Google has committed $3 million over the next five years to the Data Transfer Project, as well as hundreds of hours of its engineers’ labour. In 2018, Google, Facebook (now Meta), Microsoft, and Twitter announced the Data Transfer Project, which focused on developing tools to assist consumers. “transfer data directly from one service to another, without needing to download and re-upload it.”
According to Google, the fresh financing will be used to create open source frameworks that enable more forms of data transfer and allow more firms and organisations to join the project. People who don’t have high-speed internet, unlimited mobile data plans, or a personal device with extra storage may find data transfer difficult.
“In 2018, we launched the Data Transfer Project (DTP), an open source collaboration with Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Twitter and SmugMug to simplify data portability for people around the world,” says the company.
“On average, we see 8.2 million exports per month with Google Takeout and in 2021, more than 400 billion files were exported, which has doubled since 2019,” the company has stated.
Unlike typical ways of moving files from one provider to another, which necessitate good broadband or the use of mobile data plans, the project allows users to simply authorise a copy of their data to be moved to a new service without having to first download it to a personal device. This allows customers to try new services without having to worry about running out of storage space.
“We will also continue to improve our own tools, like Google Takeout, including adding new ways to move your files to different services with DTP technology,” says Google.
