Data Transfer Project by Google

A lot of new online services ate cropping up every day, making our life a lot easier.

But it is always harder for users to switch to another product or service, which they think is better because the process usually involves downloading everything from one service and then re-uploading it all again to another.

Thanks to GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) a legal regulation by European Union that sets guidelines for the collection and processing of users' personal information by companies - many online services have started providing tools that allow their users to download their i just one click.

But that doesn't completely simplify and streamline the process if securely transferring your data around services.

To make this easier for users, four big tech companies - Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter have teamed up to launch a new open-source, service-to-service data portability platform, called the Data Transfer Project.

What is Data Transfer Project and How Does it Work?

Data Transfer Project (DTP) data portability protocol is a universal import/export standards that have been designed to give users a new way to move their data directly between platforms.

Data Transfer Project uses existing industry-standard infrastructure and authorization mechanisms, such as OAuth and REST, to access data into a common (canonical) format and re-uploaded it to new services.

"The DTP is powered by an ecosystem of adapters (Data Adapters and Authentication Adapters) that convert a range of proprietary formats into a small number of canonical formats (Data Models) useful for transferring data." the DTP describes.

Data Transfer Project - Security and Privacy

For security and privacy, the "responsibility is shared among all the participants" as describe in the above-shown table.

The data Transfer Project system design ensures that all credentials and user data remain encrypted both in transit and at rest, for which it uses "a form of perfect encrypted both in transit and st test, for which it uses "a form of perfect forward secrecy where a new unique key is generated for each transfer," ensuring that admins do not have access to the encryption key.