O tempora o mores!
Oh the times! Oh the customs! Or so stated Cicero in 63 B.C. In his first oration in opposition to Catiline. People were repeating damnations in their instances since the dawn of human civilization. Cicero complained about his age's corruption and enmity. People nowadays whinge about corruption, enmity and a loss of privacy in a digital age. I think corruption and enmity are with us for maintains, however our pals at Google released a campaign to do something about virtual privateness multiple weeks in the past.
The Digital Liberation Front is the guerrilla-sounding name of an engineering initiative Google's implementing across all of their products. In a nutshell, it means that removing your personal data (from photographs to billing information to blog posts) should be as easy as entering it.
It won't sound like plenty, however ask all and sundry who is been silly sufficient to enroll in Classmates.Com how tons trouble it's miles to close an account and delete statistics on lots of on-line web sites and services.
Here's an excerpt from The Digital Liberation Front's website :
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The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to liberate their products. This is our mission statement:
Users ought to be capable of manage the statistics they shop in any of Google's products. Our team's purpose is to make it simpler for them to move information inside and out.
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:
- Can I get my data out at all?
- How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
- How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?
- Yes.
- Nothing more than I'm already paying.
- As little as possible.
We don't think that our products are perfect yet, but we're continuing to work at making it easier to get your data in and out of them. Visit our Google Moderator page to vote on and add suggestions on what you'd like to see liberated and why.
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The Data Liberation Front is an engineering initiative at Google, it's a refinement to Google's core values. Don't expect any great announcements, but watch data hostage taking (Facebook) start to wane. Since it's Google who's embracing this path in a very public way, expect the rest of the internet to follow suite. Make that, demand that the rest of the internet follow suite.