An Introduction to Google Takeout

There has definitely been a trend of the work world bleeding into the American’s personal lives.  In the last decade, with the rise of cellphones and ever increasing internet connectivity, workers have become more accessible.  Bosses expect more and more of their workers to be on call and productive even during off hours.  Now Google is introducing something that could stop the bleeding or accelerate it.  A team of engineers from the tech giant called the Data Liberation Front has unveiled Google Takeout.  This service is supposed to be able to allow a user to compress all their data from Google products such as their circles and contacts into a zip file that they can take with them anywhere.  That has some interesting applications.

The Data Liberation Front team claims that since you can now move your data easily out of Google services it’ll create an environment in which they’ll have to work that much harder to keep your business.

I don’t really buy that.  What I do see is a service in which you can download, let’s say, all your Google Docs from your personal account and transfer it to a company document cloud hosting service.  Another usage would include backing up all that data.  Ever since Amazon’s EC2 went down, businesses have been on edge about accessibility and security of their data.

One way to look at this is that is keeps your private and work life a little more separate.  You don’t have to invite your boss onto your Google calendar to sync dates.  However, on the other hand, your boss may require you to do more work since it’s easier to share data between cloud systems.