On January 16th, 2012 I asked Path for a copy of my user data, a feature they publicly advertise on their website. A friend made me aware, that they were rather slow reacting to these support requests. Last night, on February 1st, I got the reply:
Hi Holger,
Thanks so much for writing! I want to apologize for our extreme delay in responding to you! We as a small team have been having a bit of a struggle recently in keeping up with so much new activity but that is no excuse!
I have put your name and contact information on a list so that we can send you your Path data. We are still building this capability so thank you in advance for your patience! Please feel free to be in touch at any time to check on the status of this.
Thanks!
You know as much as I do now. I have no clue when they’re going to make this data available to me. At least I got an answer now. There wasn’t even an automatic reply back when I sent in the actual request, confirming that my mail had arrived at all.
Data portability is becoming more and more important and when services like Path go big, they better be sure that advertised features actually work, even if they’re hidden somewhere on their website. Otherwise they’ll be knee deep in support requests like this.
Their reply looks to me like they didn’t really anticipate there’d be that much growth after releasing Path 2 at the end of last year.
I’ll keep you updated on when I get my data, what it looks like and what else comes up while getting there.