Your personal data is under constant attack. A week doesn’t go by without news of yet another massive personal data breach. The only person who can’t get at your data, it seems, is you. Google, in partnership with Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook, will be changing that with the open-source Data Transfer Project (DTP). This project is developing tools that will enable consumers to transfer their data directly from one service to another.
This builds on Google’s previous work for transferring data between individual cloud data storage services: Download Your Data, aka Takeout, which users can use to download a machine-readable copy of the data they have stored in over 50 Google products. With Download your Data, you can also transfer your Google Drive files directly to your Dropbox, Box, or MS OneDrive accounts
DTP’s goal is to enable a connection between any two public-facing product interfaces for importing and exporting data directly using common application programming interfaces (APIs). The DTP was developed to test concepts and feasibility of transferring specific types of user data between online services.
The DTP will be powered by “adapters” which will convert proprietary data formats into a small number of canonical formats known as “Data Models.” Data within these models will then be used to transfer data from system to system.