Our work to move data portability forward

Editor’s note: Google and the Data Transfer Project recently submitted comments to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about data portability. Ahead of tomorrow’s “Data To Go” workshop with the FTC, we’re sharing an overview of our work along with some updates.When it’s easy for people to move their data to competing products, the pressure is on us to build the products they like best. And that’s how it should be: we want people to use our products and services because they prefer them, not because they feel locked in.This principle is at the heart of Takeout, our data portability tool that helps people export copies of their data from more than 70 Google products, including Gmail, Drive and Photos. Today there’s an average of more than two million exports per month from Takeout with more than 200 billion files exported in 2019. People use Takeout for lots of different reasons: backing up their data, getting a bird’s eye view of what’s in their account, or moving their data to a different service without first downloading it onto a device. We first supported direct transfer of data archives in 2016, and since then have launched a scheduled export service, as well as the ability to transfer photos directly from Google Photos to Flickr and Microsoft OneDrive. Today we’re announcing that we’ve added more granular controls, so you can transfer specific albums, rather than your entire library. Millions of photos have already been transferred since we began to roll this out.
— Read on blog.google/technology/safety-security/data-portability/