Want To Find Out Everything Google Knows About You? Try This Feature

It should not come as a surprise that Google collects plenty of data on you. Once you create a Google account, the service automatically stores a lot of user activity logs on its servers, no matter where you live. From emails and Calendar entries, files stored on Google Drive, to your photos and videos, there is a whole network of Google services that store and have access to your data. And, if you're using an Android phone, you'll have even more data stored across Google's services than if you were to access Google products via a computer.

Thankfully, Google offers an option to export all that user data in a massive trove, which could come in handy if you want to migrate to another cloud service or simply want to see just how much Google knows about you. The tool is called Google Takeout, and it is totally free, though a bit slow. All you need to do is visit the Takeout dashboard at takeout.google.com.

Here, you will find a list of all the Google products you have used in the past, such as Calendar, Drive, Maps, and Gmail. Takeout is also how you can download all your photos and videos from Google Photos in one go. You may be surprised after seeing the list, which can contain as many as 70 services you may have interacted with, either directly or indirectly. In addition to the legacy products, the Takeout data now also includes data from AI-powered products such as the excellent NotebookLM tool and Google's useful Gemini AI assistant.

Google Takeout contains a granular history of all your interactions with Google products and services. For example, when you select YouTube for requesting takeout information, it includes a total of 14 data points, ranging from history and live chats to playlists, subscriptions, and video metadata, too. Google Takeout also offers several format options, from mainstream ones like MP4, CSV, and HTML to more technical data types such as JSON, MBOX, and KMZ files, depending on the service from which the data is being extracted. 

In some cases, such as phone audio and transcription, they are only available in ZIP format. Once you have selected the desired (or all) destinations from which you want to extract the user data, you will get an option to pick where and how Takeout will send its bundle to you.  You can choose to get a download link via email or directly add the file container to any cloud service of your choice, such as Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, among others. 

The Google service also lets users choose how often they want to generate a Takeout export (once or every two months), pick between ZIP and TGZ format for the whole bundle, and specify the total size, which could be anywhere between 2 to 50GB. Once you agree to generate the export bundle, Google will notify you via email, with a progress tracker. Depending on the amount of data you're exporting, it may take hours or days to compile.