What Does Google Data Liberation Front Mean?
The Google Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google Inc. that is tasked with making it easy for users to disentangle themselves from Google products should they opt to stop using them. This applies to Google software that contains data that consumers may want to export to other software products. The Data Liberation Front’s goal is to enable users to do so with a relative amount of ease.
Through various platforms and software solutions, Google customers can export their data to new software products, and Google’s Data Liberation Front offers their users easy steps that outline how to perform this with each Google product. The intentions behind the Google Data Liberation Front are that Google believes that customers should be free to opt out of Google products and still be able to transfer their data to other products. This differs from other platforms that attempt to keep users by making it difficult or impossible for them to take their data with them if they decide to use another service.
Techopedia Explains Google Data Liberation Front
The philosophy behind Google’s Data Liberation Front is that Google software engineers do not desire to lock users into their products should they wish to purchase other solutions. In the past, Google software engineers believed that too many of their products forced users to stay with them for fear of losing data. Google’s Data Liberation Front enables end users to easily export their data into other brands. Technical solutions include migrating data files and syncing user access files, to name a few. Directions on how to escape to or from Google products are outlined in the Google Data Liberation Front website.
Google products include AdWords, Google Calendar, Picasa Web Albums, Gmail, Google Storage for Developers, App Engine, Buzz, Google Analytics, Profile, etc. Besides exporting data from these and other Google products, the Google Data Liberation Front website also contains information about importing data and even achieving a happy medium, as is the case with Google Sync Services, which permits the end user to maintain contacts within their Google Contacts as well as export them to other types of software programs. Conversely, the Google Takeout platform permits users to escape from all Google products simultaneously.
The Google Data Liberation Front was started by an internal engineering IT team that chose its name based on the 1979 movie "Monty Python’s Life of Brian", in which a group of characters in the movie called the Judean’s People’s Front are humorously unable to agree on anything – and tend to be very vocal in their disagreements. This mirrored the Google engineering team at the time, so this name has both realistic and humorous implications.
