Facebook is adding more ways for users to maintain control of their on-platform data, with a new option to transfer your Facebook posts and notes to Google Docs, Blogger and/or Wordpress, the latest element in its evolving data portability push.
As explained by Facebook:
"People can now directly transfer their notes and posts to Google Docs, Blogger and WordPress.com. These updates extend the reach of the tool that already enables people to transfer their photos and videos to Backblaze, Dropbox, Google Photos and Koofr. To better reflect the range of data types people can now transfer to our partners’ services, we’re renaming the tool “Transfer Your Information.”
Facebook has also provided a new overview of the transfer process:
As Facebook notes, the update expands upon its already available tools to transfer your Facebook photos and images, which it extended to more platforms last September.
The tools are part of Facebook's broader data portability push, which it's been seeking external agreement on to extend its capacity, and get a more uniform policy approach in place, to ensure that Facebook and its users have clear parameters around content ownership, and how they can re-claim and re-use on-platform data.
Indeed, as Facebook notes, it's still seeking external regulation on this aspect:
"We plan to continue expanding our data types and partners in the future. However, the ecosystem we are building to support data portability will not come to fruition without regulation that clarifies which data should be made portable and who is responsible for protecting data once it has been transferred. We hope that today’s updates can help advance conversations with policymakers, developers and experts about these issues."
In Facebook's previously published whitepaper on the challenges of data portability, it called on regulators to establish clearer rules around such, in order to better clarify this approach.
"Although some laws, such as the GDPR and CCPA, already guarantee the right to portability, we believe companies and people would benefit from additional guidance about what it means to put those rules into practice."
Data ownership and access is becoming a more important consideration as more and more of our everyday interactions are being conducted online. That's only likely to become more relevant amid the ongoing WFH shift, and as such, it is seemingly an important area for regulators to investigate, and to establish clearer guidance to ensure that all social platforms are adhering to specific requirements around cross-platform sharing and access.
Facebook's looking to take a lead on this, with a view to pushing official rules. But eventually, it does seem that all of your digital data will be made available, in some form, under official regulation and ruling.
