Facebook expands the types of data that users can transfer to other services

Facebook is renewing its calls for Congress to create guidelines on how online services should make user data available for transfer to other platforms, as it expands its own function to do so.

Facebook announced Monday that it will expand a tool that allows users to transfer their data to other services. Facebook will now allow users to transfer a copy of their posts and notes to Blogger, Google Docs and WordPress. The company already has a way for users to transfer their photos and videos to other services.

Lawmakers have championed so-called data portability features as a way to balance the playing field for new entrants to the technology industry. Facebook has attracted antitrust control and is currently facing legal challenges from the Federal Trade Commission and a broad coalition of states to allegedly maintain monopoly power illegally. Some lawmakers believe that if users could pull their data from Facebook services more easily, it could encourage them to leave. This would pave the way for new innovators to grow in the social media space.

Facebook itself has championed data portability laws and uses Monday’s launch to illustrate how firmer guidelines around the process can allow for greater and more secure data flow between services.

For example, when users transfer their posts and notes using the new feature, those transfers will not include comments from Facebook friends or posts that friends have left on users’ pages. This is due to the legal ambiguity that exists around who owns this data, especially in the absence of a federal digital privacy law. Facebook was already in trouble for how it granted a third-party developer access to friends ’user data without their explicit permission during the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

In a white paper published in 2019, Facebook raised questions about whether a platform’s “social graph” (or its network of friends that a user maintains on the platform) should be portable to other services. While the idea of ​​portability aims for users to take possession of their data and allow for greater competition, they may have privacy issues when it is not known who owns the data or whether they have opted for the transfer.

There is also uncertainty about which services should be responsible if data is compromised in the middle of a transfer. Facebook believes this is another place where Congress could clear up the confusion.

Congress could also set standards for the types of data that services should make available for transfer. They could also set railings to prevent the need to transfer certain types of data.

Some data collected by Facebook is made passively or includes inferences that the service makes about users, including protection of the integrity of the service. For example, Facebook’s public policy manager Bijan Madhani said the company will make inferences based on account activity to determine if they are run by robots. He suggested that it may benefit users to keep this data out of portability requests to maintain the integrity of this feature.

Madhani said Facebook plans to continue working on the tool and add destinations so users can transfer their data. He said consumers could look for the types of data already available to download to get an idea of ​​what might come after the transfer tool.

Although Facebook previously partnered with other industry players to create an open source platform that could be used to transfer data between services, Madhani said this is an area that requires government leadership to make backups. of the rules of the sector.

“The lack of a potential partnership with the government there can make people feel‘ well, okay, everything we’re doing here, when pushed, may not have the real force of law when there is a litigation on the table. ”“ He said. “Self-regulation is nice, but self-regulation without government regulation is less enjoyable.”

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