I'm very suspicious of this. The most dangerous thing here IMO would be if it were to allow these companies to share data among themselves, a data cartel so-to-speak. Currently from the website (emphasis mine) "enabling a seamless, direct, user initiated portability of data". I worry that they might simply remove the "user initiated" part after adoption hits critical mass. I'm now following the development on github [0]...
I'd say suspicion is always wanted with things like this. If you know of other services you would like to see data transfer to/from, please let us know, we want this be open to everyone, big and small, and are looking for suggestions.
FWIW, the team that is building this at Google is the same team that builds Takeout, so we've have been trying to give users useful tools for leaving Google a while now. We think giving users the ability to directly move data to a new service provider is the next evolution of the Takeout ethos about not locking users in.
Thanks for the reply, I've had some downtime today to look over the documentation. It looks like it's pretty solid, but I have a way to go, but I'm actually planning on becoming active on github for your project. The whole java thing kind of irks me, but hey I did fine with it in college.
Re: Java, ya its in the roadmap that the adapters should be language agnostic. Forcing them all into one language, regardless of what it is, is kind of lame.
Awesome! Thank you for taking the time to respond.
I will try to refrain from criticizing the project until I am more familiar. The next time I interact with this project will be on github, my username there is the same as it is here.
[0] https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project