In an effort to make personal data more manageable across platforms and services, Apple has joined forces with the Data Transfer Project.
The Verge is reporting that, along with a few other new additions to companies and features, the Data Transfer Project has confirmed that Apple will be joining the initiative. The Data Transfer Project began in 2018 and it’s an open-source effort to become the go-to service-to-service data portability platform.
If it takes off, it will make it easier for users to transfer their data from one online service provider to another.
Apple is one of the newest members of the group. It joins the stacked ranks that include Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and others.
As far as Apple is concerned and what it’s building, the report indicates this will be a tool that will make it easy for Apple users to add or remove data from iCloud. This will be similar to what Facebook offers with its Access Your Information tool and what Google has with Takeout. In both cases, the tools allow the user to quickly and easily download data to a hard drive.
The ultimate goal for the Data Transfer Project is to skip as many intermediate steps as possible, with users able to at some point in the future just get their data from one service to another. For instance, being able to quickly and easily transfer a Facebook photo album to a Google Photos album.
It remains unknown when a consumer-facing product will be ready to go, as most of the work is still going strong behind-the-scenes. But either way, it’s good to see Apple jumping on board with the idea.