"Data Transfer Project": What's Hiding behind the Idea – Digital

• Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Twitter have introduced a new project for the export of personal data
• Personal profiles as well as files such as music playlists will be copied to a new provider in one only click. [19659002AincorporatesinthewysignalentavolontheCompetitionbutthenprovideextremelydataLoad

If Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter together have something to announce, the entire Internet affected. This is also true for the "Data Transfer Project", presented by companies on Friday.

This is "data portability", an essential element of the European Data Protection Directive. In summary, it is the possibility of moving from platform A to platform B.

Up to now, it was a little embarrassing: a user could download his data, but then had to cache it on his computer so to download it elsewhere. In the case of photos or documents, for example, this is often tedious and tedious. If you want to change your music streaming service, you must use a third-party application to export albums and playlists.

The purpose of the "Data Transfer Project" is to simplify these changes. For example, if you want to copy your Instagram photos to the Flickr Yahoo photo service, you can do it with one click. The same applies, for example, when copying data from Google to Microsoft.

An open software kit provides the basic code for online portal and application operators to create their own adapters

Here are some examples of possible data transfers:

• Exporting Playlists when switching to a music delivery provider
• Direct upload of social media photos to image album providers for printing
• The cloud service provider went bankrupt. Cloud Provider B builds an adapter so that A's clients can export their data.
• The Supermarket Association agrees that customers can transfer their Merchant X purchase history to Merchant Y, not in their loyalty program Start with Zero

In the end, the "data transfer project "Should become a new standard, which immediately indicates a willingness to comply with the European Data Protection Directive beyond the prescribed level. In addition, support for data portability is an argument against the claim to seek a monopoly position and captivate the user to his own services.

The question of whether the standard will be accepted depends on the continuation of participation. Players like Amazon, Apple and Dropbox are not involved yet.

For the technology giants, data portability is risky in that it makes it easier for customers to go to start-ups or competitors. In practice, however, the data flow could be directed to larger companies, for example by submitting small cloud service providers or extending to new areas of activity where customers have already accumulated data that they then transfer to them.

"Unlike many other interfaces, it is not designed for a constant exchange of data between services, but for a one-off export, that is, a client failover. "

Paul-Olivier Dehaye from the PersonalData.IO organization SZ a "valuable experience, but that falls too short". It recalls that the European Data Protection Directive does not cover all data collected, for example the assessment of the browsing behavior of Facebook and Google users

As a result, these data were stored only on the servers of the companies. "The data that can be exported with these tools are only those that a company does not consider strategically important."