What Is Facebook's Data Transfer Tool, How Does It Work, and Can It Be Trusted?

Have you ever wanted to have your data accessible on different platforms without re-uploading the same things over and over again? The new Facebook Data Transfer Tool is there to ensure your data portability. With this new feature, you can move your data across different platforms, and it saves you a lot of time.

We would like to discuss this new Facebook Data Transfer Tool, where you can find it, and what it is based on. This is when you have to remember the importance of your Facebook password, and we will remind you how you can take care of that.

The New Facebook Data Transfer Tool

The new Facebook tool that can ensure data portability was announced by Steve Satterfield, Director of Privacy and Public Policy, via the Facebook blog. This tool is supposed to enable “Facebook users to transfer their Facebook photos and videos directly to other services.” There is a direct access link for the tool, but users shouldn’t be too surprised if they cannot access it at the moment. The plan is for the tool to be available to users in Ireland first, and then it should become available worldwide in the first half of 2020.

This idea to make Facebook data portable has been in the works for quite some time now. Needless to say, data portability brings forth a plethora of privacy concerns, most of which were explored in the Facebook white paper that was published in September 2019.

Each time a new feature is launched, any company should carefully consider all the pros and cons of that feature, as well as the issues that might arise from using it. Hence, Steve Satterfield claims that Facebook is very thorough when it comes to collecting feedback from its stakeholders worldwide. No one decides unilaterally how the privacy between transfers should be protected and what kind of data should be made portable in the first place.

Some of you might wonder how this Facebook Data Transfer Tool looks in the big picture of Facebook features and services. To tell you the truth, the new tool seems to be a natural step in platform development. Let’s not forget that it’s been almost ten years since Facebook enabled its users to download their information from their personal profiles. Thus, the new photo transfer tool is a step outside of the box because it spans across several platforms.

When the feature is available globally, everyone will be able to access it through the Your Facebook Information section. It is the same section where people can download their information. Needless to say, to ensure security and privacy, the data that you plan to transfer will be automatically encrypted, and you will be able to access the data by providing your Facebook password.

Why is my Facebook password important?

Now, we have just established that Facebook plans to encrypt the transferred data. Encryption protects personal data from malicious hacks. However, it probably isn’t too much of a surprise that the weakest link in this security wall is actually your password.

If your Facebook password isn’t strong enough, anyone could guess it and access your data. And we mustn’t forget that this new tool ensures data portability across DIFFERENT platforms. Therefore, if your Facebook password is compromised, it is very likely that smart hackers could find a way to access your accounts on other platforms too, even if the passwords are different.

Thus, it is very important to create strong and unique passwords that can help you protect your accounts. If you have multiple accounts, you probably tend to reuse the same password for different sites, but that’s also a pretty bad idea. In fact, if you are not too familiar with password strength and so on, there is an entire password policy that you should check out.

But to make matters simple, the bottom line is that your Facebook password has to be strong and unique. Therefore, the more symbols the password has, the better. It is obviously hard to memorize strong passwords that consist of random alphanumeric strings and whatnot, but there’s always a way around it.

You can employ a password manager that will help you generate a strong Facebook password. It will also store it for you, and it will remind you to renew the password regularly. You clearly didn’t think that you can use the same password forever and ever, did you?

Any other password I should change?

Changing passwords regularly is something all us should strive for. However, if you’re wondering if there are more passwords you should review, you might as well start with the other platforms that are part of the Data Transfer Project.

To tell you the truth, Facebook isn’t rolling out this service all by itself. The new tool is part of an open-source data portability platform called Data Transfer Project. The platform was launched in 2018, and it was created with the goal of allowing individuals to move their data across different service providers without any difficulty.

Along with Facebook, the other members of the project include Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter. It is expected that more companies will join the project later on, which automatically puts a lot of stress on privacy and security questions. The project is there to build a common framework between several online service providers. This framework should enable seamless data portability. However, to reach that common framework, users still need to use the existing app interfaces and authorization mechanisms to access their data.

Hence, passwords do not disappear anywhere. In fact, their importance grows massively when we think that several big service providers can be connected by one framework. So, it is not just for the service providers to employ all the possible security measures. A lot of that depends on us, too.

Therefore, if we can renew our Facebook password or any other platform password today, let’s do that. If the service allows us to enable two-factor or multi-factor authentication, let’s choose that option. A few more hurdles is perfectly fine, as long as we’re the only ones who can jump over them.