I'm not following -- 2011 was a decade after the Patriot Act was passed. Google had been receiving NSLs for years by that point, which likely used to be much harder to respond to before the creation of Takeout.
Now, as soon as Legal signs off, the production of the ZIP file is probably completely automated. And the programmers who made that possible probably believed their code was going to be used solely for their users' data portability.
(Disclaimer: Though I used to work there, all of the above is pure speculation.)
Takeout was implemented by the Data Liberation Front, an independent 20%-time collaboration between engineers in Google, accompanied by whimsical videos[0]. Takeout was never anywhere close to comprehensive, and the DLF didn't last[1].
It turns out reports of the Data Liberation Front demise have been greatly exaggerated. We are still very actively improving Google Takeout[0] as well as developing other products[1]. The thing that didn't last was running a quasi-official Twitter account, perhaps without official blessing.
Its true that the Data Liberation Front did start as a group of 20%ers, but like the much less successful GMail, we got turned in a real team and now we have reorgs and TPS and everything.
> The thing that didn't last was running a quasi-official Twitter account, perhaps without official blessing.
Running a quasi-official blog without blessing didn't last either [0]. Glad to hear the team got turned into a permanent one internally, but the lack of a public info on its existence doesn't fill me with confidence that this is something Google wants or prioritises at a management level.
The gp was talking about companies' engineers writing "user-friendly data-portability features. Across all product lines". Is that the case with Takeout at Google, or is it just a job given to one relatively small team of self-starters working on a project that was never spearheaded by management?
