While Google+ continues to be the flavor of the season, Google has silently released another remarkable service called Google Takeout, which makes a very strong statement to all walled gardens(read Facebook) out there and shows Google’s commitment towards ensuring user’s ownership and control over the data that is shared by millions of users over Google’s various properties.
What is Google Takeout ?
Google Takeout is the latest product developed by Google’s internal engineering team, also known by the fancy name “Data Liberation Front“(sounds more like an independent authority but it isn’t).
The team is dedicated to building easy ways to move/export your data out of various Google products and services.
Google Takeout turns all that ‘data porting’ menace into an easy-to-follow process, which eventually lets you take all your data out of Google services in a matter of few clicks. In a two-step verification process, you get hold of all your data and download it to your desktop in zip format.
It’s not that there wasn’t a way of getting user data out of Google products/services before but the ways of doing it were inconvenient and unusable for an average user. With Google Takeout, the whole process has become a whole lot easier and usable.
Over the past couple of months, Google and Facebook have been up against each other over ownership and control of user data and Google kept iterating that it’s an unethical act from Facebook, not allowing its users to export all their data out of Facebook, if they wish to.
With the launch of Google Takeout, Google has remained loyal to its words and showed that Google has no intentions of making its users stick with Google services by force or creating some sort of technical dependency or blockage. It wants its users to keep using Google services by the sheer desire to do so.
What’s the deal with Data Liberation Front ?
Well, Google could certainly launch Google Takeout without mentioning or packaging its internal ‘data liberation’ engineering team as ‘Data Liberation Front’ so why this ‘Data Liberation Front’ came into picture ?
Well, turns out that Google wants more and more companies to adopt the same policy of providing an easy way of letting users take out their data out of various web services and that’s why this ‘Independent consortium’ kinda branding for its internal engineering team.
Nice move there Google but don’t you ever expect Facebook join this ‘Data Liberation Front’ anytime soon.
Enjoy this video that introduces ‘Data Liberation Front’. Google really knows how to make its engineers feel special!