[whistle650]

Partly as a result of regulation it seems all companies are offering ways of giving you your data. E.g. Google Takeout and Facebook’s data download etc. One thing that’s missing are software tools to allow you to do interesting things with your own data (in private). E.g. Google’s MyActivity interface could be a lot better. My interest is partly out of frustration with things like Evernote’s search, and also my desire to be able to ask questions of my data: When was I last at Costco? What was that web page I found from Hacker News during the morning last Monday or Tuesday? When did I last FaceTime my cousin?

Maybe some tools could be natural language based maybe others would be more visual.

It seems to me it would make a great open source project to build such a suite of tools.

It would also be a first step towards bringing individuals more in control of the value of their data.

Does anyone else agree (or disagree)?

[crwalker]

Agree.

We're working on this. Long term goal is a simple trustworthy digital agent for getting, understanding, controlling your own data. Please contact if interested.

[ssss11]

I've also had this thought for many years. I'd be keen on discussing it, how do I contact you?

[crwalker]

Ah, looks like my profile didn't have contact info. Fixed.

[dalore]

I agree, open data standards promised us to do stuff like this with our data. Except now our data is all in closed gardens with no incentive to share. Exports are usually in a cumbersome format with no standards between them (and what would the standard be?)

[cromwellian]

Google Takeout was an employee driven project, not the result of regulation, part of the Google Data Liberation Front and first shipped in 2011.

[gabrielcsapo]

I totally agree, hopefully I push something out this weekend that does this. I think we just need to rethink the storage ownership of all of these applications. Facebook, Evernote, Apple, Google, they shouldn't be querying internal data, but data that you are exposing to them. This moves the cost of read and write access to the individual which will alter the balance of power.

[ssss11]

Exactly. The user needs to control the data, the vendor can request access to specific elements for their app (for you to use) to which you grant them access via API ... the user controlled tools need to be created though. Or do they exist now?

[gabrielcsapo]

I am working on something that hopefully can facilitate this and expand what’s possible for the user and their data. If your interested I should she something up soon https://github.com/gabrielcsapo

[philipwhiuk]

> Partly as a result of regulation it seems all companies are offering ways of giving you your data.

Entirely as a result of legislation or lawsuits, like stuff done by Max Schrems. The companies aren't doing this voluntarily at all.

[whistle650]

Google Takeout may at least partly have been the result of (some) employees thinking it was the right thing to do. It’s gotten a lot better over time, it used to be something much more crude that did seem like an internal grassroots thing....

[jkaplowitz]

Google's version long predated Max Schrems's activism or the GDPR. But, as a sibling reply says, the legislation and lawsuits probably made them put greater and more systematic resources into it.

[amelius]

Side-question: what guarantees do I have that the data I get from these companies are complete? What recourse do I have if the data turn out to be incomplete?