Trust Us, We're Google! The company that knows everything about you wants you to feel in control
Posted in: Legal, Privacy & Security at 15/06/2012 14:04
Armed with a symbolic pair of red bolt cutters, Brian Fitzpatrick has the job of helping people quit Google.
Fitzpatrick founded and leads a six-person team of Google engineers called the Data Liberation Front, which since 2007 has been developing ways to let users "unlock," or export, data such as photos, e-mails, and contact lists that they store on Google's servers. The team's website offers directions for retrieving data from 33 Google services, including Google Docs and Google Plus, and it created Google Takeout, a speedy link for downloading files from several popular services.
Extracting your data this way can be a first step toward closing a Google account for good. "When you put data into any cloud service, you're putting trust in [it]," says Fitzpatrick. "You need a way to revoke that trust."
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428049/trust-us-were-google/
