Not many of us like thinking about death — especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind. So today, we’re launching a new feature that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account.

The feature is called  Inactive Account Manager  — not a great name, we know — and you’ll find it on your Google Account settings  page . You can tell us what to do with your Gmail messages and data from several other Google services if your account becomes inactive for any reason.

For example, you can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube. Before our systems take any action, we’ll first warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to the secondary address you’ve provided.

We hope that this new feature will enable you to plan your digital afterlife — in a way that protects your privacy and security — and make life easier for your loved ones after you’re gone.

  

Starting today, you'll have a couple of new features to make it even easier to download your data.

First, your original folder hierarchy is now maintained if you export files from Google Drive. Gone are the days of looking at the contents of your zip file and wondering which "secret_plans" file is which.

Your folder hierarchy is preserved.

Want to download only your nefarious plans and all of your pictures of cats? We've got you covered!

We're always working to improve our tools and make it easier for users to control and access their data. Today we are happy to add support for two new services in Google Takeout.

Latitude:  Download a  json  file with your location data.

Reader:  You can already export your data within Reader. Now that functionality comes to Google Takeout. Export an  xml  file of your subscriptions and your lists of starred, shared, following (and more) items in  json  format.
Posted by Kari Ragnarsson, The Data Liberation Front

Your Takeout menu is growing.  Today's entree:  YouTube videos.

Previously, you've been able to download individual transcoded videos from your YouTube Video Manager .  But starting today, you also have a more efficient way to download your videos from YouTube. With Google Takeout, you can download all of the original videos that you have uploaded in a few simple clicks.  No transcoding or transformation -- you’ll get exactly the same videos that you first uploaded.  Your videos in.  Your videos out.

https://www.google.com/takeout/#custom:youtube

Enough of these goofy videos for Google Takeout. It’s time for an instructional screencast video instead.

This week, Gmail added support for downloading your recorded chat logs via IMAP. All of the entries that you can see in your Gmail chats label will now be delivered to your local email client if it is configured to use IMAP.

We have some information about how to set up and use IMAP for Gmail liberation on our dataliberation.org site, but since chat liberation has been requested by many users in the past (both on twitter and our moderator page), here is a screencast that demonstrates this new feature in use.