Sunday, October 27, 2013

Copies of my stuff

Google, Facebook, Twitter and others have a lot of content that I've
generated. I'm starting to have second thoughts about letting them
host it and sell it (me). Even assuming their privacy policy exactly
matches mine, their security may not always be perfect. They may get
hacked (or get a court order that they may or may not tell me about)
resulting in my data being used in ways I don't want it to be.
I'm starting to flirt with the idea of pulling all my content back and
hosting it myself on something like OwnCloud. At the very least, it's a
good idea to make a backup of my own data. I have no guarantee that
they will keep hosting content I've posted (think Napster and perhaps
myspace or maybe even my old employer CompuServe or that their
backups, distributed data centers and networks will prevent outages
(for example from operational error or wide-scale Internet distributed
denial of services (DDoS) attacks).
Here are links/procedures to do that for some of the services that
may have your data:

Google Takeout

Google makes the process easy: https://www.google.com/settings/takeout

Facebook

The Facebook also provides a download service:
https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467. They send you email
with links to download your stuff. I'm still waiting. Seems it's a
slow process (lower priority, larger job, more intentional
impediments?) than allowing me to quickly post what I'm eating for
lunch for all the world to see….

Twitter

In twitter settings, there is a link to request under stetting (web
interface) to request a download of all your tweets. Again, an
email link. Mine came back pretty fast. Still waiting for
Facebook….
I may update this post form time to time.
I would welcome comments or additions for popular services (but I will
favor ones I actually use…)