I have wanted to write about Google’s data liberation front from some time. The data liberation front is an effort by Google to make your data from Google products available to you once you decide not to use them any more. Today my former student Martin was faster in his blog and created an excelent article on Googles Data liberation front. Which you really should check out since it saved me a lot of effort ! I really agree with almost all the points he makes! Let us be honest: Even though Google had many chances to be evil most the time they weren’t evil at all. But it is also true that they never had the need tobe evil. I think Googles Data liberation front is great and propably this company will really not turn evil. But I would love to extend Martins article with some potential risks.

The data liberation front is nice but could also be much better. Loads of data are still inaccassible.  I am not sure if it is nothing but a marketing gag which is nice to have as long as they rule the web anyway. If the business is running worse Google will still have the chance to be like Zuckerberg and change policies. We never know and there is for sure no guarantee!

I was not surprised by Google+ and Googles efforts to launch a social network. Even though the network seems to have great privacy settings it ist still centralized which is about the biggest criticism you can have on Google. If Google was really all that great and really cares about open data and our privacy why didn’t they use all their engineering effort to create a decentralized social network?

One last example: Googles blogging services allow you to take your blogposts and export them. But what about the backlinks you have collected. Let us assume you run a successfull blog and want to move to your own website. How is Google helping you here? As far as I know they don’t let you put 301 redirects from your old blog posts to your new blog? Exporting your content is only half the way of not being locked in!

Not much to say for this risk! Right now the Google founders clearly have a vision. But what happens if they don’t run the company anymore. There is for sure a lot of trust we – or at least I – put in Google or at least the two founders. I think it is important to be aware of this. Even though right now they seem to have good ethics and morals.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I love Google and the data liberation front is a very cool feature and goes a great step towards an open web and better society and live! I do not know of any company on the web offering similar services. I am just pointing out that we should not blindly trust Google with their data liberation front and that there is still space for improvement! In this way I encourage the google engineers to continue with their great job!