New Address

The Data Transfer Project wants to make it easier to move your data between social media sites.

- Nate Drake

Data portability and transparency are ongoing issues that plague all major social media giants. Who owns the data you post to your social media accounts? Can you get a copy of the data if you ask for it? If you had a copy, what could you do with it?

Many leading social media companies have APIs that let you extract and upload data, but the data formats tend to be dissimilar and proprietary, which means if you obtained the data, you couldn’t do much with it unless you are a programmer yourself and have plenty of time for personal coding.

Back in 2018, a few leading social media companies pledged to make an effort at addressing this problem. The result is the Data Transfer Project, which was recently rebranded and expanded as the Data Transfer Initiative [1]. The mission of the Data Transfer Project (and Initiative) is to support a common neutral format for social media data as it passes from one platform to another, as well as to provide the tools necessary for transforming data in and out of that format.

In the long term, the goal is for the user to be free from direct involvement in the migration. A user who wishes to move data from one platform (say Twitter) to another platform (say Facebook) will simply choose an option in the Facebook user interface, and the migration will happen automatically. According to the Data Transfer Project developers, the purpose of the project is to “Extend data portability beyond a user’s ability to download a copy of their data from their service provider (“provider”), to providing the user the ability to initiate direct transfer of their data into and out of any participating provider” [2].