Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter launch an open source project for data transfer

Technology giants Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter have come together to launch an open source initiative that will optimize the way data is transferred between platforms today. His name is Data Transfer Project (DTP), and according to the official announcement of the project, it will allow users to transfer data directly from one service to another, without the need for download it and download it again.

The system was launched with support for image transfer, emails, contacts, calendars and tasks, and according to the official version:

DTP is an open source initiative to encourage the participation of as many suppliers as possible. The DTP will improve the ecosystem of data portability by reducing the load of infrastructure for service providers and users, which should increase the number of services offering portability. Protocols and DTP methodology allow the direct transfer of service data to the service with optimized engineering work.

Although many file transfers promised by the DTP can be done in other ways, the idea with this project is to become a more robust and flexible alternative to APIs. clbadics.

The project's white paper, available on Github, outlines the scope, ensuring that much of the code base consists of "adapters." able to translate APIs into an interoperable transfer, which allows Instagram data to be transferred to the Flickr platform and vice versa. In addition, the engineers built a system to encrypt the data in transit, issuing the keys for each transaction.

In particular, DTP focuses on a single transfer system instead of a continuous interoperability system driven by many APIs. The hope of the companies involved is to allow the connection between two user-oriented interfaces to import and export files directly.

Currently, there are tools for downloading data, but these tools rarely connect to other services. The new Data Protection Legislation in Europe (GDPR) speaks of the need for tools to offer all the information available on a user, which means that this service is much more complete and ideal than what can be obtained at from an API