gemini://gmi.noulin.net/2022-01-29-google-takeout.gmi

date: 2022-01-29 15:34:27

firstPublishDate: 2022-01-29 15:34:27

I have a gmail account since 2007 and I have been interested in knowing what data I saved across Google services.

Google has a service that creates archives of the data saved on their servers called takeout:

I have 10GB data on Google servers and I chose to export in tgz format (and unzip with the command 'tar xvf takeout-001.tgx').

My data which I typed or uploaded:

Mails are saved in a mbox format

Calendars in ics format

Bookmarks in Chrome (I don't use Chrome, I think it tried it once in 2013 and imported my bookmarks from Firefox, I didn't expect this data to be on Google servers, this feature is useful for synchronizing bookmarks between devices)

Contacts: the list in 'My Contacts' are the cards I created myself and the list in 'All Contacts' are cards created automatically from mails, phone calls,...

Documents: I have never used Google Drive but the documents are saved there

Google Keep tasks are in HTML format with json metadata

My maps in kmz format (I don't know what it is)

Activities - A list of Google services accessed by: there is time, location and ip address

Google Account: list of login,logout activity, user agent and ip address. Logins on Google websites like gmail.com are saved in this list

Device list: PC, mobiles, os version, location and last activity time

Android configurations

Posts in Google Buzz in pdf format

Google play store: devices and mobile operator, installed apps (device, date, operator), reviews, searches, uninstalled apps, visited apps

Google Groups: searches, posted to group list, viewed discussions, viewed groups

Google Hangouts: recorded chats

Location history from mobiles: GPS coordinates, time, source wifi(I don't take my phone with me when I go out and it is always connected to wifi), activity "STILL", "IN_VEHICULE", "UNKNOWN", "TILTING", "ON_BICYCLE", "ON_FOOT", "WALKING" with a confidence number. There are 44000 records between 2015 and 2021

Youtube and Google Video: search and watch histories

Clicks on Google Ads: url and time

Android usage: when apps are open

list of viewed books on Google Books with time

Calendar keyword searches with time

Developer activity: list of pages viewed on GCP,...

Searches on Google Finance

Google Cloud activity

Image search: keywords, time, which image is viewed

Google Maps: searches, viewed areas

Google search: searches, visited URLs (from when I created my gmail account in 2007)

Google takeout activity

All the activity recoding can be disabled (or 'paused') at:

You can also choose to delete the activity data by clicking on the manage link (I haven't found how to delete the location history, so I selected auto-delete older than 3 months, the last record is older than 3 months).

On Google Accounts Data & Privacy tab tracking can be disabled and data deleted.

I could delete the data from Chrome but it is a bit unclear how to delete the data from: alerts, books, calendar, contacts, drive, keep, photos and tasks.

Google Takeout