03.Feb.2010 Power to the People

Genuine data solidarity or corporate hokum? Google’s Data Liberation Front is supposedly interested in your data’s autonomy.

The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to “liberate” their products.

One thing that seems to run against this idea is Google’s propensity to hold onto data generated by users (Gmail only added a delete button after users complained). Perhaps another way to liberate data (or users of Google’s services) would be to delete search logs in a shorter amnount of time, as the European Union has pressured it to do. Joe Fay at The Register describes this tension over Google’s policies:

Google has been under particular pressure in Europe to stick a time limit on how long it hangs onto information that can be used to identity searchers.

In 2008 it halved the time it hung onto such info to nine months, a cut that still did not find favour with Eurocrats. It continues to hold data beyond that date, but says it does not hold the full IP address of users, effectively anonymizing the data, but still making it useful to the world’s largest ad broker.