Dear Linux Magazine Reader,
Last month, I used this space for a heartfelt analysis of the "Terms of Service" agreements attached to Internet services - in particular, the agreements associated with some of Google's online tools. Since I let the search light fall on Google last time, I thought I would follow up this month on a bit more optimistic thread.
When I was at the OSCON conference last month, I attended a conference session known as Google Office Hours, where a panel of Google employees answered questions regarding Google's various initiatives. A show of hands revealed that many in the audience were also Google employees, or Googlers, as they sometimes call themselves.
The speakers on the panel introduced themselves and announced the names of their assignments. In the midst of all the household words, like Google Docs and Google Android, I heard one name that piqued my curiosity: Data Liberation Front. The Googlers all googled appreciatively, appearing quite familiar with the initiative, but the non-Googlers were all a bit lost. "What is it?" we asked.
They explained that the Data Liberation Front is a Google team devoted to the task of making sure every Google tool provides a means for users to extract data. The great promise of web-based tools is that the service takes care of storing your data. Your calendar, your photos, your office documents - it is all available with a couple of mouse clicks, and you don't have to worry about where or how it is stored. But what if you decide to keep your photos somewhere else? What if you don't want to use the online service anymore?
According to Google's Data Liberation Front (http://www.dataliberation.org/):
People usually don't look to see if they can get their data out of a product until they decide one day that they want to leave. For this reason, we always encourage people to ask these three questions before starting to use a product that will store their data:
The ideal answers to these questions are:
The Data Liberation Front website provides links to descriptions showing how to extract data from many of Google's most popular tools, including Maps, Docs, Picasa, Blogger, and several others. Some of the instructions are just about exporting to a simple, standard data format like iCalendar. Some of the export routines were probably fairly trivial, and in other cases, it looked like the team had put some serious effort into providing an export path.
Of course, Google is not the only web company that offers data export options. Other vendors also support differing degrees of export, although in many cases, the export choices are limited to proprietary formats.
As I stated last month, Google puts some odd stipulations in their terms of service, but when it comes to export, they seem to be on the right track. The reason Google (and some other web companies) offer an export option is they think it gives them a competitive advantage over companies that don't provide it, and the only way that works is if users are paying attention. Be sure to find out about export the next time you sign up for an online tool - and not just whether export is possible: Find out if it is easy enough to leave you with an honest, convenient choice should an alternative solution arise three years from now. Don't put your data anywhere you can't take it back.