I'm hungry and I step up to the counter. "Hamburger and fries, please." What am I, a Martian? Big Mac or Quarterpounder? Big or little? Onions? Pickles? Cheese? Large fries or small? Curly fries?
This long interrogation finally comes to an end and I can eat in a few more minutes.
That's the way it is with Google Takeout, too. And with leaving Vistaprint, the firm that prints business cards but also caps, shirts, pens, mouse pads and umpty-ump other products. Google has more products and services than you can count. So, when you order Google Takeout, a flie of the data that Google has on you, the interrogation for the file's contents and specification is long!
Have you searched for Abraham Lincoln's birthday? Do you want to include the terms of all your searches? Have you used Google Maps? Do you want to include where you have been? How about Google Translate? Remember that time you used Google Translate to the title of a post into Chinese? https://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/2014/04/blog-post.html How about all uses of Translate? Should they be included?
It gets tiring to make all those decisions. I did want a current, up-to-date experience of downloading much of my Google data and activities but the specification of the contents got to be tiresome. Tiresome or not, I didn't want everything but I wanted most of it. I persisted, just like Elizabeth Warren. Google warned me that assembling the file could take hours or even days. It took about one hour. I received a set of 9 packages, which are zipped (compressed) files, amounting to 17.1 gigs of information.
I first used a computer in grad school in 1966. The machine was limited to 32 kilobytes. A gigabyte contains one million kilobytes. I guess it is a pretty good bet that I am not going to even look at all the stuff I just downloaded.
