If you don’t automatically back up your photos on Google Photos just yet, you will now have an extra tool in your arsenal. Facebook has just announced that soon you will be able to backup your photos uploaded on the social network to your Google Photos account. This is part of their goal to bring data portability (that is hopefully secure) to their users through the Data Transfer Project involving other major technology brands like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, etc.
Of course, you could always download your information, including photos, from Facebook any time you want. But now they want to give you the option to back them up on other platforms that are not theirs. This tool is just the first of many that they plan to introduce through the aforementioned Data Transfer Project that they have been working on together with the other tech brands. We might soon see that you could also back them up on Apple’s Photos or Microsoft’s OneDrive, etc.
The Google Photos backup tool will first be available for those in Ireland within the first half of 2020 but with no specific timeframe. You will be able to find it in the same place where you can download Your Facebook Information, in the settings section. All of the data that will be transferred will be encrypted to ensure privacy and security. You will also be asked to enter your password before the transfer can begin.
The tool is still in its early stages and Facebook says they will “continue refining it” based on feedback from beta users. If you backup your photos from your phone automatically to Facebook then this should not be of much use to you since it will probably create duplicates. But if you upload photos on Facebook from other sources aside from your phone and if you don’t back it up automatically on cloud services like Google Photos, then this will be particularly useful.
We’ll probably hear more about this as we get nearer to the official rollout. In the meantime, you can always just back up your photos by downloading them from Facebook’s tool or you can use the automatic backup on your phone for Google Photos.
DTP framework is comprised of three following components that have been designed to let any service easily convert their proprietary data and authentication formats into a common format that must be usable by others.
- Data Models
- Adapters (Data and Authentication)
- Task Management Libraries
It uses existing industry-standard infrastructure and authorization mechanisms, such as OAuth and REST, in a way that even hosting entities do not have access to a user's data either in transit or at rest.
"Rather than expecting every company to build its own system from scratch, this open source framework allows them to share any improvements in the framework as well as adapters and data models," Facebook said.
So far, the DTP project has developed adapters for 13 different service providers, listed below, supporting five different types of consumer data, including photos, mail, tasks, contacts, and calendar.
- Microsoft
- Imgur
- Spotify
- Flickr
- Remember the Milk
- SmugMug
- Solid web decentralization project
- Deezer music streaming service
- Mastodon self-hosted social networking service
For now, Facebook is only testing the transfer of photos and videos to Google photos, but the company is also expecting to add support for more services and data types in the future.
"As we continue to add more services and data types, we needed to look at several factors. It's important that the system request only the permissions required for the task at hand. Access to the destination service should end once the transfer is complete."
"Finally, transfers should only be created by the owner of the account. In order to verify this, we ask people to re-enter their password before initiating a transfer. 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."
Besides all good things, as suspected before, the project could have some serious implications for smaller service providers participating in the project, making it easier for their customers to leave and join services from popular brands with lucrative offers or free services.
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