[HN Gopher] Data Transfer Project by Apple, Facebook, Google, Mi... ___________________________________________________________________ Data Transfer Project by Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. Author : aleyan Score : 117 points Date : 2021-03-05 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (datatransferproject.dev) (TXT) w3m dump (datatransferproject.dev) | ncw96 wrote: | Possibly related to Apple's recently added feature to transfer | photos from iCloud to Google Photos: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26344739 | thamer wrote: | Yes, that's exactly what it is. It's Apple's implementation of | DTP. | sebastien_b wrote: | I wonder if this is in response to (perceived) threats of pending | regulation... | nabla9 wrote: | 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. | jasonvorhe wrote: | Google and Twitter have been offering data exports for ages | though, but importing that data into different products often | required either purchasing shitty propriety software or using | scripts that were hacked together and abandoned on someone's | GitHub. Don't know if there's something similar for Microsoft | and Apple though, but in the end this is just a standardized | API on top of already existing APIs and no one involved had to | reinvent the wheel here. | | I'd be surprised if this wasn't a widely requested feature that | all involved companies have been ignoring in their backlogs for | too long and now they've accelerated this, got management | approval and finally managed to get a couple of senior | engineers together because of impending legislation that might | force their hand. | kspacewalk2 wrote: | >or using scripts that were hacked together and abandoned on | someone's GitHub. | | I think you meant to say 'thankfully provided by their | benevolent creators for my benefit'. | jasonvorhe wrote: | Obviously, yeah, that's actually something I should have | added. It just isn't a solution for most people who want to | switch from X to Z. But of course it's awesome of everyone | scripting and reversing these things, which takes a lot of | time. They definitely deserve praise and/or at least a | coffee. | crazygringo wrote: | Well yes, that's how it works. | | Laws create incentives and businesses respond rationally. | | I'm personally glad it works. | | Businesses are supposed to make money and lawmakers are | supposed to set the rules of the playing field to benefit | consumers. It's a good combination. | riantogo wrote: | Exactly. This where I disagree with the left camp when they | paint corporations as evil. No, big companies are not | inherently evil. They played by the rules that, you, in | congress laid out. It is foolish to expect a profit driven | entity to do things out of the goodness of their heart when | their competitors are utilizing the rules available to them. | It like saying a football team is evil because they are | physically tackling their opponents. | ElFitz wrote: | There are also numerous examples of companies blatantly and | knowingly ignoring the rules or lobbying to have them bent | to their wants. Or both. | adamcstephens wrote: | The "left" made laws, then the "right" weakened them and | stopped enforcing them. Corporations are not even playing | by the laws on the books now, especially the antitrust | laws. What's missing is the will to hold companies | accountable for breaking the laws that are destroying | competition. | riantogo wrote: | Right. What you are saying is that govt is being | ineffective in making and enforcing laws. They should | maybe focus on fixing that and less on "evil mega corp" | narrative to gain cheap political points. | orthecreedence wrote: | > It is foolish to expect a profit driven entity | | Yeah, this is the actual problem the left has: profit- | driven entities. Nobody cares about groups of people | working towards a common goal (ie, "corporations"). | | Of course profit-driven entities want to increase their | profits at all costs. What's desired is systemic change and | reorganization of production around different principles | beyond just profit (or rather, eliminating it entirely). No | leftists have a problem with companies themselves. | nabla9 wrote: | Both left and right populism personalizes things. | | Traditional leftist position is that evil is structural, | class etc. People are people. Changing structures fixes | problems. | | Traditional right position is that structures don't matter, | less the better. People are mainly poor because they are | lazy. Corporations are evil because they have bad people in | them. Remove those people and you fix things. | multiplegeorges wrote: | I think most people see acting entirely and solely in the | pursuit of maximizing profits as evil and they use | "corporations are evil" as a shorthand for that. | | That evil behaviour from corporations is largely due to the | focus on maximizing shareholder value to the exclusion of | all else. That's a fairly recent way of running a business | that came about around 1970, primarily from Milton | Friedman. | | I think most people expect a company to work towards | healthy profits, while also taking into account _all_ | stakeholders, not just shareholders, their business | interacts with. | | You're right in the sense that the rules are the way they | are, so corporations act within those rules. However, those | rules were largely put in place to make it easier to pursue | the maximization of profits and were pushed by corporate | lobbying. | | So, if an entity wants to act in an evil way, but is | constrained by rules, then gets those rules changed so it | can act evilly with impunity, surely that entity should be | seen as evil? | riantogo wrote: | I think we are both saying the same thing. The problem is | creating a weak set of rules (you can pay employees less, | you can fire at will, you can circumvent taxes, you can | pollute etc.), and then expecting one company to do more | when their competitors don't while both are competing in | the same race. I think congress has failed the people and | hide behind, "look at that evil corp". | | Heck, Zuckerberg is pleading congress to pass strict | privacy laws and Amazon is pushing for higher min wages. | The reason is that it will level the field and they don't | have alone play by a different set of rules and see users | go to competitors. | adamcstephens wrote: | Zuckerberg wants Congress to pass privacy laws only | because that may preempt state level laws. If the states | do it, there will be a mix of laws, some of which will | inevitably hurt Facebook. This is a common tactic and is | made easier by the easy money in DC. | riantogo wrote: | Sure. But it is also the right thing to do. Online | privacy laws is best at federal level (not state and | county levels). | nabla9 wrote: | The US took very long pause from this principle. | | It all started with Robert Bork and his book The Antitrust | Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox | [deleted] | not_knuth wrote: | 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/ | wmf wrote: | In Solid the primary copy of your data lives in a neutral | server and multiple apps can access it. In theory, since Solid | isn't really deployed and major apps will never be willing to | adopt it. | | With data portability you can export data from one app and | import it into another but there's no ongoing sync. | toomuchtodo wrote: | Neutral server ends up as a reconciliation engine for | eventual consistency if unable to gain enough traction to be | the source of truth. | glsdfgkjsklfj wrote: | solid is dumb. and something that only makes sense for a comp | sci from the 60s. everyone else who reads the project in simple | english will see how dumb it is today. | | in simple english: It is the dream project of whoever come up | with cookies. basically cookies as first party data that you | can download, upload, shared. All while having either the | trouble of hosting a lot of infrastructure (just like the | creators of email protocol thought everyone would do, ha!) or | relaying all that info to a 3rd party like google or facebook. | The nightmare scenario to everyone saying 3rd party cookies are | bad. | derg wrote: | I would very much like the ability to transfer between services | but also completely delete once I've backed up locally. | lostlogin wrote: | Me too. But the idea that FB could ever delete user data made | me snort, and I'm not sure the others are an awful lot better. | satyrnein wrote: | Isn't Facebook legally obligated by GDPR (for example) to | delete a user's data on request? Noncompliance is risky; it | only takes one disgruntled employee to cause you a lot of | pain. | bumbada wrote: | There is no way you can actually delete anything in the cloud, | because once it is in the cloud, it is not under your control | anymore. | | The ability to "delete" something is only apparent. You can | just tell the customer you have erased her data, but preserve | it anyway, not to mention other parties like secret services or | competitors, that could be interested on your data too. | | If you have valuable data, people(like the Chinese or | competitors) will offer your workers millions of dollars(or | just threaten them or you like 3 letter agencies) for access to | this data. | dane-pgp wrote: | A more significant development, I think, would be if online | services let you keep your various accounts permanently in | synch. That way you could write a post on one platform and know | that your followers on another platform would be able to see | it. | | Sadly that still wouldn't fix the problem that you have to | visit each platform to see responses from users that don't | similarly syndicate their own posts. That might lessen those | platform's concerns about implementing this automatic synching | feature, though, and take them a step closer to being properly | federated. | ElFitz wrote: | Ben from Stratechery touched on that recently. | | A good point he had is that this kind of thing would, | seemingly counter-intuitively (but it makes sense) strengthen | the incumbents and stifle both innovation and competition. | | Innovation -> Interoperability has a (maintenance) cost and | would probably quickly devolve to "lowest common denominator | functionality" while raising yet another barrier to entry for | new companies | | Competition -> Incumbents could pretty much just exploit new | companies as "market research" and gobble up all their | features and data if they deem the experiment successful, at | no cost | wmf wrote: | That's why the solution is federation. Data portability is a | kludge designed to draw attention away from federation. | dabernathy89 wrote: | 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. | shuntress wrote: | Presumably, compliance with this standard would enable the _" | here's your shit"_ part of _" here's your shit, now get out."_ | for your "excommunication". | ketamine__ wrote: | That's what Coinbase does. | nerpderp82 wrote: | That should be in the digital bill of rights. | g_p wrote: | It's in the GDPR - right to data portability (and associated | sections). I guess that's as close to a data bill of rights | as we have right now. | ravenstine wrote: | I'm curious... has anyone drafted a digital bill of rights? | If not, maybe someone should in order to get the ball | rolling. | jonhohle wrote: | I've wanted one for the better part of a decade. It would | be great to have something like the first-sale doctrine for | digital goods, some method of eliminating phone-home DRM | when a business shuts down or service is discontinued, etc. | alexashka wrote: | > DTP is still in development and is not quite ready for everyone | to use yet | | Well, ok then. | efwfwef wrote: | I just want to be able to airdrop things from mac to windows or | nadroid devices | layoutIfNeeded wrote: | Is this going to be open to end users, or limited to the existing | tech oligopoly? | ineedasername wrote: | 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. | enos_feedler wrote: | Isn't it enough to just copy and then delete origin account? | shuntress wrote: | 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 | marcodiego wrote: | 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. | dang wrote: | 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? | kyrra wrote: | FYI, talked about 3-years ago here: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17574707 | | Nice to see it's finally landing. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-03-05 23:00 UTC)