Social media giant Facebook announced several updates to make data portability more seamless for billions of users, as the company aims to provide people with choice and control over their data.
The company said that it has rebuilt its data portability tool from the ground up and now, it’s easier for people to transfer a copy of their data from Facebook to other services via its Transfer Your Information (TYI) feature.
These updates include user experience improvements, two new destinations (Photobucket and Google Calendar), and one new data type: Facebook Events.
“People can now more easily see what destinations and what data types are supported, along with greater transparency around the status of each transfer, including making it easier to retry certain transfers,” said Hadi Michel, Product Manager at Facebook.
Other updates include the ability to simultaneously start multiple data transfers for one destination and filters that allow people to more precisely select the data they want to transfer.
“We’re also working with developers to expand the selection of data types and destinations we support,” the company said.
However, to ensure user data is safe both while it is being transferred and after, “we’re continuing to call for government regulation to make clearer rules about who is responsible for protecting that data as it is transferred to different services”.
The updates are part of Facebook’s open-source Data Transfer Project, supporting innovation in data portability across the industry and pushing the technology forward.
