Hopefully this story will become more common in the near future with online services besides Google. From webmonkey.com comes a story about letting users have free reign over their own data, an approach that would make sense to most people, but not always companies. The article “Pack Up Your Data and Leave Whenever You Want, It’s the New Rule of the Cloud” mentions that Google has put together a team of engineers called The Data Liberation Front which is “an initiative within the company to ensure every one of its products has a clear, easy option for users to export their data in bulk and take their business elsewhere.”  This initiative wishes to enable users to, for example, take all of their Gmail data – all the chats, emails, contacts, photos, attachments, everything – and download it in one nice archive file. This would be useful for if they wanted to move to another email service or if they just like to backup your files to their own computer.

Some of the thinking behind this is that the less a company gets in the way of the consumer as far as what they need, the more they will appreciate the company and give it business. Besides, it’s the consumer’s data, why not let them have it? As Brian Fitzpatrick, lead of this project said “…if you’re using a Google product now and you decide to go somewhere else, the easier we make it to leave and take your data with you, the more likely you are to come back and use something we come out with in the future.” A major problem they have remaining, though, is how to make it easy to download large amounts of data over networks whose speeds don’t match the ever increasing storage sizes for online services, an ever increasing problem as people are obtaining more and more software products online.