Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft join up to help share your data

Four of the world's largest technology firms have announced a new project aimed at making it easier to share data between different sites.

The Data Transfer Project brings together Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter in a bid to make portability of user data a smoother process.

This means that transferring information between different platforms, such as from a Windows platform to Android, becomes a lot more straightforward and secure than ever before.

"Data portability makes it easy for consumers to try new services and use the ones that they like best," wrote Brian Willard, Software Engineer and Greg Fair, Product Manager, on a Google blog post announcing the news.

"We’re thrilled to help drive an initiative that incentivizes companies large and small to continue innovating across the internet. We’re just getting started and we’re looking forward to what comes next.

Data sharing

The Data Transfer Project describes itself as, "a collaboration of organizations committed to building a common framework with open-source code that can connect any two online service providers, enabling a seamless, direct, user initiated portability of data between the two platforms."

The open-source project will also tick a useful GDPR box for the tech giants, as a key part of of the new regulation concerns the ability to gain access to data records with any company and transfer this elsewhere at any time.

As for security, that will be the responsibility of the data provider, meaning you'll still need to trust whichever company you're looking to extract the data from, however the DTP says that individual credentials and user data will be encrypted during transition.

The DTP site adds that it is still in development for the time being, and is "not quite ready for everyone to use yet" - however developers can add in certain features to their sites now, although DTP adds that, "we are continually making improvements that might cause things to break occasionally".