Facebook on Tuesday released a new in-app feature that it says will allow users to transfer their photos and videos directly to other social media platforms or media hosting services, including Google Photos. The new tool is part of the company’s so-called Data Transfer Project that was originally announced last year as a collaboration between Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Twitter to enable users easily transfer their data between various online services.
In an official blog post announcing the launch of the new feature, Facebook said that it has just started rolling out in Ireland, but is expected to be available globally next year. “The goal of this project has been to make it easier for services of any size to securely make direct transfers for data portability from one service to another and to make the process simpler for the people who use these services”, said the company.
In case you don’t know it already, the Data Transfer Project was launched in 2018 to create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that all individuals across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want. The project does this by providing an open source library that any service can use to run and manage direct transfers on behalf of users.
To mitigate security risks, the transfer mechanism uses the OAuth protocol to authenticate people with the destination service. The company also said that users will need to re-enter their password to initiate a transfer, so that unauthorized folks won’t be able to download anything to their accounts. “We also send an email to the registered account once a transfer has begun, which allows people a chance to stop the transfer if they change their mind or do not recognize the request”, said the company.
