Category Archives: Data Liberation Blog

Unlocking your data from Google’s tools

Plan your digital afterlife with Inactive Account Manager


Not many of us like thinking about death — especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind. So today, we’re launching a new feature that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account.

The feature is called Inactive Account Manager — not a great name, we know — and you’ll find it on your Google Account settings page. You can tell us what to do with your Gmail messages and data from several other Google services if your account becomes inactive for any reason.

For example, you can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube. Before our systems take any action, we’ll first warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to the secondary address you’ve provided.

We hope that this new feature will enable you to plan your digital afterlife — in a way that protects your privacy and security — and make life easier for your loved ones after you’re gone.

  

Posted by Andreas Tuerk, Product Manager

Source: Data Liberation


A perfect match: Blogger and Google+ Pages for Takeout


You: A Blogger or Google+ Page owner who dreams of controlling their data.
Us: A band of engineers who will stop at nothing to make your dreams come true.

Meet us at https://www.google.com/takeout, and together we will export each of your blogs as an Atom Xml file. Or, if you’ve enjoyed exporting data from your Google+ Stream and Google+ Circles through Takeout in the past, but are looking for something more, join us now and download html files with your posts and json files containing the circles for each Google+ Page you own. If you don’t want to rush into things, we can also just export a single blog or page of your choice. Either way, give us a try. Life will never be the same.

Posted by Kári Ragnarsson, The Data Liberation Front

Source: Data Liberation


Be picky with your Takeout

Starting today, you'll have a couple of new features to make it even easier to download your data.

First, your original folder hierarchy is now maintained if you export files from Google Drive. Gone are the days of looking at the contents of your zip file and wondering which "secret_plans" file is which.


Your folder hierarchy is preserved.
Second, you can now pick a single resource within a service to download - for instance, a single Picasa album or top-level folder from Drive - instead of exporting every single file. To try it out, go to the "Choose services" tab and click on "Configure..." once you've added a service that supports this.
Want to download only your nefarious plans and all of your pictures of cats? We've got you covered!
These are just a few things that we've been working on lately. Stay tuned for lots of excitement in 2013!

Posted by Nick Piepmeier, The Data Liberation Front

Source: Data Liberation


Two new services added to Takeout

We're always working to improve our tools and make it easier for users to control and access their data. Today we are happy to add support for two new services in Google Takeout.

Latitude: Download a json file with your location data.

Reader: You can already export your data within Reader. Now that functionality comes to Google Takeout. Export an xml file of your subscriptions and your lists of starred, shared, following (and more) items in json format.
Posted by Kári Ragnarsson, The Data Liberation Front

Source: Data Liberation


Your YouTube original videos now available in Google Takeout


Your Takeout menu is growing.  Today's entrée:  YouTube videos.

Previously, you've been able to download individual transcoded videos from your YouTube Video Manager.  But starting today, you also have a more efficient way to download your videos from YouTube. With Google Takeout, you can download all of the original videos that you have uploaded in a few simple clicks.  No transcoding or transformation -- you’ll get exactly the same videos that you first uploaded.  Your videos in.  Your videos out.




Posted by Brian Hawkins, YouTube Engineer and Data Liberator.


Source: Data Liberation


Now offering Docs for Takeout

It’s been easy to liberate your Google Docs in lots of different formats for awhile now -- ODT, PDF, RTF, Text, Word, HTML -- you name it. Starting today, you can export them along with everything else on the Google Takeout menu.

Choose to download all of the Docs that you own through Takeout in any of the formats mentioned above. We’re making it more convenient for you to retrieve your information however you want -- you can even Takeout just your docs if you'd like. Lastly, be sure to click on the new "Configure" menu if you'd like to choose different formats for your documents.


Source: Data Liberation


Gmail Liberates Recorded Chat Logs Via IMAP

Enough of these goofy videos for Google Takeout. It’s time for an instructional screencast video instead.

This week, Gmail added support for downloading your recorded chat logs via IMAP. All of the entries that you can see in your Gmail chats label will now be delivered to your local email client if it is configured to use IMAP.

We have some information about how to set up and use IMAP for Gmail liberation on our dataliberation.org site, but since chat liberation has been requested by many users in the past (both on twitter and our moderator page), here is a screencast that demonstrates this new feature in use.


If you already use IMAP to synchronize your Gmail account to a local device, enabling this new chat log export is as simple as clicking on the “Show in IMAP” checkbox for Chats in the Labels tab of your Gmail settings.

Source: Data Liberation


New on the Menu: Google Voice for Google Takeout


If you use Google Voice to manage your phone-life, we’ve got some good news: your data -- from call history, to voicemail (including transcripts!), to greetings and recordings -- is now available in Google Takeout. Starting today, you can download a copy of all your voice communications along with data from other products with one click. Voicemail messages and greetings are exported as mp3s, text messages as microformatted html, and forwarding phone numbers as a vcard.

Give it a shot, either with all your Google Takeout data, or by itself.

One more product liberated - and many more to go!

Source: Data Liberation


Introducing Google Tasks Porter

We're happy to announce a new open source application that allows you to import and export your Google Tasks, called Google Tasks Porter.

Google Tasks Porter is designed with other applications that contain task lists in mind. It supports import and export via the iCalendar format which is used by a variety of applications, including iCalendar itself. It also supports import and export to Microsoft Outlook via a CSV format. Additionally, Google Tasks Porter supports export from Remember the Milk using its iCalendar export, and import to Remember the Milk via email. You can also download a list of all your tasks in an HTML format which is designed to be portable and parseable.

Google Tasks Porter allows you to create a set of "snapshots" of your data, each representing a list of all your tasks at a particular point in time. You can then save or delete these snapshots, and you can export a snapshot at any time to another application using any of the available formats. You can also upload an ics or csv file in order to import the tasks contained therein into Google Tasks.

The application is available on the web at http://google-tasks-porter.appspot.com. The source code is also available on Google Code at http://google-tasks-porter.googlecode.com using the Apache License, Version 2.0. Please try the application out and let us know what you think. You can provide feedback via the mailing list at [email protected].

By Dwight Guth, The Data Liberation Front

Source: Data Liberation


Three Questions, Updated

When we started the Data Liberation Front in 2007, we encouraged everyone to ask three questions about the products they were using:
  1. Can I get my data out at all?
  2. How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
  3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?
But we forgot an important detail: the ability to do something useful with the data once you take it out. With that in mind, we’ve modified our first question to emphasize the importance of being able to download your data in an open, interoperable, portable format:
  1. Can I get my data out in an open, interoperable, portable format?
  2. How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
  3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?
What we mean by open, interoperable and portable is that your data should be exported in a format that is:
  • Publicly documented and non-proprietary (i.e. it does not require a commercial license to use)
  • Easy for engineers to write a program that can import the data into another system
Your data isn’t really liberated unless you can put it to use somewhere else. Making sure you can do that when you liberate from Google products is now officially part of our mission.

Source: Data Liberation