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created 12 months ago | Tagged: |
Sally
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Google Takeout, which lets you download a copy of your Google presence, turns one year old next month. Does Takeout truly let you liberate your data from the search behemoth, and what does that mean, anyway?
If you listen to the growing chorus of online chatter about the company, Google’s now-infamous “Don’t be evil” slogan is becoming increasingly inaccurate by the day. The company’s most recent move--a sweeping change that consolidated most of its privacy policies under a single umbrella--immediately drew umbrage from critics who felt that Google was on its way to taking all the data it has collected from its users through its dozens of services and building an exhaustive dossier on each of us that would be used mercilessly in efforts to sell us things. Google wants you to keep using Search, Docs, and Google+, so it’s trying to play nice, and last June Google introduced a service designed to let you see, in part at least, what Google knows about you with a single click. Called Google Takeout, the service is so simple that it is completely undocumented when you visit the site. You sign in, and then see an offer to “Download an archive of your data from” a variety of services (outlined below), and that’s it. You can grab it all in one click, or choose specific services from which to download, but unless your usage of these services is exhaustive (think thousands of Google Docs or Picasa photos), the one-click approach is easiest.
