Data transfer project of Tech giants goes live

CALIFORNIA, U.S. - In a bid to encourage other platforms to adopt the new technology, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter have announced the Data Transfer Project (DTP).

DTP is 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.

The four tech giants will open source the code, and are hoping others will adopt to the new technology and help create an interconnected web where users can easily move data from platform to platform with ease.

Such a platform, experts claim, will help avoid situations where users have to set up profiles over and over again on each site that they register on.

However, the DTP framework is being touted for its other uses too, and the four tech giants have pointed out that the technology 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.

Further, all the four companies released a scientific paper that they had been working on, in which they said, “The DTP framework will work on existing APIs and authorization mechanisms to access data to access and convert data into a common format and will require minimal modifications from participants.”

Further, the paper pointed out that all the security features are inbuilt, and a governance body will also be created to oversee the framework's future development.

According to Brian Willard, Software Engineer and Greg Fair, Product Manager at Google, "Our prototype already supports data transfer for several product verticals including: photos, mail, contacts, calendar, and tasks. These are enabled by existing, publicly available APIs from Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, Remember the Milk, and Smugmug.”

Meanwhile, Craig Shank, Vice President for Corporate Standards at Microsoft said, "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.”

Steve Satterfield, Privacy & Public Policy Director at Facebook added, "These are the kinds of issues the Data Transfer Project will tackle. The Project is in its early stages, and we hope more organizations and experts will get involved.”

And Damien Kieran, Data Protection Officer at Twitter said, "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.”