DDPs

I saw some recent news going around about the Australian Internet Observatory. Bergis Jules, my collabrator on the (now ended) [DocNow] project alerted me to it, and I saw it getting shared around in the fediverse. Bergis reminded me that we had been talking about the importance of the “archive downloads” that the GDPR required web platforms to make available to users, in order to abide by the GDPR. At the time we had been mostly focused on Twitter, but others like the National Library of New Zealand were starting to collect Facebook archives (Wayback link since it appears they may have stopped doing this?). The AIO seem to have recognized this too, and built a platform to connect researchers and data donors to contribute their archives which they have called Data Download Packages or DDPs. While the announcement is recent, it appears that they have been doing a lot of work analyzing the DDPs from a host of platforms (AirBNB, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Netflix, Spotify, TikTok,…