
Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History - siberianbear
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/google-will-soon-let-you-automatically-scrub-your-location
======
mattlondon
This is welcomed, but they might do better to remove the requirement to have
the Web/Location/App history enabled for apparently unrelated features.

E.g. I cant store my home location in Google Maps without turning on Web & App
activity history. Why? I cant share my _current_ location (not historic, just
my latest location - they only need to store one) with my partner unless I
turn on Web and Location history. Why?

I am sure a lot of people will now pipe-up and say "Ah well they want your
data! That is why!". Kthx bai for that - I get it.

It strikes me as this being a "nudge" more than anything, or perhaps just a
cut-corner to get a feature enabled rather than support something custom (e.g.
in the case of my current location vs location history, it was probably easier
for them to build something that just picks the most-recent record off of the
top of your location history rather than create something new for only storing
the most recent ping independently from location history along with all the
privacy controls, legal reviews, documentation, and UI fiddly bits that go
along with supporting something new)

~~~
tylerl
Here's your answer:

There's no such thing, at least at scale, as sharing your information without
also storing it. Not if you want the system to be reliable. So in order to
make Google share your location with others, you have to give them permission
to store your location. This should be self-evident enough if you take a
moment to think about it.

As for lumping web history together with location history, it turns out you
can derive the latter if you know the former. There's been a lot of fuss and
breathless reporting about that fact. So authorizing them to know the one
without the other is a bit of a fiction, especially in those cases that get
written up by tech journalists. Best not to pretend that it's possible to keep
them separate.

This new thing is an acknowledgement of the fact that the whole point of using
Google services is sharing information with them and asking them to hold on to
it, at least for a bit, at least until you've gotten the desired use out of
the service... but also of the fact that a certain kind of person, the kind
you often find on HN, would sleep better if Google deleted that data after it
had served it's immediate purpose.

~~~
callmeal
>So in order to make Google share your location with others, you have to give
them permission to store your location.

Sure. I have no problem with that. What I have a problem with is, why is
google insisting on storing all the locations that I am not sharing?

I only want to share this current location. So yes, that will have to be
stored somewhere. But for the love of everything I don't see why sharing my
current location requires saving all my future locations.

~~~
JetSpiegel
Because otherwise Waze doesn't work.

You can also imagine the other sub-rosa reasons for this.

------
o10449366
The funny thing is that Google will still let you store your home address and
they'll display it on the map, but if you have Location History turned off
they'll refuse to list it as an autocomplete option when you search for
addresses or directions. They _know_ what it is, but they won't let you
actually use it unless you expose everything else. It's extremely user hostile
and there's no good reason to do it.

Edit: To clearly demonstrate what I'm talking about:
[https://imgur.com/a/QW9OxAS](https://imgur.com/a/QW9OxAS)

They pin your saved locations to the top of the UI. If I click "Home" it will
take me to my exact address. However, if I attempt to search "Home" in the
search bar I get

"Turn on your Web & App Activity setting to search for 'home' and other
personal places"

No thanks, Google. You don't need to know my entire location history 24/7 to
take me to a static address you already have saved.

~~~
gonyea
This is hilarious. Every single Google conspiracy is basically because some
Google Engineer tried to DRY up functionality in an insanely complicated
system.

~~~
taneq
It's funny, though, how every single "conspiracy" just randomly ends up
falling in the "fine if you give them full access, fails if you turn off
location services" quadrant. Like, I've not _once_ seen a mistake in the
direction of "eh just turn off that data collection point and it'll fix it."

~~~
gonyea
Imagine you have ~billions of users and 99.9% of them use the default. Do you
put your eng effort towards power-user flexibility for the tinfoil hat crowd
or do you improve popular features?

In the case mentioned, searching "your locations" appears to be just all on or
all off (I have no insider knowledge of Maps). That _greatly_ reduces the
surface area for heisenbugs in a high QPS system.

------
duxup
So does this actually delete it ... for Google?

Deleting it from say my browser, maps, or other history is one thing. Does
Google no longer have any of it?

Also the top and bottom bars that leave me with like 1/3 usable space on
google's blog is really frustrating to read on:
[https://blog.google/technology/safety-
security/automatically...](https://blog.google/technology/safety-
security/automatically-delete-data/)

~~~
aiiane
Yes, if you choose to delete it, it will be deleted. (It takes nontrivial
amounts of time to delete it across distributed service architecture but the
deletions do get propagated.)

~~~
loudtieblahblah
I simply do not believe this.

Unless they're audited by a source that can be trusted and have the findings
made public, I will not believe it either.

~~~
aiiane
You're welcome to believe whatever you want, but a decent chunk of my day job
is making sure that it's true.

~~~
ben_jones
I value your contribution to this thread, can I ask some follow-ups?

Does Google have multiple "Deletion policies" such that deleting data from
i.e. your GCP bucket follows one policy, and the "scrubbing" described in this
article follows an entirely different policy? If so, do different deletion
policies have different processes and different audit trails such that the end
"deleted" state is subjective and controlled by the engineering and managerial
oversight of the engineering/leadership team of that given product(s)?

From my (naive) opinion, it must be really, really, hard to for example,
retrain every ML model that a now deleted datapoint ever touched. Its hard too
to believe that, at some high level in Alphabet's org, there is no motivation
to have the positive PR of feature(s) like this, but still at essence not
delete the parts of the data trail that significantly drive Google's revenue.
Do these datapoints significantly impact Google's revenue?

~~~
aiiane
First let me say that I can't speak to whether anything "significantly impacts
Google's revenue" \- either I don't have any material information in that
regard, or if I did the SEC probably wouldn't want me making statements about
it. :)

So with that caveat in mind, let me see what I can help answer.

I'm not entirely sure what nuance you're implying when you say "different
deletion policies" \- while for instance Cloud might have a different timeline
or set of triggers for when and what data is deleted, when it happens
"deleted" still generally means "deleted". Some products like GSuite have the
ability for administrators to say, disable accounts, which removes them from
use but doesn't delete the account, but that's transparent to the domain
administrator.

It's definitely nontrivial to track data propagation within large systems, but
standardizing infrastructure, having central documentation of data handling
plans, and having comprehensive privacy reviews for any new functionality that
launches helps keep people on the same page.

Edit: oh, and regarding "retraining every model a data point touched" \- the
easiest way to do this is to just always be regenerating your models on a
frequent basis. If you retrain your models once a day or once a week on a
fresh snapshot of your data, they'll only ever be that stale.

~~~
russdpale
Uh, I guess all of this is wonderful and I appreciate the write up, but
anecdotal evidence on an internet forum is not very reassuring to many of us.
Until Google commits to some real actual transparency, there is no reason to
believe they are actually deleting any data from their own servers, and that
the options presented to end users is nothing more than a placebo switch.

No offense to you, but I remember when Amazon was releasing their home
devices, and many people rang alarm bells in these forums only to be answered
by supposed Amazon employees or friends thereof explaining why these devices
couldn't possibly been sending data. Well low and behold, they are sending all
sorts of data to Amazon. Were those commenters just lying? Were they
misinformed? Were they trying to spread disinformation for whatever reason?
Perhaps all three..

Here in America, the gig is up. Everyone, even our grandma's, understands that
security and privacy is _always_ going to take a back seat to profit. Always.

So again, no offense to you personally, but everything you are saying must be
taken with a ginormous grain of salt.

The only answers are either open source or objective third party auditing, or
preferably some combination of both. Words from google employees mean nothing.

~~~
qvrjuec
What data are the Amazon devices sending other than recordings of commands
which need to be interpreted?

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Will they also untrain the machine learning model that they've fed all of this
data into to predict exactly what kind of ads are most likely to get you to
spend money? How about slurping up data for users who don't have an account
but send a ping to google on every goddamn page on the internet?

~~~
user17843
Google is not allowed to collect PII data of users who visit google services
without registering. So everytime you delete your cookies, you are a new user,
and they also are not allowed to log the ip address of non-users indefinitely.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Do you have a source, or any evidence that they don't? Google doesn't deserve
the benefit of the doubt. This is literally their business model.

~~~
user17843
I think this is basically the GDPR rules, but I would need to look into the
details more.

~~~
bduerst
You're right - Article 3 of GDPR defines the scope as applying to any user
residing in the EU. If the users are not logged in then you don't know where
they reside (IP address != residence), meaning any international company that
operates in the EU needs to err on the side of caution for non-logged in users
everywhere.

~~~
jefftk
IP address geolocation is the normal way people determine if GDPR applies.

~~~
bduerst
IP address geolocation is not always accurate, can be spoofed, and is flat out
wrong for EU residents who travel outside of the EU.

Maybe it's normal for a startup, but for a billion dollar company, they're not
going to roll the dice on 4% revenue fines and IP address geolocation.

~~~
jefftk
If you send some test requests to any big company including Google I believe
you'll see they're using IPgeo.

(Disclosure: I work at Google, I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice)

~~~
user17843
Do you think my interpretation of Google not having long-term user-profiles of
non-logged in users due to GDPR is correct? I read that Google has rolled out
their GDPR compliance worldwide.

------
AdmiralAsshat
Will that remove the history from Google's Sensorvault?[0] Because if not,
this is just theater.

[0][https://www.eff.org/es/deeplinks/2019/04/googles-
sensorvault...](https://www.eff.org/es/deeplinks/2019/04/googles-sensorvault-
can-tell-police-where-youve-been)

------
Sheep_McSheepy
One thing that I find very interesting in the comments is people's approach to
Google services. It's no secret that Google makes money from ads and models
based on the user usage on their free services.

A lot of people are complaining that if they disable data collection, try
their hardest to not contribute to these data models and block the ads with ad
blocker then some feature doesn't work for them. So you just want to use
Google services completely for free without contributing anything.

Other people complain about permissions that Assistant or other products
require. There's always a very good reason why these permissions are required
that is not monetary. Each permission request goes through a lot of scrutiny,
lawyers reviews, product reviews, approvals, etc. You can ask why disabling
some permissions affects features that shouldn't need it. Sometimes it is
lawyers fault, sometimes it's just engineers not supporting properly each of
2^{number of permissions} permission combinations.

~~~
luckylion
> So you just want to use Google services completely for free without
> contributing anything.

Not necessarily. I believe that google's services are good enough to use them,
and I'd certainly pay a few bucks a month to do so and be their customer - and
not be the product that they sell to their customers. I'm also pretty sure
that they'd make more money off of me paying them for providing a service to
me than they make by selling my data to advertisers (me blocking ads and all
that). If the only way of "contributing" however is to give up my privacy,
then yes, I don't want to contribute.

~~~
SquareWheel
Why not pay for a GSuite account? That seems to meet your criteria.

~~~
luckylion
That would be more of a "paying for something", I think. I don't use Google
Apps, I have a gmail account that I don't regularly use. I'm a simple man, I
just use search (and it's variations) and maps, and the occasional YT video. I
understand that GSuite doesn't touch those, so while a good idea from a moral
view ("I can't pay you for this, so I'll pay you for that which I never use
but can pay for"), it doesn't change the privacy invading parts of the
products I actually do use.

------
owaislone
I'll be happy when they let me use their products like Google assistant
without collecting all this info in the first place. Even a degraded
experience would be fine. Why does assistant need to know where I was last
week or what I searched for to answer simplistic questions?

~~~
brandonhorst
You're in luck! Those requirements were removed months ago. You can use
Assistant with those settings disabled no problem.

~~~
owaislone
I just tried. Still asks me to turn on web and app activity, voice and audio
activity, and device information. I say "OK Google" and it asks me to turn
these things on. It does understand that I invoked it but won't help me unless
I turn on these three trackers.

------
Circuits
TBH I dont mind Google knowing all this stuff about me. I like targeted ads.
What I dont like is the idea that someone could steal that information from
them and use it against me. Soak up as much info as you want from me Google,
idc but if you're going to do that than you better damn well be able to keep
it protected.

~~~
50656E6973
>you better damn well be able to keep it protected

There is no 100% security.

Some companies do a lot better job than others at protecting their systems,
but it's only a matter of time before they are breached or information is
leaked, especially a high value target like Google.

If a powerful nation state wants to breach a corporation, they will.

So, the real question is this: is an affinity for targeted advertising really
worth creating the most detailed psychological profiles in history on billions
of people if it is inevitable that this information will be compromised and
used for more nefarious purposes?

------
new12345
I see this(others recent Gmail changes) as tactical measures that google is
taking to save its image in light of steep growth of privacy friendly
startups(proton mail, duckduckgo, etc.). But my take is that they aren't going
to get too war with this until they really commit themselves to preserving
users privacy. Unfortunately, likelyhood of this change in thinking of Google
executives is very low as its an up hill battle against the revenue they earn
selling users data.

------
pixelperfect
Doesn't Google keep track of web history through IP/browser fingerprinting
even if you don't use an account? And when asked about it they give vague
answers about what information is being kept and for how long. That's why I
switched to using DuckDuckGo for most of my searches.

~~~
incompatible
Probably. I also switched to DuckDuckGo, and it generally works fine. On
Google, I would get banners suggesting that I set my privacy settings, but it
would say I had to log into a Google account to use it.

------
parliament32
This is huge, and exactly what I want from these kinds of services -- a set
"age out" policy where I can specify how long my data is retained before being
deleted.

If FB let me clean out all my posts/comments/activity from everything older
than a year I might actually start using it again.

------
whizzkid
Google should know that they have very little credit left on my side. When I
read the this article, I immediately think about the ways on how they can
still keep tracking me.

\- Check the latest user status after 3 months before deleting user history.

\- Compare it with the previous 3 months and update the difference ona
separate table that are not facing the end user.

\- Scrub location and web history from user facing database.

It saddens me now that all google apps on my mobile phone are no longer
allowed to access nothing. I try to only grant access if i really need to.
This is how it became unfortunately.

------
murat124
Why is the minimum lifetime of data set to 3 months? Is it because 3 months
sounds like a reasonable period of time for users to look back at their usage
or is it because Google needs 3 months to process the data, for marketing or
other money making purposes?

The reality is whether they keep the data for 3 months or 18 months doesn't
mean anything. It just gives you the illusion that they no longer use your
data. I find it hard to believe there's good intentions behind this (other
than deleting data AFTER it's used).

~~~
aiiane
You can always set it to zero by turning off location history / web and app
activity entirely, causing new data to not be stored at all.

~~~
JoshTriplett
And then a pile of features that _shouldn 't_ need that history will refuse to
operate.

------
tonyztan
Dup:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804232)

------
ocdtrekkie
I'm happy to just leave both settings off entirely. I actually do have some
_historical_ location data still stored there, they know where I was a number
of years ago.

I almost wonder if leaving it there has a positive effect, as my life has
changed, the locations I go have changed, the products and services I use and
the stores I patronize have changed, and Google is left with a version of me
that is no longer accurate.

~~~
jklinger410
This is why most ads target within 30 days.

------
amirmasoudabdol
This is actually worst for your privacy because it gives you an impression
that your data is not being used. However, by the time that you remove it
Google is already done with your data. I feel this will spread to other type
of data that they are collecting too. I cannot convince myself that it’s a
good thing and Google has good intentions with it.

~~~
mtgx
Yes, maybe if the auto-delete was for 24h, at least as an option, but 3
months? Why bother? Just pause the activity completely:

[https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols](https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols)

------
c22
[https://blog.google/technology/safety-
security/automatically...](https://blog.google/technology/safety-
security/automatically-delete-data/)

~~~
c22
What value has "buzzfeednews" added here?

------
username223
> Scrubbing this data from your Google account...

What about those of us without Google accounts? I use pretty aggressive
tracker blocking, but wouldn't be surprised if a PREF cookie, ETag, browser
fingerprint, or some other tracking mechanism snuck through at some point. My
parents don't use any Google services other than search (not logged in), but
Google likely has most of their web browsing histories going back years,
thanks to ads and analytics.

If I delete my Google cookies, will Google delete my history and not try to
re-identify me? It seems like "privacy theater" otherwise.

------
4ntonius8lock
What's the over/under on how long before this feature 'accidentally' breaks?
I'd bet even money on it 'malfunctioning' in less than 1 year.

Just like so many of the privacy features put out by FANG companies, which
mysteriously undo themselves upon update roll outs. Funny how I've never seen
those roll outs cause the privacy features to automatically turn on, only off.

Still better than nothing, I appreciate the option, but I can't help but being
VERY skeptical about this.

------
newscracker
The article doesn’t mention Google collecting and storing location information
even when it’s turned off, and having the users figure out more convoluted
ways to get rid of that tracking. Scrubbing this information periodically is
not a substitute for not collecting or storing it in the first place. Whenever
that’s done, I’ll probably accept that Google is doing something for privacy.

------
bad_user
This feature looks pretty cool and it’s basically what I wanted. Kudos.

The question is, are they deleting that data?

I think they are big enough that, at least for EU users, not deleting that
data would land them in a lot of trouble, so I think that they do.

For people concerned with privacy I don’t think Google is trustworthy enough,
but these features are good to have for the rest of the world, so I’m glad to
see it.

~~~
idlewords
One nice form of regulation would be a mechanism to let companies in this
situation make a formal and binding privacy claim, that would then expose them
to painful consequences if shown to be untrue.

Right now we just have to take Google's word for it, but if they were willing
to pinky swear (figuratively speaking), it would let people trust them more,
and possibly let them offer new kinds of services.

~~~
dragonwriter
> One nice form of regulation would be a mechanism to let companies in this
> situation make a formal and binding privacy claim, that would then expose
> them to painful consequences if shown to be untrue.

Or you could just make making false representations to get anything of value
from people a tort _generally_ , and in egregious cases a crime as well,
rather than making it a privacy-specific regulation, and without making any
particular formality on the part of the vendor necessary for consumers to be
protected.

~~~
idlewords
Your scenario means you have to sue Google and win, as well as prove damages.
That has historically just not worked. When Snapchat was shown to be
collecting location data after explicitly promising not to, for example, they
just got a slap on the wrist.

I'm taking about a system that would let companies voluntarily increase their
legal exposure to specific claims as a proof of commitment. That would allow
companies to pick a level of privacy protection they wanted to offer, and
market to customers based on that commitment, in an enforceable and credible
way.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Your scenario means you have to sue Google and win, as well as prove
> damages. That has historically just not worked.

So does a proposal about a special ceremony which makes the claim binding; you
still have to take action when they break it, and prove that they did.

> I'm taking about a system that would let companies voluntarily increase
> their legal exposure to specific claims as a proof of commitment.

Increased exposure in what specific way? Lowering the standard of proof below
preponderance of the evidence? Keeping that standard but allowing statutory
minimum damages? Adding a damages multiplier?

~~~
idlewords
You have a regulatory body to provide outside auditing, high monetary
penalties for violations through neglect, and if the violations are
intentional, somebody goes to the pokey. Kind of a codified and structured
version of what the FTC does now, except with real teeth and without the
problems the FTC faces in enforcement.

If you don't like that approach, there are other ways to make the idea work
(or, since this is HN, "well actually" it into a fine powder).

------
hawaiian
There's a hint of hubris in this move, the way I see it. Google must have
enough confidence in the interferential power of the data they've accumulated
that they can now wash their hands of anti-privacy dark patterns and declare
themselves pure. It's a huge PR win without having to commit to deep changes
in their (primary) business model.

~~~
Felz
Assuming that were true, wouldn't it be a massive existential risk to Google?
The finely tuned ML model that classified everything correctly before might
catch fire and explode if the thing generating its data changes.

In practice I assume that data has highly marginal value for them so the small
percent of people who bother to use this won't matter much.

------
strooper
Living outside US jurisdiction, I strongly believe, my data will end up in the
hands of the interested party, specially when/if I am targeted, no matter what
setting I choose. I rather get some services running smoothly in my devices
when I have these settings (i.e. historical data) enabled. So, I prefer
keeping these enabled.

------
jakecopp
Is there an open source replacement for Google Maps timeline that doesn't
destroy battery life?

I know how bad it is privacy wise but I get so much utility of being able to
see all the places I have been on a map, it's so wonderful after travelling or
for finding places in my hometown I haven't yet been to.

------
ryacko
On a web forum for programmers on a website known for funding startups there
are numerous discussions about Google being inconvenient about privacy and
some of them are thinking about buying Apple products. As opposed to rooting
their smartphone and using MicroG.

~~~
dredmorbius
Rooting and re-romming is decidedly nontrivial in many cases, even for
otherwise technically proficient users. Many devices are poorly supported,
information is at best unclear, tool distribution is vastly less than trust-
inspiring, data loss risk is high, and supported platforms for accomplishing
root are limited.

Source: been trying (off and on) to root a device since 2015. By all accounts,
it's _not_ ROMable.

This being a key reason I've all but entirely soured on smartphones and
tablets of _any_ description, though Purism are looking interesting.

------
antpls
It would have been fairer to let the users decide how many days precisely they
want to keep history, and let everyone find their sweet spots.

And, sure, it's deleted from Google. Is it also deleted from ads networks
after Google shared the data with them? I doubt about it.

~~~
SquareWheel
What do you mean? Google is the ad network. They aren't sharing that data with
anyone else.

------
craftinator
Too little, too late. The average person is beginning to hate you as much as
the tech savvy people, Google, and there's no one to blame but your greedy
elitist self!

------
amelius
By the way, I deleted my entire history two weeks ago, and since then I didn't
notice any downsides yet, such as a deterioration of my "search experience".

------
m0zg
Offering this should be a legal requirement for any company collecting
tracking data, IMO. I might even re-enable my YouTube and Search history when
they roll this out.

------
Sir_Substance
But only if you have a google account. If you don't have a google account,
there's no way to request your shadow profile get scrubbed. As usual.

~~~
Sheep_McSheepy
If you don't have google account then your data is stripped from all PII
making identification virtually impossible. How do you want to instruct Google
to delete your data if it cannot tell what's your data?

~~~
whenchamenia
Not sure if this is sarcastic or not. Psudeoanonymization is a paragon of
plausible deniability.

~~~
Sheep_McSheepy
Deniability of what? Google cannot reliably identify logged out users.
There're different lawyer groups that make sure it's the case. I was working
with the log data and this is actually a big pain, having to go through data
reviews and remove all identifiable data.

------
pavelmark
We will do something approaching the right thing... soon!

------
jdofaz
I don't want to send my location to google in the first place. Is there a way
to do that on Android without disabling Location Services entirely?

------
sam_goody
Google builds a profile for each user.

Even when the data is deleted, I assume the profile stays (as far as I can
tell from the meager writing so far), and can continue to be developed with
further info, even if all the old info has been deleted.

At the end of the day, the profile is more important than the data that was
used to build the profile, so its great for Google - and it doesn't help me
that much that my data was deleted.

In addition, Google could save in that profile all sorts of useful metadata
(how many emails, from what range of countries, etc.) that might someday be
useful.

Other commenters have stated that Google's algorithm currently rebuilds the
profile when any data has changed. Obviously this will have been fixed (...to
include the fact that the user wants deletion in the profile) before this
feature gets rolled out.

1\. Only a tiny percentage of users will use this, so the benefits in a legal
sense are big compared to the loss.

2\. The only loss is that future development will have been able to squeeze
more from that info, and the metadata is enough to offset most of that risk.

------
ktosobcy
Why just not stop collecting it?

------
theDoug
Great, another thing they deprecate, my own history. /s

------
OrgNet
Only do that if you don't want to know what Google knows about you (because
they will keep your history and don't mind hiding it from you).

------
PHGamer
can we export our location history?

~~~
mceachen
Yes. Google takeout has that as an option.

------
caprese
Thank you European Union

------
RockmanX
google will soon let you think you can scrub your personal info.

------
loudtieblahblah
uh huh

~~~
dang
Would you please stop dragging down the quality of this site by posting
uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments? If you don't believe something,
fine—the rest of us don't necessarily need to hear about that, but ok, one
comment was fine. This one, though, is both rude and dumb. Posts like this
will get you banned from HN, so please don't do it again.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
Spearchucker
I personally don't believe them. I have an android phone but no Google login.
I don't even want to begin to try and work out how to get them to scrub my
anything. I've asked them for a copy of all my data based on phone number
under GDPR. I've also instructed them to delete what they have about me.
Obviously very interested to see how it works out.

------
Chilenazo
Whenever I want to send an email through gmail in my phone, it doesn't suggest
senders unless I give them permission to access my phone contacts. Does
anybody know a way around this?

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tyopiuy
Ya ok, call me a cynic, but I doubt it amounts to anything more than a new
column in their tables. It’s gonna all be there - there’s too much money on
the line to permanently erase anything

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Dirlewanger
Honestly, people have to be fools to think this is anything more than a feel-
good placebo. Google is only doing this because public sentiment is starting
to grow restless regarding data privacy. But given the pitiful, embarrassing
grasp (judging by the Facebook/Google hearings) Congress has on the issue, I
guarantee there will be no kind of followup to ensure Google actually deletes
the data as they say they will. And honestly, why would they actually
implement the feature? Who's going to hold them accountable? Won't be the
federal government, they're a wet sock. Won't be shareholders, it's actually
against their interest to provide data deletion. Won't be the media, they'll
move onto another news narrative soon enough.

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duxup
I don't know that we can be so sure it is a placebo.

It would be good policy at Google to do / be ready to actually do the thing so
that if called to / required to... they can quickly say "done!".

A CEO sitting in front of congress would certainly like that.

