It’s a little scary and a more than a little revealing. Google Takeout lets you download your history among all Google products…most of the time. And don’t expect to get support on it if it doesn’t work.

With privacy concerns at an all time high and Google usually getting a bad rap about it, here’s some information that may not put you at ease.

I’d guess that most people have used a Google product at some point in their lives. I was recently alerted to a service I wasn’t aware of while researching a problem for a friend. It’s called Google Takeout and it allows you to download all of your personal data, should you choose to move on from Google or to have a backup. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s removed from Google’s servers, nor does it mean you’ll actually get ALL of your data.

So I decided to see what it was about and headed over to Google Takeout. In typical Google fashion, it shows you all of their products and you can choose which app that may have your data (they were all selected by default).

The list continued to include all 49 products.

After reading a post about how the author (who was a paying Google customer with access to free support) couldn’t actually download all of his data, I wondered if the same would happen to me. Google actually informed him they couldn’t help because it wasn’t part of a ‘Core Service.’ Scary. Their suggestion? Google it.

A message cheerily came up saying I’d be informed when the archives had been completed and I could download them then. Not long after, I did receive that email and it showed I had almost 17GB of data which had been broken up into a few 2GB archives.

Sure enough, it said it wasn’t able to fetch all the data I requested. It allowed me to look at the one that had issues and it turned out it was Google My Business. However, that’s all it said and didn’t say why it had problems. Without delving into each of the GMB listings I manage, it appeared they were all there. Of course, it wouldn’t say it couldn’t fetch it all if it couldn’t so obviously, something was amiss there.

Because it takes 20 minutes to download 2GB here, I only decided to look at the first archive and quickly browse through it to see what it was. Once the zip file had finished, I extracted it to a folder and started browsing.

The contents of the first zip file.

19 out of 49 apps appeared and as expected, there was all of my data. From Google Ads I had clicked on to saved map locations, my photos I have on Google Drive and the history, comments, playlists and videos I have on YouTube. Surprising? Not really. Overwhelming? Yes. If you think too hard about it, you’ll get paranoid.

I recall watching a program where a guy had two phones with him. One turned on and the other turned off. When he returned from visiting certain places around the city and installed a program to see what data was being transferred when he got home, he was shocked to see the phone that was off still sent information to Google about his whereabouts that day. You can turn off and read more about Location History in this post.

I suppose the “take away” from this is that your history is not private and you won’t really know how it’s being used. Sure, we’re served ads depending on what we search for and we’re re-targeted by ads after visiting some websites. Data = money and Google uses that to its advantage. They put on a pretty face but if you dig deep enough, they are the man behind the curtain.