data portability

Italy’s competition watchdog has opened an investigation into Google over concerns it has abused a dominant position by hindering data portability rights which are afforded to individuals under the European…

Google faces fresh antitrust probe in Italy after data portability complaint

There’s a new alliance in town: the Data Cloud Alliance. Founded by Google Cloud, Accenture, Confluent, Databricks, Dataiku, Deloitte, Elastic, Fivetran, MongoDB, Neo4j, Redis and Starburst, the group’s mission is…

Google, Databricks, Fivetran, Redis and others launch the Data Cloud Alliance

Google has signalled it’s dialling up efforts around portability, announcing a plan yesterday to spend $3 million and “hundreds of hours” of its engineers’ time over the next five years…

Google dials up focus on portability ahead of rule changes

Agreeing a new data transfer agreement with the US is a “high priority” for the EU, Margrethe Vestager, the bloc’s executive VP for digital strategy, said yesterday — but she…

Privacy Shield 2.0 is ‘high priority’ but ‘not easy’, warns EU’s Vestager

Facebook announced that it has added two new destinations for when you want to move your data from the social network, including shifting images to Photobucket and event listings to…

Facebook adds Photobucket and Google Calendar to its data portability options

Facebook today announced a new feature that will allow users to export their Facebook posts and notes to a number of third-party services. Although the company has long since offered…

Facebook now lets users export posts and notes to Google Docs, Blogger and WordPress.com

Featured Article

MIT professor wants to overhaul ‘The Hype Machine’ that powers social media

“I think that having objective sources of fact checking are important. We know that fact-checking does reduce the belief in and sharing of fake information.”

MIT professor wants to overhaul ‘The Hype Machine’ that powers social media

Facebook’s photo and video portability tool has added support for two more third party services for users to send data via encrypted transfer — namely: cloud storage providers Dropbox and…

Facebook’s photo porting tool adds support for Dropbox and Koofr

Facebook is considering expanding the types of data its users are able to port directly to alternative platforms. In comments on portability sent to US regulators ahead of an FTC hearing…

Facebook signals expansion to portability tools ahead of FTC hearing

More worries for TikTok: A European data watchdog that’s landed the biggest blow on a tech giant to date — slapping Google with a $57M fine last year (upheld in…

TikTok is being investigated by France’s data watchdog

Facebook’s photo transfer tool is now available globally half a year on from an initial rollout in Europe, the company said today. The data portability feature enables users of the…

All Facebook users can now access a tool to port data to Google Photos

The European Commission is asking for views on how online platforms should be regulated in future, launching a public consultation today on the forthcoming Digital Services Act (DSA). This pan-EU…

Europe asks for views on platform governance and competition tools

Facebook is today rolling out a tool that will allow users in the U.S. and Canada to export their Facebook photos and videos to Google Photos. This data portability tool…

Facebook now allows users in the US & Canada to export photos and videos to Google Photos

It’s not friend portability, but Facebook has announced the launch today of a photo transfer tool to enable users of its social network to port their photos directly to Google’s…

Facebook launches a photo portability tool, starting in Ireland

Facebook’s head of global spin and policy, former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, will give a speech later today providing more detail of the company’s plan to set up…

Facebook makes another push to shape and define its own oversight

A year on from Europe’s flagship update to the pan-EU data protection framework the Commission has warned that too many privacy policies are still too hard to read and has…

Privacy policies are still too horrible to read in full

Featured Article

Friend portability is the must-have Facebook regulation

Choice for consumers compels fair treatment by corporations. When people can easily move to a competitor, it creates a natural market dynamic coercing a business to act right. When we can’t, other regulations just leave us trapped with a pig in a fresh coat of lipstick. That’s why as the…

Friend portability is the must-have Facebook regulation

European privacy campaigner Max Schrems has filed a fresh batch of strategic complaints at tech giants, including Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Spotify and YouTube. The complaints, filed via his nonprofit privacy…

Privacy campaigner Schrems slaps Amazon, Apple, Netflix, others with GDPR data access complaints

A win for privacy on LinkedIn could be a big loss for businesses, recruiters and anyone else expecting to be able to export the email addresses of their connections. LinkedIn…

LinkedIn cuts off email address exports with new privacy setting

The Data Transfer Project is a new team-up between tech giants to let you move your content, contacts, and more across apps. Founded by Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft, the…

Facebook, Google and more unite to let you transfer data between apps

Remember Instapaper? The Pinterest-owned, read-it-later bookmarking service is taking a break in Europe — apparently while it works on achieving compliance with the region’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, which will…

Instapaper on pause in Europe to fix GDPR compliance “issue”

Two weeks ago TechCrunch called on Instagram to build an equivalent to Facebook’s “Download Your Information feature so if you wanted to leave for another photo sharing network, you could.…

Instagram launches “Data Download” tool to let you leave

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Facebook shouldn’t block you from finding friends on competitors

Twitter, Vine, Voxer, MessageMe. Facebook has repeatedly cut off competitors from its feature for finding your Facebook friends on their apps… after jumpstarting its own social graph by convincing people to upload their Gmail contacts. Meanwhile, Facebook’s Download Your Information tool merely exports a text list of friends’ names you…

Facebook shouldn’t block you from finding friends on competitors

Mark Zuckerberg’s flimsy defense when congress asked about a lack of competition to Facebook has been to cite that the average American uses eight social apps. But that conveniently glosses…

Zuckerberg owns or clones most of the “8 social apps” he cites as competition

It’s hard to #DeleteFacebook with no viable alternative, but at least you can export all your data. There’s no such option on Instagram. That lack of data portability puts users…

Instagram traps data without a Download Your Information tool

Facebook is facing calls from consumer groups to make the European Union’s incoming GDPR data protection framework the “baseline standard for all Facebook services”. The update to the bloc’s data…

Facebook urged to make GDPR its “baseline standard” globally
AI

WTF is GDPR?

Within a matter of months, the General Data Protection Regulation will apply across the EU and business processing citizens’ data will need to be sure they’re compliant. We explain the…

WTF is GDPR?

Lost in all the buzz around Google+ is an important new feature rolled out alongside it that makes it way easier to take all your data out of Google. It…

Editor’s note: Today the DataPortability Project announces PortabilityPolicy.org – the result of a 16 month effort that it hopes the industry will embrace. This guest post explains what a Portability…

The software industry is still figuring out the right balance between open and closed, but we at the DataPortability Project believe that communication is the first step. Tell your visitors…