Instagram launches “Data Download” tool to let you leave
In the past, when a government sent an Internet company a National Security Letter (or equivalent), it was a lot of work for them to dig up every trace of content that user has ever produced or had recorded about them -- think, for example, of a Google account, which might have GMail archives, chat logs, search history, YouTube videos, Google+ posts, Google Voice records, Chrome backups....<p>It used to be really hard to gather all that information and package it up in a nice little bundle. It used to be hard for a company to get their software engineers to quietly implement such functionality across all products without getting internal angst and bad press leaks.<p>But now, companies can just tell their software engineers that they're writing user-friendly data-portability features. Across all product lines, they'll happily code away, completely oblivious to the fact that their code is also going to be used for this other purpose.