Comment by BXlnt2EachOther | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BXlnt2EachOther | Hacker News Reader

BXlnt2EachOther

> Great idea! Of course Google, as other BigTech companies was coherced to implement it mainly due to GDPR restrictions

I don't think this can be correct. Takeout was released June 28, 2011. GDPR was passed April 14, 2016 and went into effect two years later.

I seem to be luckier than sibling comments; my gmail+photos tasks have been reliable. Three big differences from the author: I have closer to 40GB than 200GB of photos, I download the zips from Google rather than having it post 200GB+ to OneDrive, and I unzip my backups when they happen and move them to network storage, rather than rely on them to be 100% automated. I do recall one manual run failing and I was notified.

I do wish some pieces were a little more intuitive, for example how the Drive vs Docs/Sheets/Slides overlap is handled.

I know anti-Google sentiment is very high here, and disclosure that I worked there in the past, but IMO Takeout is a user-friendly effort and they're well ahead of other companies, big tech and especially smaller and non-tech, there. I might be selling Facebook short; they do have an exporter but I haven't used it. [Edit: of course my opinion would be different if I ran into broken exports like a couple sibling comments report.]

Once upon a time within Google, there were people who were pushing for Takeout specifically for data portability. The thinking was, if they couldn't hold people's data hostage, they would be better incentivized to make their products the best on the market.

> they're well ahead of other companies

Agreed; it has never had a great UX but I'm glad it exists. I would like very much for it to be automate-able, as it is, it's pretty ADHD-hostile. I have to remember to start the process, remember to go get the files, and remember to deal with the files after they're done downloading (even on "gigabit fiber", it still takes long enough to force a context switch to something else and thus another opportunity to forget to deal with it).

> Takeout was released June 28, 2011. GDPR was passed April 14, 2016 and went into effect two years later.

Exactly. It really bothers me that people make these assumptions that all companies are bad and must be forced to do things that help users. And in this case, the author straight-up lies.

Google did NOT do this in response to legal regulations. They launched Takeout before the GDPR was even first proposed, let alone passed. They did it on their own, precisely in response to user desires not to be locked in. You're more likely to start using Google if you always know you can get your data out.

Thanks for clarifying the GDPR error.

Also, to be clear - I don't see Google as inherently bad. My opinion here is just about Google Takeout.

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