Re: New home for list needed-a Case Against Yahoo
This is interesting, Tom, thanks, although not altogether encouraging. Encouraging that a small "subversive" engineering group within a big company started testing their CEO's claims that Google doesn't trap end users by making it difficult to leave and take their information with them, finding that it wasn't always true, and working to engineer ways for people to get their data out more easily. And encouraging that the name of the group "Data Liberation Front" is a takeoff on the "Judean People's Front" from The Life of Brian, my all time favorite Monty Python movie. Not so encouraging in that they've only got through 2/3 of their products so far to engineer ways to make it easier for customers to take their data out, and I don't see "Google Groups" on the list of products that have been "liberated." They have some very good advice for anyone choosing a site where data are stored, that I think folks choosing a site should take seriously if we have to make this decision: "People usually don't look to see if they can get their data out of a product until they decide one day that they want to leave. For this reason, we always encourage people to ask these three questions before starting to use a product that will store their data: 1. Can I get my data out at all? 2. How much is it going to cost to get my data out? 3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?" I think we should have good answers to these questions before we choose a commercial site, if we can't find an institutional host and are forced to go in this direction. Katharine On Nov 13, 2009, at 4:59 AM, Tomas Sobota wrote: By sheer coincidence, there is a interview in El Pais (Spanish newspaper, only in Spanish) today with Nicole Wong, vicepresident of the legal services of Google (http://www.elpais.com/articulo/ tecnologia/alguien/gusto/Google/puede/llevarse/datos/elpeputec/ 20091113elpeputec_1/Tes ) and the matter of data ownership is mentioned. In case some of you cannot read it, she mentions a new site "Data Liberation Front" (http://www.dataliberation.org/ ) that Google just created to explain and facilitate data export and import from their products. This site is in English :-)
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