Google has a Data Liberation team

I discover via Google OS that Google has a "Data Liberation team".

Who knew?

Luke Blanshard is a member ...

Gmail Email filter export

... Posted by Luke Blanshard, Software Engineer and member of the Data Liberation team

He looks like a respectable guy, though I didn't realize Google hired people who are *cough* around my age.

Turns out, he's not entirely alone (unless the Front and the Team are different ...)

Google Blog Converters

By J.J. Lueck, Data Liberation Front

This is why I love Google. They understand the evil power of "data lock" and have decided to explicitly oppose it ...

...... We build a very good targeting engine and a lot of business success has come from that. We run the company around the users–so as long as we are respecting the rights of end users and make sure we don’t do anything against their interest, we are fine,” Schmidt said. He noted that history has shown that the downfall of companies can be doing things for their own self interest. “We would never trap user data,” he said....

This "Data Liberation" thingie may be a bit covert (is it a two person org?), but I want a T-shirt anyway.

Long live the Data Liberation Front (team)!

Update 3/8/09: Thanks to a semi-anonymous comment and another by Luke Blanshard I now know ...

• Luke is much younger than me.
• The DLF lives in the capital of fly-over land (Chicago), just down the road from me (Twins)
  
• the DLF has a tweeter (I'm a follower ...)
  
• the DLF has a goals statement:

Liberate data across web services.

Make that data portable across cooperating web services.

Allow users to own their own data which is submitted to the Cloud.

Do anything else to allow users to have fine-grained, easy access, and control of their data