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Google Takeout: Export a copy of your data in Google services

takeout.google.com

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Re: Google Takeout: Export a copy of your data in Google services

#51
post #47

Google Takeout is a great solution to the problem of, how do we get Google programmers, without protest, to write functionality into their services to allow Big Brother to acquire a neat and tidy copy of all a user’s data?

... what.

You're complaining about the one way google users have to reclaim data that is rightfully theirs?

You know that if "big brother" wants data, big brother gets backdoors, not polite export requests?

Re: Google Takeout: Export a copy of your data in Google services

#52
post #19

Another fun one. Go into Facebook and download your data and look in the ads folder. There's a very helpful "advertisers_who_uploaded_a_contact_list_with_your_information.html" page that lists every advertiser who somehow obtained your contact data and ran targeted ads to you. There's a lot of sketchy companies out there who I never had any kind of relationship with who somehow managed to obtain email or other contac…

See also: https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/.

Re: Google Takeout: Export a copy of your data in Google services

#53

I periodically use the takeout service and selectively copy to the 1TB of storage I have on OneDrive (which comes with an Office 365 subscription). Having my digital stuff backed up on two cloud providers is enough for my capacity for risk. I used to make a 3rd backup in Dropbox but don’t do that anymore.

I once tried to download my Google photos, and it became super messy. I got tons of different folders all with duplicates and other stuff and it was pretty unusable. Has this improved?

I did this 2 days ago, it's the exact same.

I used a simple one-liner find/mv command to move all JPGs into the same folder... which made it more decent.

Re: Google Takeout: Export a copy of your data in Google services

#54
post #47

Google Takeout is a great solution to the problem of, how do we get Google programmers, without protest, to write functionality into their services to allow Big Brother to acquire a neat and tidy copy of all a user’s data?

... what. You're complaining about the one way google users have to reclaim data that is rightfully theirs? You know that if "big brother" wants data, big brother gets backdoors, not polite export requests?

I’m not complaining. I’m marveling at the clever solution to the problem of, “How do we get hundreds of product teams to support our legal obligations without feeling morally conflicted?”

Re: Google Takeout: Export a copy of your data in Google services

#55
post #44

i'm very curious about something -- people here rave about the takeout -- does anyone actually use the thing? i've tried the takeout option about a year ago when i wanted to switch from google photos to apple photos and it was an absolute mess, it exported random zipped folders, all broken up (i think there were 14 of thema ll together), multiple images were duplicates, somehow it managed to corrupt apple format of p…

As I wrote elsewhere, previously. I agree it's a mess, but not the end of the world. Extract the file -not- preserving directory structure(-j flag). Now you just have everything in a single folder. Then delete the metadata files by file extension. This took all of a few seconds to do for each zip.

Re: Google Takeout: Export a copy of your data in Google services

#56
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct. For GDPR purposes, data is PII if it can be used in combination with any other data to identify an individual. Doesn’t matter if the individual data points are not themselves identifying. One thing I’ve been curious about is whether AI and algorithms that can potentially take a huge amount of anonymous data and “identify” a user (but not explicitly), only identify in the sense that the output of the…

> For GDPR purposes, data is PII if it can be used in combination with any other data to identify an individual. By that definition, all data is PII. There is no information available on this planet that has not been influenced by people. I'm not trying to be obtuse. I worry about this problem a lot. Obviously we need to keep companies from doing stupid stuff like storing the first digit of a Social Security number (…

Privacy laws are mainly aimed at allowing those whose data is being used to be aware of this, understand what is used for which purpose, and to elect to control this should they object.

None of this is the same as a blanket prevention.

Re: Google Takeout: Export a copy of your data in Google services

#57
post #44

i'm very curious about something -- people here rave about the takeout -- does anyone actually use the thing? i've tried the takeout option about a year ago when i wanted to switch from google photos to apple photos and it was an absolute mess, it exported random zipped folders, all broken up (i think there were 14 of thema ll together), multiple images were duplicates, somehow it managed to corrupt apple format of p…

I think people love the idea of takeout more than the thing itself.

Re: Google Takeout: Export a copy of your data in Google services

#58
post #44

i'm very curious about something -- people here rave about the takeout -- does anyone actually use the thing? i've tried the takeout option about a year ago when i wanted to switch from google photos to apple photos and it was an absolute mess, it exported random zipped folders, all broken up (i think there were 14 of thema ll together), multiple images were duplicates, somehow it managed to corrupt apple format of p…

I just finished found through the takeout process for photos last night. 39 2GB archives. Request took a couple of days to process, then I got an email with a bunch of links that they said were good for 7 days. I planned to load them into my Synology download manager, but the takeout system seems to rely heavily on browser state, so Synology couldn't download them. Each took 5 minutes to download at home over WiFi, and the takeout interface demands authentication every 10 minutes. It also reloads the page and reset my position in the download list on every click.

I've uploaded and expanded about half the archives on my Synology, and it's currently indexing everything, so I can't comment on the photo issues you've mentioned quite yet.

Overall, I'm happy there exists a mechanism to get my photos, but the quality of the experience is truly awful.

Re: Google Takeout: Export a copy of your data in Google services

#59
post #19

Another fun one. Go into Facebook and download your data and look in the ads folder. There's a very helpful "advertisers_who_uploaded_a_contact_list_with_your_information.html" page that lists every advertiser who somehow obtained your contact data and ran targeted ads to you. There's a lot of sketchy companies out there who I never had any kind of relationship with who somehow managed to obtain email or other contac…

I've been watching that list for years. Oddly, a LOT of car lots are always on there. Someone must be making a killing selling them low quality leads.

Re: Google Takeout: Export a copy of your data in Google services

#60
post #44

i'm very curious about something -- people here rave about the takeout -- does anyone actually use the thing? i've tried the takeout option about a year ago when i wanted to switch from google photos to apple photos and it was an absolute mess, it exported random zipped folders, all broken up (i think there were 14 of thema ll together), multiple images were duplicates, somehow it managed to corrupt apple format of p…

I just finished found through the takeout process for photos last night. 39 2GB archives. Request took a couple of days to process, then I got an email with a bunch of links that they said were good for 7 days. I planned to load them into my Synology download manager, but the takeout system seems to rely heavily on browser state, so Synology couldn't download them. Each took 5 minutes to download at home over WiFi, a…

Almost like they made the ux really hard to use for a reason, eh?

All that engineering talent and that's the best solution? Lol.

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