Google has joined hands with Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook on a new open-source initiative called the Data Transfer Project. The new project aims to make data transfer across online platforms more efficient.
The search engine giant said that the Data Transfer Project is dedicated to developing tools that will allow customers to transfer their data directly from one service to another, without needing to download and re-upload it.
The new project can be called an evolution of data export tools offered by Google and several other companies. These existing tools allow users to download the content like photos, videos, etc. but don’t provide any direct method to move the content from one to another service. Data Transfer Project will address this challenge by enabling implementation of adapters.
Currently, the adapters have been developed for seven service providers across five types of consumer data. Users can transfer their data directly to their Dropbox, Box, Microsoft OneDrive, and Google Drive.
To ensure data security and privacy, the services will first need to allow data transfer between them, and then authenticate each account independently. The credentials and user data will be encrypted both in transit and at rest. Google mentioned that a new and unique key is generated for each transfer.
“Additionally, the framework allows partners to support any authorization mechanism they choose. This enables partners to leverage their existing security infrastructure when authorizing accounts,” wrote Google in a blog post.
All the four companies are actively working on it to develop more tools that can enable users to convert the proprietary APIs of any service to and from a set of standard data formats.
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It will be interesting to see if the companies achieve their vision of making data transfer project accessible for all the web services out there. A lot will depend on the other companies if they agree to support the envision. Some companies might allow limited support.
