Wednesday, Aug 26, 2026 at 9:29 PM

low-effort post.

recently google emailed me about an ancient alt account that i had, and i had had entirely forgotten that i created, and that apparently hasn't seen any usage since i created it. so i decided to do a full GTakeout. the results were mildly interesting.

• in GChat, there's an explicit specifier that the user_type is "human".
• the GAccount ChangeHistory uses a semantic HTML export. this reminds me of the Netscape bookmarks HTML format wherein it's actually used both for semantics as well as markup, pretty cute.
• though the account hasn't been used with almost any Google products, all of them faithfully produced a set of files with no activity in them.
• GWorkflowStudio contains an export file called "interventions". peculiar.

across all the files, there is a very broad variety of export formats; of course every product uses its own format, kind of a well-known thing in G. most of them have settled for JSON or CSV, though there are outliers such as the "semantic HTML" above, but also, My Activity seems to use a non-semantic HTML, and GWallet's pass list is inexplicably a PDF.