Google’s Data Liberation Front, on Tuesday, extended its assistance to one more Google service – Google Voice. If you are a Google Voice user and for some reason want to bid bye to the service, you need not wonder what is going to happen to all the data you leave behind – voice messages, texts and call records – you can now take them along with you. You can download a copy of all your voice communications along with data from other products with one click.
Voicemail messages and personal greetings can be exported as MP3 whereas text messages are treated as microformatted html and forwarding phone numbers as vcards.
Tuesday onwards Google Voice became the latest service to be integrated into Google Takeout, a Data Liberation Front service. Google Takeout lets users export all their data and also includes support for Picasa, Google+1, Buzz and more.
The Data Liberation Front (DLF) is a Google engineering team whose goal is to make it easy for users to move their data in and out of Google products. In a blog post, Google Data Liberation Front said that they do this because they believe users should be able to export any data that they create or import into a product. The Data Liberation Front engineering team consults with other engineering teams within the company on how to liberate their products. The mantra of the DLF is “Users should be able to control the data they store in Google’s products.”
You can view a video of the Data Liberation Front below:
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The blog post said Google DLF believed that users should be able to download their data at no extra cost and within as little time as possible. “If it takes you many hours to get your data out, it is almost as bad as not being able to get your data out at all.”
Much of the information that is archived by Google can be controlled through your Google Dashboard. The Google Dashboard offers a simple view into the data associated with your Google Account, so you could see what is being collected and then manage the settings according to your liking.
However, what is not clear now is whether users really care about data liberation, which is important when you want to leave a service. But if you are a captive, satisfied customer then Google’s data portability service might not find many takers.
In case you have any suggestions on what data you would like to liberate and from which Google service, you can visit the Google Moderator page.