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This sounds weird. When CNBC broke the story a month back, I'd : 1. gone around deleting every invoice from my GMail inbox 2. Noticed it wasn't getting remove

This sounds weird. When CNBC broke the story a month back, I'd : 1. gone around deleting every invoice from my GMail inbox 2. Noticed it wasn't getting removed after waiting for 24 hours. 3. Reached out to the reporter mentioning google might be not deleting it properly. 4. Waiting a couple more days and calling off the alarm when google did finally delete it. I wrote about it at https://captnemo.in/blog/2019/06/01/cleaning-google-purchases/ https://captnemo.in/blog/2019/06/01/cleaning-google-purchase.... My purchase history still shows 0 results, more than a month after my cleaning spree. 3 weeks still sounds too long for this information to linger around.

devoply 7y ago
With all these we deleted it... we promise... does anyone not believe that they have that list stored there with your e-mail address attached to it and now you can't see it?
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  If anything, I’m more afraid of instant frictionless deletes - in my experience, they’re almost always implemented by setting a “this is totally deleted” flag and then scheduling a job to do the actual deletion. (Not that this is inherently an evil practice! In many contexts, users expect to be able to fix accidental deletions and will get really mad if they can’t.)
giancarlostoro 7y ago
I always assume there's a backup somewhere in Google or Facebook that's old as hell but has the old emails, I would assume some of these places have cold storage options for backing up legacy data, but then again, there's the time myspace wiped a bunch of old data and nobody seemed to have cared. Surprised to this day that many other sites have shut down, but MySpace keeps on kicking.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  Probably, but they don't need the original emails. They've already mined it for pertinent personal data and stored the resulting, secret, proprietary information about you in a different place.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  I can assure you that Google goes to great lengths to ensure ancient backups of your user data do not still exist. No backup of user data exists more than 30 days there, typically less.

devoply 7y ago

With all these we deleted it... we promise... does anyone not believe that they have that list stored there with your e-mail address attached to it and now you can't see it?

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
If anything, I’m more afraid of instant frictionless deletes - in my experience, they’re almost always implemented by setting a “this is totally deleted” flag and then scheduling a job to do the actual deletion. (Not that this is inherently an evil practice! In many contexts, users expect to be able to fix accidental deletions and will get really mad if they can’t.)

giancarlostoro 7y ago

I always assume there's a backup somewhere in Google or Facebook that's old as hell but has the old emails, I would assume some of these places have cold storage options for backing up legacy data, but then again, there's the time myspace wiped a bunch of old data and nobody seemed to have cared. Surprised to this day that many other sites have shut down, but MySpace keeps on kicking.

jjeaff 7y ago
Probably, but they don't need the original emails. They've already mined it for pertinent personal data and stored the resulting, secret, proprietary information about you in a different place.
londons_explore 7y ago
I can assure you that Google goes to great lengths to ensure ancient backups of your user data do not still exist. No backup of user data exists more than 30 days there, typically less.