with Facebook by saying that their reports show a lot of data.
2: Facebook has individually singled me out because I'm special for some reason and is individually manipulating my report.
3: Facebook actually has almost no data on me because i post nothing on there (and practically never log in anyways) and outside of the occasional photo tag my friends say nothing about me on Facebook because they know i don't use it, so what's the point?
So given the alternatives of a massive conspiracy involving (at least) thousands of people or believing that i'm a unique special snowflake who's vitally important to Facebook for some reason, i'm going with "Facebook doesn't know anything about me."
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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/Twitter/LinkedIn/many others), such as identity, authentication and login, authorization and permission lists, contact management, messaging and notifications, feed aggregation and subscription, comments and discussions, and more.
A Specifications document that describes a REST API that extends those existing standards, contains design notes on the individual components used, and is intended as a guide for developers who plan to build servers or applications.
A set of servers that implement this specification.
A test suite for testing and validating Solid implementations.
An ecosystem of social apps, identity providers and helper libraries (such as solid.js) that run on the Solid platform.
A community providing documentation, discussion (see the solid gitter channel), tutorials and talks/presentations.
Standards Used
The Solid platform uses the following standards.
RDF 1.1 (Resource Description Framework) (see also RDF Primer) is heavily used in Solid data models. By default, the preferred RDF serialization format is Turtle. Alternative serialization formats such as JSON-LD and RDFa can also be used.
The WebID 1.0 (Web Identity and Discovery) standard is used to provide universal usernames/IDs for Solid apps, and to refer to unique Agents (people, organizations, devices). See also the WebID interoperability notes for an overview of how WebID relates to other authentication and identity protocols.
WebIDs, when accessed, yield WebID Profile documents (in Turtle and other RDF formats).
The FOAF vocabulary is used both in WebID profiles, and in specifying Access Control lists (see below).
Authentication (for logins, page personalization and more) is done via the WebID-TLS protocol. WebID-TLS extends WebID Profiles to include references to the subject's public keys in the form of X.509 Certificates, using Cert Ontology 1.0 vocabulary. The authentication sequence is done using the HTTP over TLS protocol. Unlike normal HTTPS use cases, WebID-TLS is done without referring to Certificate Authority hierarchies, and instead encourages host server-signed (or self-signed) certificates.
In Solid, certificate creation is typically done in the browser using the HTML5 keygen element, to provide a one-step creation and certificate publication user experience.
Authorization and access lists are done using Basic Access Control ontology (see also the WebAccessControl wiki page for more details).
Solid uses the Linked Data Platform (LDP) standard (see also LDP Primer) extensively, as a standard way of reading and writing generic Linked Data resources.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I'm on Facebook. I have a profile. I just don't use it. I'd certainly believe Facebook is gathering some information about me from other people, but if so they haven't managed to correlate it back to my account yet. If i've actually tricked Facebook into thinking that i'm two different people, that may actually be even better?
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Because their shitty nosql architecture will not support it. Try searching a document database on random shit. It is all tied to user keys.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
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.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
So again, Facebook is telling everyone else that it knows lots of information about them, but they're lying specifically to me and claiming that they don't in my case. What's their motivation? Why am i special?
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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.