We can't think of a ton of reasons to want to leave Gmail behind, but should you decide to do your emailing elsewhere, the search giant wants to make it easy for you to take your data with you.

Working towards that goal is a small team of Google Chicago engineers who make up Google's Data Liberation Front. Just as it sounds, the team's mission is to liberate personal user data so that it can be easily transferred into and out of Google's services by building simple import and export functions.'

"Many web services make it difficult to leave their services - you have to pay them for exporting your data, or jump through all sorts of technical hoops -- for example, exporting your photos one by one, versus all at once," Google wrote in a blog entry. "We believe that users -- not products -- own their data, and should be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product without a hassle."

In addition to "already liberated" Google products, such as the company's blogging platform Blogger and email service Gmail, the team also plans to do the same for Google Sites and Google Docs (batch-export) in the coming months.

Original Image Credit: hawkridge.org