New data portability tools bring us closer to the exit of Facebook

If you’re morbidly curious about the masses of data Facebook collects on you, then good news: earlier today, Facebook announcement that users could now move their data to two other destinations with the help of the Tool for transferring your information (TYI). Starting today, the company said, you can now move your photos to the Photobucket photo hosting site and any of your Facebook event listings to Google Calendar.

“To give people choice and control over their data, we’ve spent the last few months rebuilding our data portability tool from the ground up,” Hadi Michel, Facebook product manager, said in a blog post detailing the announcement. In addition to these new data destinations, Michel added, Facebook has also revamped its TYI interface to be “simpler and more intuitive”: now people can easily see which data formats are supported by which destinations. The new layout is also designed to make it easier for users to check the status of their individual transfers and try them again in cases where they are not completed.

“At Facebook, we plan to continue to provide our users with secure data portability features they can trust, ”continued Michel. “We’re also working with developers to broaden the selection of data types and destinations we support. “

Considering Facebook usual attitude As far as our data is concerned, this update is downright charitable. Facebook, as a business, has nothing less than a steel handle on pretty much all of our personal data, using everything from our income to our level of education to hammer us with targeted advertisements. To be able to resume at least some of this data appears to be a step in the right direction. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that Facebook still has a long, long way to go.

In a nutshell, data portability means exactly what it sounds like: giving users the freedom to upload their data from one platform and upload it to another. This requirementis part of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) since 2018. Following the entry into force of this law overseas, we have seen US lawmakers present their own views on a US data portability law, not to mention the serious interest of the Federal Trade Commission and Biden himself. And it’s not hard to see why: In theory, data portability not only gives users the power to manage their data on their own terms, but also allows them to cut corners on Facebook. obscene monopoly in the wider social media market. Yes some members of the Ant people The Facebook group wants go to a small social media startup to, uh, start a new group with new Ant Folks, that startup’s user base grows. Social ties flourish and diversify. Facebook gets competetion.

Despite how crap this all sounds for Facebook, the company has gone all out with some positive portability proposals. In a 2019 Washington Post Editorial, Zuckerberg wrote that any tight regulation should guarantee some degree of data portability.

“True data portability should be more like the way people use our platform to connect to an application than the existing ways of downloading an archive of your information,” he said. “But that requires clear rules about who is responsible for protecting information as it moves from department to department.”

Zuck continued to advocate for concrete US data port laws in the years that followed, while also developing his tools to allow users to do just that. Last summer, the company gave Facebookers around the world the power to directly upload their selfies and cat photos from Facebook. to Google Photos. Last April, Facebook extended this tool to allow users to take their text messages, notes and ramblings from their Facebook page to Blogger, Google Docs and WordPress. Today we have Photobucket and Google Calendar. And if today’s blog post is to be believed, these won’t be the last integrations Facebook is going to plug into its platform. From a privacy (and competition!) Standpoint, this all sounds really great, especially coming from a company like Facebook. But there is still a lot of work to be done.

While the ideal of data portability that many of us have been sold to is an ideal that would finally, thankfully, allow us to pack our bags and quitting Facebook for good, Facebook’s TYI tool fails to address some of the platform’s most important data sucking breaches. Even if you have never used a Facebook product in your life, tthe company will continue to follow you through large majority third-party apps and sites that you use anyway. And because Facebook continues to reliably track and target you, advertisers are unlikely to currently dependent on Facebook will see any reason to put their money elsewhere. As we saw with the lackluster boycott of Facebook ads last summer, most of the company’s business partners are either will not or just unable to take the risk that comes with marketing on a new platform. So even if we get all of our data back and bounce back, there’s a good chance Facebook is still getting paid. Yet the weakening Facebook user base is the only way to make it less attractive to partners.

Then there is the data porting tools themselves. Even if you don’t know how not very intuitive this is the case, it is only designed to process certain types of data that Facebook collects about each of us: pictures of our children, speeches we post on our feed at 3 a.m., or parties we forget about. ‘to go. These data points may seem like an intimate part of who we are, but they’re not worth much compared to some of the other data Facebook has on you, especially the platform’s. social graphic, which he uses to track who you know, who they or they know, and so on. This vast network of social connections is the secret sauce that makes Facebook creepy in recommending you to be friends with a guy you were sitting with in your Spanish class. Besides helping you find old friends you’ve lost touch with, this social graphic is also the backbone of some of Facebook’s hearts. ad targeting technology. The platform uses your reaction to a given ad to influence the ads seen by your roommates, parents, neighbors, or anyone else the social graphic has connected you with.

Facebook knows that these social links have a ton of financial value for marketers (and competitors), which is why it has shut down all portability with its social graph. back in 2013. Some economists have launched the idea that a more powerful way to start competition would be to introduce a way for users to download this social data out of Facebook and transport it elsewhere. Facebook retaliated that porting a person’s entire social history would do nothing but cause countless breaches of the privacy of users around the world.

It’s a fair point to do, and one with no easy answer, at least not yet. As more than one policy scholar has pointed out, the data for all of our social graphics is stored in Facebook’s systems in a format that only Facebook can read. The closest thing you or I could export from Facebook is a clear text list spelling out the names and dates of each Facebook login, and bring this list to a new one rising or established Platform. But as Techcrunch wrote back in 2018, it’s not always enough to find people you know. If you have a friend with a super generic name (like “John Smith”), you’re going to sift through lots of people with the same name until you find that person off of Facebook.

If the business is serious about embracing portability, EFF, Mozilla, and many of others have brainstormed where this can start. New Facebook friends can automatically (and consensually) share encrypted contact information with each other, and that data can be decrypted once one of them takes to a non-Facebook platform, for example. Or Facebook can combine TYI with data upload tools from platforms like YouTube or TikTok. These ideas are not perfect, but neither that’s what’s left with us right now: a social network where none of us can ever really stop for good because Facebook has spent most of its history slowly creeping into just about all sites on the web and most applications we all use. And all the while it’s promising us that’s what we wanted from the start.