Data Transfer Project (DTP)

Data Transfer Project (DTP) is an open source initiative to facilitate the transfer of data between the differing online platforms of providers like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter. The project seeks to ease the download and transfer of potentially large volumes of personal content to another social media platform of the user’s choice.

DTP was developed to respect users’ rights to choice, privacy and security while easing the data transfer process and reducing requirements that might make it difficult for some users to migrate their data.

DTP avoids the potentially problematic steps of downloading and re-uploading personal content involved in migrating between platforms. Through APIs, DTP transfers content between services without requiring an intermediate step where the data must be downloaded, stored and re-uploaded. The content is converted by platform-specific adaptors to convert the data into a common format before transferal to the new platform’s API. Avoiding user management of data makes the process easier and the user doesn’t have to worry about space, possibly spanning multiple drives of data, corruption of data or organization difficulties.

The Google Data Liberation Front started DTP in 2017 and offered it as a service in July 2018. The project comes as a development of Google’s Download Your Data (also known as Takeout), which Google created to enable downloading a machine-readable copy of personal data from across its more than 50 different services.