store Personal data on your home Computer or from one provider to another? With the Google service data both download.

Greg Fair, and Stephan Micklitz in Munich, the Google office (photo: Conny Mirbach)

Mr Micklitz, Mr Fair, you Google download, among other things, for the service data. What exactly is a Tool?

Stephan Micklitz, head of development for security and data protection:
With data you can download, for example, photos, contacts, E-Mails, calendar entries or music files that are stored by Google, on your computer or transfer it to another provider.

Greg Fair, the product Manager of data download: My wife and I have two children and, accordingly, as well-all parents – lots of photos of them. 600 gigabytes, to be exact. As Recently our hard drive with the photos broke, I was glad that I had them stored completely in the case of Google photos. So I was able to play the images with download the data to a new hard drive.

How many users use to download data to Export your data?

Fair: Currently, we are one of the world Million exports per month, and the trend is rising. In General, the users make a Back-up of data stored in Google…

Micklitz: …which is a bit irrational, because the data is stored at Google is actually much safer than most of us at home.

Fair: peeing home, the cat maybe on the hard disk, or the kids make you broken, or there is a fire. In Google, every file is stored multiple times on different servers. Safer it is not.

photo: Conny Mirbach

And still save a Fair your data on a hard disk, Lord!

Fair: This is the case, remember that my wife, image processing programs, where it is impractical, if the images are in the Cloud.

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Micklitz: But I don’t use, for example, such programs still do I save my pictures on a hard disk. It is my data, that’s why I want to own a physical copy of it.

Why do you so irrational?

Micklitz: photos, for example, are something very Personal and Emotional. Many memories are associated with it. As a user, I don’t want to make me on the spot by a single company – even if I work for this company. Therefore, portability are download services such as data so important: they give our users the opportunity to always have the data that belong to you, even if you are just in Google in the Cloud.

Since when is portability Google a topic?

Fair: For over a decade. Initially, we developed custom data-portability services. In 2011, Google’s centralized solution came out then Takeout – the service was then called. In the meantime, we have integrated more and more Google services and today’s data supports download more than 40 of them.

Micklitz: Greg is the product Manager for data download, and actually works at our headquarters in Silicon Valley. However, since the location is Munich, Germany for the development in the areas of data protection and data security at Google in a leading role, he has supported us for a year.

Fair: Yes, many of my colleagues are here. It was just more sensible for me to work in a direct exchange with you on these issues. And it is also pleasant.

“data download” on the Smartphone (photo: Conny Mirbach)

Many users store their data on your computer, transferred to other services, however, rare. Why is there this imbalance?

Fair: in the Meantime, you can transfer data from Google to Dropbox, Box or Microsoft Office 365, and Vice-versa, of course. Many other competitors do not offer this possibility. To change this, we have in 2017, called the Data Transfer Project, and in July of this year officially announced. This is an Open-Source project, the company features free-of-charge program code for Portability and a seamless Transfer of data from one Service to the next.

Micklitz: we assume that a Start-up developed a great new service. For the small company, it would be expensive to provide a portability solution. Instead, you can go to the Data Transfer Project and the corresponding code in your own Software.

it Is in your best interest, if I move to a different provider?

Fair: We want you to Google services, because they are the best – and not because you think that your data is somewhere else useless.

data protection basic regulation, which entered into force in may, contains provisions for the portability of data. They had to customize a data download, in order to meet the requirements?

Fair: As we have the regulation two years ago, for the first Time read through, we thought: In the case of portability, we are already pretty good in there. At the moment we has been with us for quite a while.

Micklitz: We find it good that the issue is finally Onattention gets, it deserves. At the Moment, portability is still a niche topic that not many users are interested in. But we believe that this will change in a few years.

Why?

Micklitz: The people Yes, to save your data in the Cloud. But let’s suppose that a company goes bankrupt, and your data is stored on the servers of this company. Then you want to have the possibility to save this data. This also has something to do with the durability of data. I want my children to have snapshots from their Childhood, just as I can look at the yellowed photo prints of my parents.

you want digital photos have the same durability as analog?

Micklitz: Yes. Also in the further sense of privacy: that can I use the data I save today, in 50 years.

infobox, article 3 short biographies

Stephan Micklitz is as head of development worldwide in the areas of security and privacy at Google responsible. He studied at the Technical University, Munich computer science and works since the end of 2007 at Google in Munich, Germany. the

Greg Fair care, as a product Manager, among other things, the Tool to download data, with the users of your data from Google not only download but also to transfer other providers can. The Californians has been working since 2012 at the headquarters in Mountain View (California), and spent last year in Munich, to work with Stephan Micklitz and his Team at Google products.