MakeUseOf: “I’ve always known Google had a lot of information on me, but “a lot” is vague. I wanted to see the receipts. That’s when I stumbled upon a tool hidden in plain sight: Google Takeout. It gave me a way to download my data directly from Google’s servers, neatly packaged for my inspection. Google Takeout is an official service launched in 2011 by a team inside Google called the Data Liberation Front. Their mission was to make it easier for users to move their data out of Google products—whether for backups, switching platforms, or just curiosity. It’s essentially an export tool. You select the Google services you care about, and Takeout compiles an archive containing your personal data from those services. This could be your emails, documents, photos, browsing history, YouTube watch history, location logs, Google Fit activity, payment records, and more…

Buried in my Gmail folder were job applications from my early twenties, awkward exchanges with old friends, receipts from online shopping experiments, and even long-forgotten newsletters I had once been obsessed with. Reading them felt like peeking into the mindset of a past version of myself. There was a certain sweetness to it, but it also made me realize how much of my personal growth, like career moves, relationships, financial choices, etc., was quietly documented in my inbox…”

Note – If and when you decide to finally quit GMail, you can easily transfer all the contents of Google Takeout to your new email service – such as Proton. And then delete everything off GMail.