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Comment by click170 | Hacker News Reader

Google already provides a pretty good interface for exporting your data..

http://www.dataliberation.org/

Or, from your Google+ page, click on your picture in the top right corner, then Account Settings, then on the new page click on Data Liberation on the left hand side.

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You cannot get all your logins, session time, IP address, etc. This is what you have a right to get out of a EU based company. Yes, this means that as a business, it is pretty hard to comply with the law.

When they don't save it there is nothing to get. They have a policy to remove personal data after 3 months or so.

It's at least six months, and they don't do a very good job of anonymizing: they scrub the last two digits of the IP, but not tracking cookie logs. DataLiberation further contains no information they keep when you are not logged in, and only a fraction of what they have (and keep) when you are logged in. The "privacy dashboard" points to several chunks of data that are retained but not accessible, and there is far more that actually is kept.

A simple but perhaps inconvenient way to verify this is to be criminally prosecuted for something where your Google account is relevant. Google will hand over what they have to the prosecution, and as the defendant, you'll be entitled to see the evidence. (I've not tried this and don't recommend it, but do know someone that this happened to, and have examined the contents of the provided CD.)

DataLiberation is mostly a PR site, and it's main use is migrating what data Google feels is useful to you, not finding out what Google knows.

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