[HN Gopher] Data Transfer Project by Apple, Facebook, Google, Mi...
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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.
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