Google Takeout

One-line summary: Official Google data-export archive; the remaining documented path for a user’s YouTube data after the Data API closed watch history.

What it is

Google Account Help’s “download your Google data” flow: pick products, create an archive, wait minutes-to-days, download a link. YouTube is a listed product. From 2026-08-21-autoresearch-user-owned-interest-graph-youtube-recs.

Why it matters to interest-graph-recs

If a personal interest graph needs what the user actually watched, Takeout is the official batch path. It is not a live recommendation API.

Key facts

Archive link expires in about 7 days; each archive can be downloaded 5 times (via 2026-08-21-autoresearch-user-owned-interest-graph-youtube-recs).
Time-range export is not supported.
The Help page mentions a Data Portability API for third-party apps; that API’s YouTube-history scopes were not fetched.
Distinct from the YouTube Data API, which returns watchHistoryNotAccessible for watch history.
Academic data-donation papers (Ohme, Pfiffner, Carrière) treat a GDPR “copy of your data” as a research method. Retrieved abstracts do not measure Takeout latency or name YouTube-history scopes on a Data Portability API. From 2026-08-21-academic-research-user-owned-interest-graphs-vs-platform-recs.

Google Takeout

Google Takeout

What it is

Why it matters to interest-graph-recs

Key facts

Sources

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