The Data Liberation Front
"Users own the data they store in any of Google's products.
Our team's goal is to give users greater control by making it
easier for them to move data in and out."
"Why did you start The Data Liberation Front?
For a couple of reasons. The first reason is that we heard our CEO, Eric Schmidt, speak out against lock-in time and time again:
How do you be big without being evil? We don't trap end users.
So if you don't like Google, if for whatever reason we do a bad
job for you, we make it easy for you to move to our competitor.
We started looking at our products and discovered that while the door to leave wasn't locked, in some cases it was a bit "stuck" and we thought that we could do better.
Why are you doing this? What's the catch?
We're doing this because we want our users to stay with us because they want to. While locking users in is a way to keep them in the short term, we believe that the way to keep users in the long term is to keep innovating and making our products better so that they choose to stay with us. And besides, if someone stops using one of our products today, we hope that they would be willing to try one of our other products at some point in the future."