10 years ago Facebook provided a pretty nice set of APIs and way to grant access to your data (for example photos, messages, friend lists) for 3rd party apps. What we got was 1000 quiz apps using these for data mining - with user consent.
Android is another example. Initially Google put little restrictions for data applications could access - with permission from user. We all know what happened.
I’m not saying we should stop trying to tear down the walled gardens, but this is not trivial problem to solve. Some users might be even better off with their data locked in the garden managed by Apple, Google or Facebook.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/connect-external-devi...
[1]: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD825AM/A/lightning-to-vg...
At what point do you become compelled to start transforming your web application into an open protocol?
If your argument is that companies should be compelled to publish good API documentation, and allow any client to connect to them, then aside from creating a completely unnecessary system of regulatory moats, and aside from using the wrong words to describe this idea, you're likely to run directly into a 1A violation.
Nothing in the parent comment says anything about requiring good documentation or 100% backwards compatibility.
Don't get me wrong, I've had to reverse engineer my share of proprietary protocols to get behavior I wanted (and would have loved to see them be open), but I don't think I can get onboard with the idea that requiring open protocols is trivial or noninvasive.
You can't honestly believe this. Even if one agrees with making some things open protocols, potentialy by law (messenger, social networks), stating "it's trivial" to do such a thing is just the height of hyperbole.
If we're going to legislate anything, I believe the right way is to force complete data export is made available via a reasonable API/process, which then allows people to independently evolve & progress, and competitors will then need to support (or not) what comes out on the other side. But customers then know they can always extract or simply backup their data themselves if needed.
every client provider can do whatever they want, that'd be the beauty of it. Someone could write a stripped down, privacy respecting Facebook client and charge users five bucks instead of running ads, if that's what users want. Someone could offer a chronological news-feed free of algorithmic meddling, or one that you can fine-tune however you like. That'd would simply be developer and user choice. Just think of RSS-readers or podcast apps or email clients. They're not all equal, but that's a feature, not something gone wrong.
Hmm. At least in the case that the OP was taking about -- third-party Facebook clients -- I don't think it would "destroy their walled garden" any more than third-party Twitter clients did back when those were meaningfully a thing. Standardized APIs aimed at enabling full-featured third-party social network clients wouldn't really contribute to a robust market in competing social networks; they'd just contribute to a robust market in, well, third-party social network clients.
What it seems to me you want is a couple steps beyond data portability, which honestly really isn't enough on its own. What I actually need is a way to import the user's social graph from Facebook or Twitter. That's arguably how Instagram bootstrapped its success initially: if you gave it your Twitter account, it would download all your followers/following info. (And, of course, that's why Twitter shut down that API after that.)
"But doesn't that violate GDPR?" someone is raising their hand to say, and: yes. GDPR as written does help protect privacy, but it's also an incredible boon to social network incumbents: it under it, your social graph can't be treated as your data, because by definition it contains personally identifiable information about all your contacts. For your regulation idea to be meaningful, GDPR and similar privacy regulation around the world would have to be overhauled -- if all the "open API" can do is import/export my personal data sans social graph, it becomes little more than a backup mechanism and a convenient way to fill out registration forms.
I feel like you're missing his point a bit, which is that sure they can do whatever they want, but it would be within a well-defined and highly regulated system, and would need to conform to an interface that would be difficult to change and evolve.
A bit like how IRC never really got updated with features people like to see in newer IM apps, like conversation history, read receipts, sending images and videos, threading, and so on. Or HTTP. Or email. Federation always leads to ossification.
Google Photos definitely supports Live Photos, I've successfully uploaded and shared lots of Live Photos via the Google Photos for iOS app.
Which then raises the question of why doesn't the tool support it?
Or Apple might just not be uploading the videos that accompany the photo for some reason.
[1]: https://developers.google.com/photos/library/guides/upload-m...
Hopefully yes. Most "progress" is towards worse services and more user data minining and ads.
But if needed, they can always innovate. But they'd still have to be able to export to the standard format (even if it can hold less than their full features).
Curious, what happens if Apple locks your account (not in their ecosystem but M1 got me apple-curious ;)? Can you still export you're data, photos?
Additionaly, I plan to amend that with a self-hosted solution. I know, this reeks of tin foil, sure. However, whenever I read a horror story of someone getting locked out of their accounts and loosing access to their data a chill runs down my spine. Everytime I see captach start popping up too often I wonder if I'm suddenly, for some reason getting close to getting banned. This is the same reason why I have a GSuite account under my domain and never use login with Blabla solutions.
There is a real risk but it's not that different from the pre cloud era: that of proprietary formats. Google Docs itself is proprietary (if you map the Google Drive files to your local filesystem in the style of Dropbox the actual local data store locally is just a URI). It's worse, but not a huge amount worse than having your files be a proprietary blob, say a Word file.
And there are of course innumerable services that have data that never leaves the cloud from Facebook at one extreme to various services such as Gantt charts that aren't downloadable in any meaningful way.
But as I said I don't think this one case is a good example: In the case of Apple's stuff, I can keep it all current on my laptop: just tell photos, iCloud files, music etc to keep a complete copy on the local disk (i.e. don't treat it as a chache) and then back up normally. Music, photos, etc are stored in normal files (JPEG and mp3). My IMAP client downloads everything (messages and attachments) so if I were willing to use iCloud mail or gmail everything would be backed up; ditto for my calendars and address book. This is the same for many other cloud providers like Dropbox.
My account isn't much more than a networked drive, so this idea of adding 'transfer to another cloud' or whatever is still a regression.
While we're here, read the title: "Apple now lets you..."
Lets? Oh, thanks for giving permission, Apple. I don't think any of this would fly under the GDPR's data portability provisions.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
Given the country list, this is being done to likely get ahead of some kind of regulation, but I don’t think this is necessarily due to this specific clause. This is above and beyond what would be minimally required.
But from other comments, it looks like this is the start of other data transfer initiatives between major tech companies. Which would be a good thing, even if it is a result of trying to avoid further regulation.