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Facebook just made it easier to transfer your data to other apps

Facebook has updated its Transfer Your Information tool to make copying your data from the social network to other services “simpler and more intuitive”.

Transfer Your Information – or TYI – is a feature that allows you to transfer a copy of the information you’ve shared on Facebook to another service, such as Dropbox or Google Photos. 

TYI isn’t new, but Facebook recently announced that it had spent the last few months rebuilding the tool from the ground up to make it easier to use and to offer users more choice when it comes to where they want to store their data. 

Facebook users can now transfer their data to two new services – Photobucket and Google Calendar. Users can also transfer Facebook events (hence the addition of Google Calendar) which is one data type that couldn’t be copied over in past versions of Facebook TYI. 

Previously, users have been able to choose between seven destinations (Blogger, Google Docs, Dropbox, WordPress, Google Photos, Koofr and Backblaze) and four data types (posts, notes, photos and videos) depending on which service they choose. 

Other changes arriving with this update include greater transparency around the status of each transfer, the option to complete multiple data transfers to a single destination at the same time and filters that make it easier to narrow down the exact information you want to transfer, such as date ranges and specific albums for photos and videos. 

“At Facebook, we plan to continue providing our users with secure data portability features they can trust”, wrote Facebook on August 9. 

“We’re also working with developers to expand the selection of data types and destinations we support. However, to ensure user data is safe both while it is being transferred and after, we’re continuing to call for government regulation to make clearer rules about who is responsible for protecting that data as it is transferred to different services. In the meantime, we’ll keep contributing to the open source Data Transfer Project, supporting innovation in data portability across the industry and pushing the technology forward”.

The new TYI updates are available now, meaning you can head over to Facebook.com/tyi to try them out today.

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