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Or we could go one better and use the GDPR's "data portability" requirement to force Facebook to effectively offer such an API: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdp

Or we could go one better and use the GDPR's "data portability" requirement to force Facebook to effectively offer such an API: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ A regulator / court would have to look at what is "technically feasible" for Facebook to implement, but given that there are multiple interoperating projects supporting ActivityPub (with much smaller resources than Facebook) I think it would be hard to argue that Facebook couldn't add ActivityPub support. At a stretch, Facebook might argue that data portability only requires them (as data controllers) to publish your Facebook posts to specific accounts on other services, and doesn't require Facebook to accept inbound posts from competing platforms, but I don't know whether Facebook would want to be in a situation where their competitors have access to data on Facebook but Facebook doesn't have similar access to data from their users.

amelius 8y ago
To be honest, the only data I would want to export out of Facebook would be "events" (event name, time, location, description, rsvps, image/video data, comments). Would that also be possible using the GDPR directive?
- dane-pgp 8y ago
  The relevant term of Article 20 of the directive seems to be "personal data", which means information relating to a person (thus being broader than the idea of "personally identifiable information"). If you ran the Facebook page for a club or society, then much of the metadata about the events you created for it would likely not be covered by the GDPR; but for a personal Facebook page, if you were publishing information about an event that you were organising and were planning to attend, it is more likely that a useful amount of metadata would be covered. I don't know whether ActivityPub has a standardised way of handling event invitations and RSVPs, but the existence of things like the iCalendar format and its various implementations might go some way towards making the "technically feasible" argument.

amelius 8y ago

To be honest, the only data I would want to export out of Facebook would be "events" (event name, time, location, description, rsvps, image/video data, comments). Would that also be possible using the GDPR directive?

dane-pgp 8y ago
The relevant term of Article 20 of the directive seems to be "personal data", which means information relating to a person (thus being broader than the idea of "personally identifiable information"). If you ran the Facebook page for a club or society, then much of the metadata about the events you created for it would likely not be covered by the GDPR; but for a personal Facebook page, if you were publishing information about an event that you were organising and were planning to attend, it is more likely that a useful amount of metadata would be covered. I don't know whether ActivityPub has a standardised way of handling event invitations and RSVPs, but the existence of things like the iCalendar format and its various implementations might go some way towards making the "technically feasible" argument.