Google+ Shutdown Must Be Delayed

When Google shuts down its Google Plus social media service tomorrow, it will be leaving its roughly 400 million active users in the lurch. Even though the platform never gained the kind of traction that Facebook and Twitter have, it was still home to countless vibrant online communities that will soon cease to exist.

Google Plus is offering a feature for users to export their data in an attempt to show those loyal users that it cares about them. Unfortunately, the company’s effort falls far short. If you run a group in Google Plus, your export data will not contain any contact info for the members of your groups, making it impossible to reconstruct your community. There also won’t be any of the media such as images that you and your members uploaded over the years — just links to soon-to-be-dead G+ pages.

To make matters worse, the data is incredibly cumbersome to handle if you actually want to migrate to another social platform. My company, Grou.ps, created a migration script for G+ users to move their data to our open source social networking platform. But we’re constrained by the data Google has provided. We contacted Google Plus leadership team about these problems but were only met with red tape.

There are currently project, like the Archive Team’s, to preserve all of the public posts ever made on Google Plus. That’s a great initiative, which recognizes that the Internet and what’s posted online is part of society’s shared history in our digital era. But even the good people at the Internet Archive unfortunately can’t do anything to preserve the actual social communities that were created on Google’s supposed social network.

And this gets to the heart of the matter. Google Plus, like Facebook and Twitter, have never been about building communities. It’s true that Google created an easy-to-use way to export your data to either Blogger or WordPress. But there are a number of problems with this solution. First of all, neither of those platforms are social networks. So if users wants to recreate their Google Plus communities and connections, they have to do it from scratch. Second, it forces users to choose from two Google-approved, rather than giving them the freedom to choose what to do with their data.

After Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal and reports of YouTube’s algorithm leading users down rabbit holes to radicalization, most people hardly expect Big Tech giants to act in the public interest. So this behavior is not really a surprise. But maybe it can be a learning experience.

The data export issue is hardly unique to Google. Facebook’s data export is similarly lacking. It can make a nice offline archive if you want to go on a “digital cleanse” and scrub yourself from all social media. But if you, say, want to move to another platform because you object to Facebook tracking your every move across the web, you’re out of luck. So we need to force tech giants to respect user choice and freedom to migrate off one platform and to another.

Users need data portability and interoperability. Regulations like GDPR are a great start when it comes to privacy, but they don’t do anything to help user choice. In fact, we’ll never truly have a free marketplace among social platforms until users are guaranteed the ability to move from one platform to another. Google is slamming the door on its users freedom. We shouldn’t let other companies do the same in the future.