Starting next year, Google will make it easier to transfer your user data to third-party services using the Takeout export tool.
This update comes at the end of an investigation by the Italian Competition Authority (AGCM), a market competition regulator. In total there will be made three new changes to Google’s service. While we don’t know exactly what the changes will be, the AGCM does mention a few things. Two of them will be “additional solutions” to Google Takeout, giving people a way to export their information to “third party operators”. The third “commitment”, as it is called, will “enable direct data portability from service to service”. The latter specifically relates to moving data generated from someone’s Google search history and YouTube.
To give some backstory, in 2022 the AGCM claimed Google had abused its dominant position in the technology industry to collect “large amounts of (user) data” and create “barriers to interoperability” when sharing information with third parties. One of the complaints said Takeout was “extremely complicated” to use – something they claim was designed that way because it “discourages people from putting their data elsewhere”. In response, Google suggested the three features we mentioned earlier as changes it could make to satisfy regulators; everything that the Authority accepted.
Expansion of data portability
As for the instant data portability feature, 9to5Google states that it is much like the Data Transfer Initiative (formerly known as the Data Transfer Project). If you don’t know what that is, the Data transfer initiative consists of the coming together of Apple, Meta and Google to expand data portability for users. The classic example, as given by 9to5Google, envisions you being able to transfer images from Google Photos to iCloud without having to do anything manually. The companies do all the heavy lifting. This can save valuable bandwidth while being much faster than downloading gigabytes of content.
It’s not known exactly when everything in the Google Takeout update will be released, but we won’t have long to wait for the instant data portability tool. The tech giant told the Authority that the feature will officially launch sometime in “the first quarter of 2024”. However, we may see it even sooner, as third-party platforms can test an early version of the tool “six months before its actual release.” Possibly in October at the earliest.
If you don’t want to wait until next year for the Google Takeout upgrade, check out TechRadar’s list of the best data migration tools for 2023.