Viva Data Liberation!

If, like me, you spend a lot of time in the cloud, you may occasionally worry about your (over?) reliance on Google's many cloud products. You may have bookmarks set in Chrome, appointments recorded in Calendar, emails stored at Gmail, documents saved at Documents, blog posts at Blogger and so on. With the exception of fairly rare gmail outages, Google's service provision and data security performance has been pretty reasonable, But still, but still...

A Google engineering team has set up a site called Data Liberation, aimed at providing users with clear and easy information on how to 'escape' from each of the Google services, taking their precious data with them. The stated (and admirable) principle behind this site is: "users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google's products".

Google may be about to take over the world, but in this instance at least, they are doing so with a modicum of politeness.