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Comment by bhartzer | Hacker News Reader

Why would you want to export the data? to save voicemails?

Because it's yours?

Of course, there's a difference between why you would want to export your data and why you would want the ability to export your data.

Yeah, I would want the ability to do that, if you're adding some sort of data to a site then would that be a given? That you have some way of actually exporting the data that YOU put into it?

That wasn't actually my question here, though. My comment is actually about accessing it--why not just go directly to the service to access the voicemail?

Because you're not locked into the google voice service. You can stop using it and not risk having to lose all of the information that you had stored and created using google voice.

Probably because these services won't be around forever. It's relatively common for online services to vanish, even the ones that had been extremely popular (Geocities, for instance), and if all of your data is locked in, you lose it along with the service.

The Data Liberation Front seems to be trying to untie your data from the services that use it, because it's yours and can still be valuable to you after you've stopped using said service.

I'd like to be able to export the data so I have a backup in case Google accidentally loses some of my data, or locks me out of my account. I suppose if you totally trust Google then it might not be such a useful feature. Although I could also imagine it being nice if you want to switch to some other service in the future that resembles GV and allows you to import your old GV data.

[Edit: Why wouldn't you want to export data?]

Yeah as well as text messages, phone numbers (for importation into other contact systems) etc. backed-up and archived for work/business (even personal) purposes.

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