Tech giants, including Facebook, promise to facilitate data portability

Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have decided to collaborate to facilitate the portability of personal data of users who would like to transfer their data from one service to another, they announced Friday.

This project called "Data Transfer Project" aims to "help users move their personal data safely and smoothly between service providers," says Microsoft in a blog post, while technology groups are regularly criticized about their use of the personal data of their users.

Currently, some online services and social networks, including Facebook, already allow to download to his computer all his data: photos, messages, contacts, documents etc.

But it is not necessarily obvious or even possible to re-download these files to another service because they are not technologically compatible, making de facto impossible to leave a service or a social network to choose another without losing all its data.

Hence the idea with "Data Transfer Project" to create a common open-source platform that allows services to transfer data directly via a compatible digital format, explain groups in blog posts, calling other companies to join this initiative.

The "General Data Protection Regulation" (GDPR), which entered into force in the European Union in May, provides, among other new rights for Internet users, the principle of "data portability".

Personal data and their use by technology companies are particularly sensitive topics, especially since the Cambridge Analytica scandal that broke out in March around Facebook user data.

These groups therefore multiply advertisements and initiatives intended to show their willingness to be more transparent.