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....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.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.