from Hacker News

Data Transfer Project by Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc.

by aleyan on 3/5/21, 6:27 PM with 69 comments

  • by dabernathy89 on 3/5/21, 7:27 PM

    Would potentially be useful if you could take advantage of this _after_ you've been excommunicated from a service for whatever unknowable violation you committed.
  • by dang on 3/5/21, 10:35 PM

    If curious, past threads:

    Data-Transfer-Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23887000 - July 2020 (27 comments)

    An open source platform promoting universal data portability - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17596146 - July 2018 (10 comments)

    The Data Transfer Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17580502 - July 2018 (47 comments)

    The Data Transfer Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17574707 - July 2018 (50 comments)

    Others?

  • by shuntress on 3/5/21, 9:22 PM

    For me, it is difficult to pin down what exactly this type of thing should be.

    Is it purely for data migration? ie: I am closing my facebook account and want to extract an archive copy of all my contacts, posts, uploads, etc

    Is it better to function as a direct transfer? How could it possibly make sense to transfer my old hackernews comments to my new facebook account?

    The more I think about it, the more I just come back to email. Not necessarily the specific implementations, just the high level design: From any domain, I should be able to send a direct message to a contact in any domain. They should be able to view any basic[0] content I post (text, images, calendar) and respond in kind with basic content regardless of the domain either of us use.

    I'm not sure that fully-federated-everything is the best answer and I would expect most reasonable implementations to include "Sign in at facebook.com for the best experience" or whatever.

    I can't personally imagine the ideal system yet but I assume it must be somewhere in the unmapped middle ground between Facebook/Twitter/Apple silos and thousands of impossible-to-trust sloppily-federated micro-domains hosted by random individuals.

    Edit: As an aside, the issue of authentication seems critically important with no clear designs that would provide a secure and usable solution. Though, the issue of account name squatters does already exist, it is relatively manageable with so few domains and no inter-operability between domains.

    [0] This concept of "basic" data seems to be more-or-less captured by the "verticals" described here https://datatransferproject.dev/documentation

  • by ncw96 on 3/5/21, 7:15 PM

    Possibly related to Apple’s recently added feature to transfer photos from iCloud to Google Photos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26344739
  • by nabla9 on 3/5/21, 6:45 PM

    After antitrust action from regulators and lawmakers from EU and the US seems inevitable, the contributors to the Data Transfer Project now, suddenly, believe portability and interoperability are central to innovation.
  • by hosh on 3/6/21, 1:54 AM

    An alternative would be to self-host with something like sandstorm.io, and granting temporary permission to cloud providers to access some of the data, on a per-grain basis.

    I have no idea how the economics would work with this.

  • by kyrra on 3/5/21, 8:24 PM

    FYI, talked about 3-years ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17574707

    Nice to see it's finally landing.

  • by not_knuth on 3/5/21, 8:11 PM

    Can someone please eli5 how this relates to Solid [0]? Is it an alternative? Completely unrelated? Would they work together -- and if, how?

    [0] https://solidproject.org/

  • by feralimal on 3/6/21, 11:27 AM

    For me, this touches on everything that is wrong with the setup we find we have. How we lose our privacy and are beholden to our corporations and governments.

    * We are separated from our data. It should be ours, and we should be able to allow for corporates to access it if we choose to and we are able to understand the usage.

    * The options we are given here are to be able to move our data from one corporate entity to another. Hardly the solution individual ownership of one's data and privacy.

    * We are looking to government legislation to make this right for us, but governments like having access to all the data that the corporations share with them. Governments are in the business of managing populations at scale - the more information they have, the better modelling, nudging, manipulations of the population they can do. Basically corporate and governmental interests align.

    * Not to forget that corporations lobby governmental entities for the legislation they want. Even if the legislation states one thing, there are ALWAYS backdoors that are understood.

    I'm sorry to say that the attack on privacy is a coordinated one with governments AND corporations. If you hope that this time the government will write better legislation or that corporates will do the right thing, you are mistaken. They only care about being perceived to do the right thing - so public relations.

    If you are aware of all that, and have a solution, I would be interested to hear. I think any solution would involve individuals acting very defensively about their data. Any solution that begs government or corporations for better action this time is doomed.

  • by efwfwef on 3/5/21, 9:20 PM

    I just want to be able to airdrop things from mac to windows or nadroid devices
  • by derg on 3/5/21, 7:25 PM

    I would very much like the ability to transfer between services but also completely delete once I've backed up locally.
  • by nixpulvis on 3/5/21, 11:06 PM

    What would really help is a STDlib across major languages for the core data models. Think the programmer's equivalent of iLife. You're not going to sell me on a big REST structure until I'm happy with the objects I'm getting.
  • by layoutIfNeeded on 3/5/21, 10:09 PM

    Is this going to be open to end users, or limited to the existing tech oligopoly?
  • by john2010 on 3/6/21, 11:34 AM

    I wonder how they vet any small companies? Just like stealing/selling Chrome/firefox extensions how will this work if a small company withe nextcloud offers migration - then it is 'acquired' by 'evil' company.

    https://datatransferproject.dev/faq

    > Q: Why aren’t there more, smaller companies in the Project?

  • by zelon88 on 3/6/21, 12:04 AM

    Notably absent is Amazon.
  • by futuregirlskies on 3/6/21, 12:33 AM

    We need this for music streaming services
  • by marcodiego on 3/5/21, 9:26 PM

    Even office suite market's money today is on on-line collaboration. Microsoft would benefit tremendously with a decent open source reader for Microsoft Office formats.
  • by sebastien_b on 3/5/21, 9:54 PM

    I wonder if this is in response to (perceived) threats of pending regulation...
  • by ineedasername on 3/5/21, 9:45 PM

    Unless you can choose to move data instead of copy data from service to service then all this is doing is making it real easy for every service to get access to all of the big pool if data that every other service has on you.
  • by alexashka on 3/5/21, 7:27 PM

    > DTP is still in development and is not quite ready for everyone to use yet

    Well, ok then.