13 ms·

Google will delete new accounts' data by default in 18 months

187 points by miles 6y ago

partiallypro 6y ago
This is only for new accounts, current accounts have to manually sign up for this feature.
- wwwwewwww 6y ago
  It makes sense, otherwise they'd be deleting user data without consent. Maybe they could show an opt-in screen to every user pointing them to this setting.
timsally 6y ago
This is a step in the right direction but my question is what information derived from your data do they retain? Getting rid of the raw data is great but there are still serious privacy implications if they retain highly sophisticated models trained on the data. The simplest example would be retaining a feature vector of your face while deleting the raw photos.
- bilal4hmed 6y ago
  agree with you. I have kept location data on, because its something I revisit a lot, the other stuff is set to delete after 18 months. If I dont notice anything different ill set it to 3 months. The original post from Google had this line https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-private-information-private/ https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-p... "As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period."
  - ciarannolan 6y ago
    >"As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period." Wait, what? Is this some weasel word soup going on? I do not believe this for one second.
    - gipp 6y ago
      What about this is unbelievable to you?
      - bilal4hmed 6y ago
        there was a link where that text is https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/ https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/
      - ciarannolan 6y ago
        That the largest for-profit, personal data collection effort on earth would not try to exploit data about email, calendars, photos, files, etc. to sell me more stuff? What about that is believable to you? You just take them at their word and call it a day?
    - season2episode3 6y ago
      I'd actually take them at their word that they don't sell your data directly. That'd be fucked up. They do, however, use your data to make money by slotting you into segments and selling the anonymized _segment_ data to advertisers. It's still extremely invasive, just in a sorta subtle way. Selling your data directly is the sort of behavior I'd expect out of companies that are evil and don't care about being seen as evil (see: wireless carriers, "location intelligence" companies, etc)
  - gentleman11 6y ago
    Advertising use is one of the uses I am least worried about, and yet is the only use that they promise to not pursue
- samename 6y ago
  Also, while this move is good, surely data that's 18 months old just isn't that useful to Google anymore, right? They've already trained their models and extracted the data they needed. I do see how this can have any real practical privacy effects, beyond someone's account being hacked.
- joveian 6y ago
  IIRC from looking at this feature somewhat recently, they explain that they are not necessarily deleting the data, only not associating it with your account. OTOH, from what other commenters are saying it sounds like they may want to delete (some of) the data but currently do not do so because it is shown in the account. Presumably they will still keep whatever they find useful. I hadn't used my account in a while and was going to just "delete" what I could and keep the account. They have a "download your data" button but refused to let me use it claiming they couldn't be sure it was really my account (but not providing any way to convince them), so at that point I decided to delete. Hopefully they did actually delete it. For me, it still showed the older history after I enabled the "delete" older history option (possibly it would have been removed after some delay), so I manually deleted it (it wasn't all that much) and that did seem to remove it.
  - gentleman11 6y ago
    I hate that I basically can’t ever delete any of my accounts any more. Usually the only option is “deactivate.” I think hn uses that policy too actually
Retric 6y ago
The article contradicts the headline. Existing accounts, though, will still need to proactively turn on the feature Presumably, the overwhelming majority of HN users already have an account.
- basch 6y ago
  the title should be changed
- dang 6y ago
  Ok, we've made that clear in the title above. Thanks!
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  The title was also carefully worded to leave out what data, making people worry that data they want to keep (e.g. their mail/photos/Drive files) will be deleted, just to get the click...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
pgrote 6y ago
I know I am in the minority, but I like the feature of Google letting me know when I've been somewhere in the past or if I have been to a site. I understand the trade offs in terms or my privacy, but I see value in the way they use the data to show me information.
- rwc 6y ago
  Understand where you're coming from and agree there are real benefits to using your data to improve experience. I don't think the debate is whether this data can improve your experience. The debate is in how the data is leveraged. Watching the WWDC 2020 keynote, lost count of how many times the presenters referred to "on device" computation to create the same improved experience you're describing, but without sacrificing privacy. When Google does it, we know the data is being leveraged not only for the betterment of our experience, but also for the betterment of their advertising products.
  - bilal4hmed 6y ago
    Google also has been moving to federated learning for their products such as Translation, Keyboard, Voice Recorder where the data doesnt leave the phone. Your point is fair though reply
    - bestnameever 6y ago
      Some data could still leave the phone with federated learning. Although it is said to not be stored in the cloud. > It works like this: your device downloads the current model, improves it by learning from data on your phone, and then summarizes the changes as a small focused update. Only this update to the model is sent to the cloud, using encrypted communication, where it is immediately averaged with other user updates to improve the shared model. All the training data remains on your device, and no individual updates are stored in the cloud. > https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collabo...
      - 6y ago
Weryj 6y ago
My guess is that Google determined that old data with such granularity just isn't that important to keep around.
mgraczyk 6y ago
One surprising thing I learned by working at these large companies (I worked at Google for 2 years): User data older than ~90 days is essentially worthless. Other companies that I am aware of essentially do not use such data for anything except people management (teams with better historical metrics can hire more, etc).
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > User data older than ~90 days is essentially worthlesl Worthless, commercially - yes. But priceless and utterly invaluable for historical interest and academic research! I hope Google keeps their Ngram, search-stats and even geolocation history for everyone (anonymized and aggregated, of course) - it'll be an invaluable tool for researchers of all kinds to be able to see, for example, how our movement patterns varied from ~2015 when we started collecting that en-mass to some point in the future. Ditto Google Street View archives - Street View is now almost 13 years old and I'm looking forward to being able to see how things were in everyday life back in 2008 compared to however things are when I'm old and grey).
- vl 6y ago
  This is of course is incorrect. I worked at Google as well, and I can tell you that for text-based ML services 90 days often is not enough.
  - mgraczyk 6y ago
    What I mean is that the data for a particular user is worthless after 90 days (really more like 30). Aggregated data is useful for building models, but individual user data is not useful for targeting that particular user. For example, suppose you are ranking search results for Alice. It may be beneficial to include old data in your language model or indexing models. However, it would likely not be beneficial to include Alice-specific features that go back more than 30-90 days. Such features include counters for her actions (clicks, queries, scroll), embeddings of her activity, etc. On the other hand, site and query specific features would likely be useful for years.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
A friendly reminder that the US government can read your emails without a warrant if they've been stored on a server for longer than 6 months. https://www.propublica.org/article/no-warrant-no-problem-how-the-government-can-still-get-your-digital-data https://www.propublica.org/article/no-warrant-no-problem-how...
- arminiusreturns 6y ago
  I found the organization of this very readable. Thanks for the link and reminder. On topic: this just in, person (corporation) who has lied and abused your privacy many times says they promise not to do it anymore, more at 11.
- tantalor 6y ago
  > they can obtain opened email as well as unopened emails that are at least 180 days old with only a subpoena as long as they notify the customer whose email they've requested This seems to contradict "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized"
- jasonv 6y ago
  I was wondering why you were getting downvoted, and perhaps because the target link describes something a little bit more nuanced than that. "The government can also get older unopened emails without notifying the customer if they get a court order that requires them to offer "specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe" the emails are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation" — a higher bar than a subpoena."
jtth 6y ago
Data exhaust older than a month is not monetizable for them. This lets them save space and seem nice while nothing changes.
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  Your comment made me wonder how much cost this may save, in terms of storage, maintenance, electricity, etc. Are we talking petabytes of storage? Could the data include things like imagery or massive encapsulations?
  - est31 6y ago
    There is no guarantee that this feature doesn't just flip a "deleted" bool column in their database outside of GDPR countries. And maybe derived products of the data stick around for longer, i.e. weights of custom ML models, HMM states, etc.
  - el_nino 6y ago
    It's also buying good will with users and regulators since privacy became a hot topic in recent times. Google decided to make it a default to delete any data older than 3 or 18 months. This is a clear sign that even 3 month old data has just marginal value, if any.
- zelly 6y ago
  Search history, ad clicks, etc. can serialize to very tiny records. I don't think this is about saving storage space. One day of YouTube uploads probably takes more space than every user's data combined.
  - jtth 6y ago
    Sure. Still saves space. Also closes over the envelope of their legal exposure.
    - t-writescode 6y ago
      Having exabytes of storage space and saving a few TB does functionally nothing. It'd be like you deleting a single doc file.
el_nino 6y ago
> auto-delete activity and location every 18 months by default Does this mean any data older than 3/18 months is deleted or that every 3/18 months they delete everything? P.S. I assume that they may have already put a price on 3/18 month old data and decided that by then it has lost enough of its value to make such a loss worth it in order to buy a bit of good will from users and regulators alike.
- bilal4hmed 6y ago
  The former, any data older than 3/18 months is deleted. so if you set it up for 3 months today, then any data on and before 3/15/2020 will be deleted
ipnon 6y ago
The sincere take: It's better for big corporations to move towards more privacy than less, even if it is not enough and they have a suspicious history.
justicezyx 6y ago
I liked Sundar somewhat when I was at Google, after he shortly become CEO, until 2019 I left. Looking back, I always felt something missing when I think of him, in comparison to Larry Page. Right at this moment, it felt to me that Sundar is meant to be another typical professional manager for a "conventional company". The primary issue is that he, like other manager, lacks the inert urgency for their task. Apple has been playing the privacy card at least 2 years ago. That by itself threatens Google at its core. Yet I never see the decisiveness in rethinking Google's identity; it was always reactionary, 2nd timed, backward looking... Google is about to decline. Hopefully that will be something like the 90s' microsoft, and waiting for next revival...
toyg 6y ago
That just means their internal processes are now good enough to do all they need to do in 3 months. Otherwise they would have custom cut-off capabilities, and wouldn’t basically force everyone to turn collection back on at every turn after you’ve disabled it. I explicitly did it three times before giving up, as Assistant would turn it back on every now and then. That’s when I decided I’ll make an effort not to use any G service if I can avoid it.
aboringusername 6y ago
If Google cared about privacy, they would have detailed guidance on how to let an individual opt-out of every single google data collection point, including: analytics, recaptcha, fonts, JS libraries. Except they've inserted themselves at every layer, to the point where you can't avoid your data going via Amazon/MS/Google. Just the way the US wanted it :)
OminousWeapons 6y ago
What irritates me about Google is they go to great lengths to tell you what they don't do but they won't simply come out and tell you what they do actually do. For example, I was reading the privacy policy involving transferring Nest accounts to Google and they say "we absolutely do not use your video or audio for advertising purposes". That's great, but it doesn't tell me anything about other forms of data that could be used for advertising (IP, usage data, whether I am inside the geofence or outside of it at a given time, probe requests, Bluetooth data, device data, etc). I want companies to come out and in clear language say "we collect X data streams, we try to derive the following Y things about you from those X data streams (demographics, whether you are home, other devices you own, etc), and we create Z data products from those derivations which we sell to the following types of companies. If you don't feel comfortable with that then don't use our products." That is what a real commitment to transparency and privacy looks like.
- leokennis 6y ago
  If they loudly proclaim that they don’t use your audio or video for advertising, I’d immediately presume that they do use everything else for advertising. If after an exam I would spontaneously say: “I absolutely did not cheat on question 3 of the test!”, what would you assume I’d have done on questions 1 and 2?
  - bad_user 6y ago
    > I’d immediately presume that they do use everything else for advertising. For one that's illegal in the EU at least. Due to GDPR Google cannot use your data for profiling without explicit consent. Thinking about "what they don't tell you" is how conspiracy theories work. Such claims are either evidence based or they aren't. And don't get me wrong, if you don't trust Google for whatever reason that's fine, I just find your reasoning odd.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > For one that's illegal in the EU at least. Due to GDPR Google cannot use your data for profiling without explicit consent. And presumably, EU users will get an extra consent screen going into details. But as far as I know, this doesn't imply these details have to be the part of the document called "privacy policy". > Thinking about "what they don't tell you" is how conspiracy theories work. Such claims are either evidence based or they aren't. Absence of evidence is only weak evidence of absence, but it's still evidence. In this case, you could call it "being suspiciously specific", which is a known technique of lying by omission. Privacy policies don't exist in a vacuum - they're formed by entities strongly incentivized to make money every possible way that's not explicitly illegal[0]. So a suspiciously specific privacy policy can be reasonably considered worrisome, especially for a company known to make money off their users' data. Conspiracy theories are excessively using the "what they don't tell you" reasoning, but that doesn't mean the reasoning itself is bad. It's just one requiring finesse and a somewhat more complete picture of an issue at hand. The best conspiracy theories are ones that balance this reasoning - any more, and they'd be trivially debunked; any less, and nobody would find them interesting. -- [0] - And some even achieve success by crossing the line into squarely illegal behavior - see e.g. Uber.
hughes 6y ago
I find the location history feature in Google Maps immensely valuable. Is there any way to run a similar self-hosted feature? I'd love to import my existing timeline if possible.
- cromka 6y ago
  Ditto. I think it would be great if one could use Google and set to autodelete after 3 months, but still periodically download and import the history to a private instance of a similar service. Same goes for the Search History.
- danans 6y ago
  In theory you could just: - Write your own mobile app that has access to fine grained location, logs it, and periodically uploads the location trace to your own server. - Download the traces from your server and convert them to an appropriate format. - Upload the traces to Google MyMaps - or use a map rendering engine you control if avoiding 3rd party online services is a goal - for visualization By doing this you give up additional features provided by Google Location history - things like semantic place detections (i.e you were at airport X or mall Y) trace error correction, auto-segmentation of traces, etc. But if all you care about is a seeing a trace on a map, then that should work. This general approach is already widely used by software that has an external location logging system (i.e. wildlife tracking transmitters, commercial vehicle fleet tracking) but need to visualize/track those on a map. Disclosure: Google employee but not currently working on Maps.
- Ao7bei3s 6y ago
  At least the data collection part is very easy to set up on Android and zero maintenance afterwards: Use GPSLogger[1] to record the position. It can auto-upload to pretty much anything from DropBox to SFTP (FTP over SSH). It can auto-start on boot, run in background, and rotate files daily. (If you do SFTP, use ForceCommand internal-sftp in sshd_config to restrict the phone to file transfers.) No excessive energy usage. Use GPSMapper[2] to visualize the GPX files on phone, or https://www.gpxsee.org/ https://www.gpxsee.org/ on Linux (this tool works well even with hundreds of GPX files loaded, unlike all others I've tried). None of the viewers are really "nice" unfortunately. If someone needs a side project idea, a personal location history visualizer would be nice. All existing tools focus on individual tracks (eg day hikes), there's nothing that does much useful when you dump a few years worth of history into it. Actually most just freeze or crash. But there's so much that could be done (performance, filtering by time, exporting/sharing specific parts, postprocessing like removing outliers, correcting cut corners by matching against a map, detecting places/businesses and hyperlinking to services like AllTrails, visualizations like speed over time (this part is common) but auto-detecting and showing this for all traces along the same route (no software does this yet) (think "how fast was I on which part of my commute each day over the past year"), multi user eg. family capability, etc.) Of course even if viewers are limited today, one can still collect the data in case someone writes a better viewer tomorrow ;-) Google Takeout can export raw location history, and there are tools to convert that standard GPX. Only issue I have with GPSLogger is that the accuracy filter is not adaptive. At a high value, you'll get outliers, at a low value, it won't record during flights. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gpslogger&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gp... [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gpsvisualizer&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gp...
ALittleLight 6y ago
Personally, I'll be retaining my data indefinitely. I like that they give this option, but I've used the indefinitely retained data multiple times and never been hurt by it, so far as I know. I've used it for "When did we go there?" Type questions, or "What was the name of that restaurant?" And also, just sitting down to look at the history and see "What was I doing X years ago" brings back memories. I think it's neat to see something like, I went to the theater three years ago? What did I see? Ohhh, I bet it was X! I feel like it's something like an automated diary of my life.
- leokennis 6y ago
  Pro tip if you want this and also value your privacy: take photos of places you visited, books you read etc. on your iPhone. On the Photo map you can see your photos grouped by location, on the normal photo timeline grouped by year/month/day and the ML powered search is good enough to recognize stuff like “book”, “restaurant”, “beach” etc.
- mleonhard 6y ago
  I want to keep this data, too. But I want to keep it on my own devices, in my home, running software that I control. This option doesn't exist yet.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    I suppose there's some way to download it from Google. If nothing else they'd to support GDPR. If you could download it, ingest it into some system, maybe add a shell script on your phone to ping a server once a minute with your geo data or something... It seems doable, but also like it would take some effort to get to be nearly as good as Google is now. I get why some people want to be private from Google, but it doesn't really bother me.
  - Avamander 6y ago
    Browsers are IMHO the biggest culprit, I really wish Chrome had an option to have a longer memory of things like visited pages. On the other hand, Chrome remembers some thing for far too long, sites that I haven't visited for a long long time still exist in chrome://settings/siteData?search=cookies+and+site which is rather annoying.
codegladiator 6y ago
Oh I hope so. I don't believe it will.
mynegation 6y ago
Alice (Imaginary VP of something at Google): hey, Bob, could you please plot usefulness of data by creation date? Bob: sends the chart Alice: Carol, could you please chart the amount of data by creation date and send me alongside with our storage costs? Carol: sends the information Alice: does quick cost benefit calculation, fires up an email to Diane in PR Alice: here is how we spin it...
seesawtron 6y ago
This is a great discussion forum to surgically point out the flaws and hypocrisy of big players in the tech, especially on privacy. However, do you think Google (or any other big firm) executives look at discussions in Hacker News to improve their future policies? What could we do more than just having a discussion on these issues that we see everyday? Opting out of Google is sadly too painful to be a viable option.
ogre_codes 6y ago
This is an easy give-away for Google, they are essentially giving users the option to automatically delete data which has no value to Google themselves. This isn't really a win for consumers and privacy at all.
jdofaz 6y ago
I have the impression that Privacy to Google only means that it is difficult for a human to see your data. They don't see an issue with their software using your data.
chintan 6y ago
What about the "profile" (i.e. the model) of me that is created based on the history? i.e. https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated?hl=en https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated?hl=en I'd think thats more valuable - raw data would not really be necessary unless they need to re-learn things.
- gentleman11 6y ago
  I’m not 100% sure I mind the profile as long as the data behind it is gone. It adds an element of “cant confirm or explain” the profile which means you cannot be as convincingly associated with it. Still not ideal but a big improvement to me
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- adrianmonk 6y ago
  How useful would it be to target ads based on what you did 19+ months ago? If you ignore privacy, it seems like the model needs to be based more on a moving window of what's relevant to you now.
NewEntryHN 6y ago
Well I want to keep my data basically forever. I just don't want Google to have a copy of it. Possibly what is happening here is the exact opposite.
- pwaivers 6y ago
  It's difficult to have both, no?
renewiltord 6y ago
Do I have to do anything to ensure this stuff doesn't get deleted for me? I really like Timeline and don't want it truncated. It looks like I have to do nothing but I'm not sure.
formblejeo 6y ago
Important distinction: it’s for new users only. Existing users will need to opt-in.
megamindbrian2 6y ago
Hackernews should do this too.
ndesaulniers 6y ago
myaccount.google.com -> Data & Personalization -> Manage Your Activity Controls -> Auto-delete Note: there's multiple auto-delete's to select, one for Web & App Activity, Location History, Youtube history.
zelly 6y ago
So it takes 18 months for G to train their models. Good to know.
bad_user 6y ago
You can also disable the collection of data completely, or delete the data automatically after 3 months. The later is what I now do. People freak out about what they see in the Google profile, but you have to give them credit for being transparent about it, even before GDPR came into effect.
m0zg 6y ago
The only three choices are: 18 months, 3 months, nothing. So I choose nothing. How about 2 weeks, Google? I'd enable if you promise to delete after 2 weeks. It's all you need for ad serving anyway.
jeena 6y ago
I'm conflicted on this, it's kind of the worse of both worlds, they mark your data as deleted in the database and you don't have access to it anymore but they can keep using it indefinably as long as they don't fuck up and some legislation forces them to delete it. So now only they have access to your data but you don't anymore. Anecdote: I was really happy about the data Google maps saved about me a couple of weeks ago when I got a letter from the migration agency which asked me to send in a list of my journeys abroad since 2017. The list was supposed to have: date traveling out, date coming back, country and purpose. Last year I was abroad 19 times and 126 of the 355 days, without Google maps collecting the data in the background for me I would have no chance in hell to get it right, and I guess the migration agency has access to this kind of data too so they can double check if I was telling the truth or not. But in 2018 when Google introduced the possibility to mark my data as deleted, I clicked the button and lost the ability to see the data for 2017 and early 2018 which I really regretted now, because I needed to try to come up with dates and countries according to photos on my phone which had GPS coordinates and my DSLR which had just the dates.
- zhengyi13 6y ago
  Internally, a lot of companies have a standard corporate damage-limiting process that actively deletes old email. You can't have subpoena'd data you really no longer possess. That's a (potentially significant) legal win. OTOH, if you claim you've gotten rid of data to one party, and then another party is able to dig that same data up in a legal proceeding, I expect the first party might be upset, and seek compensation. Quite apart from that, if you have metrics that show long tail data are infrequently accessed, but do take up an appreciable (and ever growing) amount of resources, it's a OpEx/engineering win to actually get rid of that on a proactive basis.
- JJzD 6y ago
  Imagine how hard it would be to keep the lid on this operation, and how damaging it would be if it ever came out and what the legal repercussons would be, for example from EU side? So, you'd need to vet an ultra secure team, who is not allowed to talk about this data both to use and store it. Or you have to publish a representation to wider teams telling them 'these are secret feautures'. So, you'd need a secret code base nobody is allowed to talk about. Corporations can do shady things, but it's hard to imagine this old data being useful anyway, to be worth all this hassle and possible repercussions.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
Do they use your data to train an algorithm and "simulate" what you like? Toss the data afterwards. I'm a machine learning noob but it feels like they could train a vague representation of you with your data to throw products or sites against and get a thumbs up or down.
optimaton 6y ago
Not a popular opinion, but I have a feeling that this is going to quickly go from your privacy is our responsibility to gatekeeping is virtuous, so we won’t let you do that.

187 points by miles 6y ago

partiallypro 6y ago

This is only for new accounts, current accounts have to manually sign up for this feature.

wwwwewwww 6y ago
It makes sense, otherwise they'd be deleting user data without consent. Maybe they could show an opt-in screen to every user pointing them to this setting.

timsally 6y ago

This is a step in the right direction but my question is what information derived from your data do they retain? Getting rid of the raw data is great but there are still serious privacy implications if they retain highly sophisticated models trained on the data. The simplest example would be retaining a feature vector of your face while deleting the raw photos.

bilal4hmed 6y ago
agree with you. I have kept location data on, because its something I revisit a lot, the other stuff is set to delete after 18 months. If I dont notice anything different ill set it to 3 months. The original post from Google had this line https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-private-information-private/ https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-p... "As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period."
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  >"As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period." Wait, what? Is this some weasel word soup going on? I do not believe this for one second.
  - gipp 6y ago
    What about this is unbelievable to you?
    - bilal4hmed 6y ago
      there was a link where that text is https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/ https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/
    - ciarannolan 6y ago
      That the largest for-profit, personal data collection effort on earth would not try to exploit data about email, calendars, photos, files, etc. to sell me more stuff? What about that is believable to you? You just take them at their word and call it a day?
  - season2episode3 6y ago
    I'd actually take them at their word that they don't sell your data directly. That'd be fucked up. They do, however, use your data to make money by slotting you into segments and selling the anonymized _segment_ data to advertisers. It's still extremely invasive, just in a sorta subtle way. Selling your data directly is the sort of behavior I'd expect out of companies that are evil and don't care about being seen as evil (see: wireless carriers, "location intelligence" companies, etc)
- gentleman11 6y ago
  Advertising use is one of the uses I am least worried about, and yet is the only use that they promise to not pursue
samename 6y ago
Also, while this move is good, surely data that's 18 months old just isn't that useful to Google anymore, right? They've already trained their models and extracted the data they needed. I do see how this can have any real practical privacy effects, beyond someone's account being hacked.
joveian 6y ago
IIRC from looking at this feature somewhat recently, they explain that they are not necessarily deleting the data, only not associating it with your account. OTOH, from what other commenters are saying it sounds like they may want to delete (some of) the data but currently do not do so because it is shown in the account. Presumably they will still keep whatever they find useful. I hadn't used my account in a while and was going to just "delete" what I could and keep the account. They have a "download your data" button but refused to let me use it claiming they couldn't be sure it was really my account (but not providing any way to convince them), so at that point I decided to delete. Hopefully they did actually delete it. For me, it still showed the older history after I enabled the "delete" older history option (possibly it would have been removed after some delay), so I manually deleted it (it wasn't all that much) and that did seem to remove it.
- gentleman11 6y ago
  I hate that I basically can’t ever delete any of my accounts any more. Usually the only option is “deactivate.” I think hn uses that policy too actually

Retric 6y ago

The article contradicts the headline. Existing accounts, though, will still need to proactively turn on the feature Presumably, the overwhelming majority of HN users already have an account.

basch 6y ago
the title should be changed
dang 6y ago
Ok, we've made that clear in the title above. Thanks!
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
The title was also carefully worded to leave out what data, making people worry that data they want to keep (e.g. their mail/photos/Drive files) will be deleted, just to get the click...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

pgrote 6y ago

I know I am in the minority, but I like the feature of Google letting me know when I've been somewhere in the past or if I have been to a site. I understand the trade offs in terms or my privacy, but I see value in the way they use the data to show me information.

rwc 6y ago
Understand where you're coming from and agree there are real benefits to using your data to improve experience. I don't think the debate is whether this data can improve your experience. The debate is in how the data is leveraged. Watching the WWDC 2020 keynote, lost count of how many times the presenters referred to "on device" computation to create the same improved experience you're describing, but without sacrificing privacy. When Google does it, we know the data is being leveraged not only for the betterment of our experience, but also for the betterment of their advertising products.
- bilal4hmed 6y ago
  Google also has been moving to federated learning for their products such as Translation, Keyboard, Voice Recorder where the data doesnt leave the phone. Your point is fair though reply
  - bestnameever 6y ago
    Some data could still leave the phone with federated learning. Although it is said to not be stored in the cloud. > It works like this: your device downloads the current model, improves it by learning from data on your phone, and then summarizes the changes as a small focused update. Only this update to the model is sent to the cloud, using encrypted communication, where it is immediately averaged with other user updates to improve the shared model. All the training data remains on your device, and no individual updates are stored in the cloud. > https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collabo...
    - 6y ago

Weryj 6y ago

My guess is that Google determined that old data with such granularity just isn't that important to keep around.

mgraczyk 6y ago

One surprising thing I learned by working at these large companies (I worked at Google for 2 years): User data older than ~90 days is essentially worthless. Other companies that I am aware of essentially do not use such data for anything except people management (teams with better historical metrics can hire more, etc).

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
> User data older than ~90 days is essentially worthlesl Worthless, commercially - yes. But priceless and utterly invaluable for historical interest and academic research! I hope Google keeps their Ngram, search-stats and even geolocation history for everyone (anonymized and aggregated, of course) - it'll be an invaluable tool for researchers of all kinds to be able to see, for example, how our movement patterns varied from ~2015 when we started collecting that en-mass to some point in the future. Ditto Google Street View archives - Street View is now almost 13 years old and I'm looking forward to being able to see how things were in everyday life back in 2008 compared to however things are when I'm old and grey).
vl 6y ago
This is of course is incorrect. I worked at Google as well, and I can tell you that for text-based ML services 90 days often is not enough.
- mgraczyk 6y ago
  What I mean is that the data for a particular user is worthless after 90 days (really more like 30). Aggregated data is useful for building models, but individual user data is not useful for targeting that particular user. For example, suppose you are ranking search results for Alice. It may be beneficial to include old data in your language model or indexing models. However, it would likely not be beneficial to include Alice-specific features that go back more than 30-90 days. Such features include counters for her actions (clicks, queries, scroll), embeddings of her activity, etc. On the other hand, site and query specific features would likely be useful for years.
Viliam1234 6y ago

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

A friendly reminder that the US government can read your emails without a warrant if they've been stored on a server for longer than 6 months. https://www.propublica.org/article/no-warrant-no-problem-how-the-government-can-still-get-your-digital-data https://www.propublica.org/article/no-warrant-no-problem-how...

arminiusreturns 6y ago
I found the organization of this very readable. Thanks for the link and reminder. On topic: this just in, person (corporation) who has lied and abused your privacy many times says they promise not to do it anymore, more at 11.
tantalor 6y ago
> they can obtain opened email as well as unopened emails that are at least 180 days old with only a subpoena as long as they notify the customer whose email they've requested This seems to contradict "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized"
jasonv 6y ago
I was wondering why you were getting downvoted, and perhaps because the target link describes something a little bit more nuanced than that. "The government can also get older unopened emails without notifying the customer if they get a court order that requires them to offer "specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe" the emails are "relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation" — a higher bar than a subpoena."

jtth 6y ago

Data exhaust older than a month is not monetizable for them. This lets them save space and seem nice while nothing changes.

themodelplumber 6y ago
Your comment made me wonder how much cost this may save, in terms of storage, maintenance, electricity, etc. Are we talking petabytes of storage? Could the data include things like imagery or massive encapsulations?
- est31 6y ago
  There is no guarantee that this feature doesn't just flip a "deleted" bool column in their database outside of GDPR countries. And maybe derived products of the data stick around for longer, i.e. weights of custom ML models, HMM states, etc.
- el_nino 6y ago
  It's also buying good will with users and regulators since privacy became a hot topic in recent times. Google decided to make it a default to delete any data older than 3 or 18 months. This is a clear sign that even 3 month old data has just marginal value, if any.
zelly 6y ago
Search history, ad clicks, etc. can serialize to very tiny records. I don't think this is about saving storage space. One day of YouTube uploads probably takes more space than every user's data combined.
- jtth 6y ago
  Sure. Still saves space. Also closes over the envelope of their legal exposure.
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    Having exabytes of storage space and saving a few TB does functionally nothing. It'd be like you deleting a single doc file.

el_nino 6y ago

> auto-delete activity and location every 18 months by default Does this mean any data older than 3/18 months is deleted or that every 3/18 months they delete everything? P.S. I assume that they may have already put a price on 3/18 month old data and decided that by then it has lost enough of its value to make such a loss worth it in order to buy a bit of good will from users and regulators alike.

bilal4hmed 6y ago
The former, any data older than 3/18 months is deleted. so if you set it up for 3 months today, then any data on and before 3/15/2020 will be deleted

ipnon 6y ago

The sincere take: It's better for big corporations to move towards more privacy than less, even if it is not enough and they have a suspicious history.

justicezyx 6y ago

I liked Sundar somewhat when I was at Google, after he shortly become CEO, until 2019 I left. Looking back, I always felt something missing when I think of him, in comparison to Larry Page. Right at this moment, it felt to me that Sundar is meant to be another typical professional manager for a "conventional company". The primary issue is that he, like other manager, lacks the inert urgency for their task. Apple has been playing the privacy card at least 2 years ago. That by itself threatens Google at its core. Yet I never see the decisiveness in rethinking Google's identity; it was always reactionary, 2nd timed, backward looking... Google is about to decline. Hopefully that will be something like the 90s' microsoft, and waiting for next revival...

toyg 6y ago

That just means their internal processes are now good enough to do all they need to do in 3 months. Otherwise they would have custom cut-off capabilities, and wouldn’t basically force everyone to turn collection back on at every turn after you’ve disabled it. I explicitly did it three times before giving up, as Assistant would turn it back on every now and then. That’s when I decided I’ll make an effort not to use any G service if I can avoid it.

aboringusername 6y ago

If Google cared about privacy, they would have detailed guidance on how to let an individual opt-out of every single google data collection point, including: analytics, recaptcha, fonts, JS libraries. Except they've inserted themselves at every layer, to the point where you can't avoid your data going via Amazon/MS/Google. Just the way the US wanted it :)

OminousWeapons 6y ago

What irritates me about Google is they go to great lengths to tell you what they don't do but they won't simply come out and tell you what they do actually do. For example, I was reading the privacy policy involving transferring Nest accounts to Google and they say "we absolutely do not use your video or audio for advertising purposes". That's great, but it doesn't tell me anything about other forms of data that could be used for advertising (IP, usage data, whether I am inside the geofence or outside of it at a given time, probe requests, Bluetooth data, device data, etc). I want companies to come out and in clear language say "we collect X data streams, we try to derive the following Y things about you from those X data streams (demographics, whether you are home, other devices you own, etc), and we create Z data products from those derivations which we sell to the following types of companies. If you don't feel comfortable with that then don't use our products." That is what a real commitment to transparency and privacy looks like.

leokennis 6y ago
If they loudly proclaim that they don’t use your audio or video for advertising, I’d immediately presume that they do use everything else for advertising. If after an exam I would spontaneously say: “I absolutely did not cheat on question 3 of the test!”, what would you assume I’d have done on questions 1 and 2?
- bad_user 6y ago
  > I’d immediately presume that they do use everything else for advertising. For one that's illegal in the EU at least. Due to GDPR Google cannot use your data for profiling without explicit consent. Thinking about "what they don't tell you" is how conspiracy theories work. Such claims are either evidence based or they aren't. And don't get me wrong, if you don't trust Google for whatever reason that's fine, I just find your reasoning odd.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > For one that's illegal in the EU at least. Due to GDPR Google cannot use your data for profiling without explicit consent. And presumably, EU users will get an extra consent screen going into details. But as far as I know, this doesn't imply these details have to be the part of the document called "privacy policy". > Thinking about "what they don't tell you" is how conspiracy theories work. Such claims are either evidence based or they aren't. Absence of evidence is only weak evidence of absence, but it's still evidence. In this case, you could call it "being suspiciously specific", which is a known technique of lying by omission. Privacy policies don't exist in a vacuum - they're formed by entities strongly incentivized to make money every possible way that's not explicitly illegal[0]. So a suspiciously specific privacy policy can be reasonably considered worrisome, especially for a company known to make money off their users' data. Conspiracy theories are excessively using the "what they don't tell you" reasoning, but that doesn't mean the reasoning itself is bad. It's just one requiring finesse and a somewhat more complete picture of an issue at hand. The best conspiracy theories are ones that balance this reasoning - any more, and they'd be trivially debunked; any less, and nobody would find them interesting. -- [0] - And some even achieve success by crossing the line into squarely illegal behavior - see e.g. Uber.

hughes 6y ago

I find the location history feature in Google Maps immensely valuable. Is there any way to run a similar self-hosted feature? I'd love to import my existing timeline if possible.

cromka 6y ago
Ditto. I think it would be great if one could use Google and set to autodelete after 3 months, but still periodically download and import the history to a private instance of a similar service. Same goes for the Search History.
danans 6y ago
In theory you could just: - Write your own mobile app that has access to fine grained location, logs it, and periodically uploads the location trace to your own server. - Download the traces from your server and convert them to an appropriate format. - Upload the traces to Google MyMaps - or use a map rendering engine you control if avoiding 3rd party online services is a goal - for visualization By doing this you give up additional features provided by Google Location history - things like semantic place detections (i.e you were at airport X or mall Y) trace error correction, auto-segmentation of traces, etc. But if all you care about is a seeing a trace on a map, then that should work. This general approach is already widely used by software that has an external location logging system (i.e. wildlife tracking transmitters, commercial vehicle fleet tracking) but need to visualize/track those on a map. Disclosure: Google employee but not currently working on Maps.
Ao7bei3s 6y ago
At least the data collection part is very easy to set up on Android and zero maintenance afterwards: Use GPSLogger[1] to record the position. It can auto-upload to pretty much anything from DropBox to SFTP (FTP over SSH). It can auto-start on boot, run in background, and rotate files daily. (If you do SFTP, use ForceCommand internal-sftp in sshd_config to restrict the phone to file transfers.) No excessive energy usage. Use GPSMapper[2] to visualize the GPX files on phone, or https://www.gpxsee.org/ https://www.gpxsee.org/ on Linux (this tool works well even with hundreds of GPX files loaded, unlike all others I've tried). None of the viewers are really "nice" unfortunately. If someone needs a side project idea, a personal location history visualizer would be nice. All existing tools focus on individual tracks (eg day hikes), there's nothing that does much useful when you dump a few years worth of history into it. Actually most just freeze or crash. But there's so much that could be done (performance, filtering by time, exporting/sharing specific parts, postprocessing like removing outliers, correcting cut corners by matching against a map, detecting places/businesses and hyperlinking to services like AllTrails, visualizations like speed over time (this part is common) but auto-detecting and showing this for all traces along the same route (no software does this yet) (think "how fast was I on which part of my commute each day over the past year"), multi user eg. family capability, etc.) Of course even if viewers are limited today, one can still collect the data in case someone writes a better viewer tomorrow ;-) Google Takeout can export raw location history, and there are tools to convert that standard GPX. Only issue I have with GPSLogger is that the accuracy filter is not adaptive. At a high value, you'll get outliers, at a low value, it won't record during flights. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gpslogger&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gp... [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gpsvisualizer&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mendhak.gp...

ALittleLight 6y ago

Personally, I'll be retaining my data indefinitely. I like that they give this option, but I've used the indefinitely retained data multiple times and never been hurt by it, so far as I know. I've used it for "When did we go there?" Type questions, or "What was the name of that restaurant?" And also, just sitting down to look at the history and see "What was I doing X years ago" brings back memories. I think it's neat to see something like, I went to the theater three years ago? What did I see? Ohhh, I bet it was X! I feel like it's something like an automated diary of my life.

leokennis 6y ago
Pro tip if you want this and also value your privacy: take photos of places you visited, books you read etc. on your iPhone. On the Photo map you can see your photos grouped by location, on the normal photo timeline grouped by year/month/day and the ML powered search is good enough to recognize stuff like “book”, “restaurant”, “beach” etc.
mleonhard 6y ago
I want to keep this data, too. But I want to keep it on my own devices, in my home, running software that I control. This option doesn't exist yet.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  I suppose there's some way to download it from Google. If nothing else they'd to support GDPR. If you could download it, ingest it into some system, maybe add a shell script on your phone to ping a server once a minute with your geo data or something... It seems doable, but also like it would take some effort to get to be nearly as good as Google is now. I get why some people want to be private from Google, but it doesn't really bother me.
- Avamander 6y ago
  Browsers are IMHO the biggest culprit, I really wish Chrome had an option to have a longer memory of things like visited pages. On the other hand, Chrome remembers some thing for far too long, sites that I haven't visited for a long long time still exist in chrome://settings/siteData?search=cookies+and+site which is rather annoying.

codegladiator 6y ago

Oh I hope so. I don't believe it will.

mynegation 6y ago

Alice (Imaginary VP of something at Google): hey, Bob, could you please plot usefulness of data by creation date? Bob: sends the chart Alice: Carol, could you please chart the amount of data by creation date and send me alongside with our storage costs? Carol: sends the information Alice: does quick cost benefit calculation, fires up an email to Diane in PR Alice: here is how we spin it...

seesawtron 6y ago

This is a great discussion forum to surgically point out the flaws and hypocrisy of big players in the tech, especially on privacy. However, do you think Google (or any other big firm) executives look at discussions in Hacker News to improve their future policies? What could we do more than just having a discussion on these issues that we see everyday? Opting out of Google is sadly too painful to be a viable option.

ogre_codes 6y ago

This is an easy give-away for Google, they are essentially giving users the option to automatically delete data which has no value to Google themselves. This isn't really a win for consumers and privacy at all.

jdofaz 6y ago

I have the impression that Privacy to Google only means that it is difficult for a human to see your data. They don't see an issue with their software using your data.

chintan 6y ago

What about the "profile" (i.e. the model) of me that is created based on the history? i.e. https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated?hl=en https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated?hl=en I'd think thats more valuable - raw data would not really be necessary unless they need to re-learn things.

gentleman11 6y ago
I’m not 100% sure I mind the profile as long as the data behind it is gone. It adds an element of “cant confirm or explain” the profile which means you cannot be as convincingly associated with it. Still not ideal but a big improvement to me
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
adrianmonk 6y ago
How useful would it be to target ads based on what you did 19+ months ago? If you ignore privacy, it seems like the model needs to be based more on a moving window of what's relevant to you now.

NewEntryHN 6y ago

Well I want to keep my data basically forever. I just don't want Google to have a copy of it. Possibly what is happening here is the exact opposite.

pwaivers 6y ago
It's difficult to have both, no?

renewiltord 6y ago

Do I have to do anything to ensure this stuff doesn't get deleted for me? I really like Timeline and don't want it truncated. It looks like I have to do nothing but I'm not sure.

formblejeo 6y ago

Important distinction: it’s for new users only. Existing users will need to opt-in.

megamindbrian2 6y ago

Hackernews should do this too.

ndesaulniers 6y ago

myaccount.google.com -> Data & Personalization -> Manage Your Activity Controls -> Auto-delete Note: there's multiple auto-delete's to select, one for Web & App Activity, Location History, Youtube history.

zelly 6y ago

So it takes 18 months for G to train their models. Good to know.

bad_user 6y ago

You can also disable the collection of data completely, or delete the data automatically after 3 months. The later is what I now do. People freak out about what they see in the Google profile, but you have to give them credit for being transparent about it, even before GDPR came into effect.

m0zg 6y ago

The only three choices are: 18 months, 3 months, nothing. So I choose nothing. How about 2 weeks, Google? I'd enable if you promise to delete after 2 weeks. It's all you need for ad serving anyway.

jeena 6y ago

I'm conflicted on this, it's kind of the worse of both worlds, they mark your data as deleted in the database and you don't have access to it anymore but they can keep using it indefinably as long as they don't fuck up and some legislation forces them to delete it. So now only they have access to your data but you don't anymore. Anecdote: I was really happy about the data Google maps saved about me a couple of weeks ago when I got a letter from the migration agency which asked me to send in a list of my journeys abroad since 2017. The list was supposed to have: date traveling out, date coming back, country and purpose. Last year I was abroad 19 times and 126 of the 355 days, without Google maps collecting the data in the background for me I would have no chance in hell to get it right, and I guess the migration agency has access to this kind of data too so they can double check if I was telling the truth or not. But in 2018 when Google introduced the possibility to mark my data as deleted, I clicked the button and lost the ability to see the data for 2017 and early 2018 which I really regretted now, because I needed to try to come up with dates and countries according to photos on my phone which had GPS coordinates and my DSLR which had just the dates.

zhengyi13 6y ago
Internally, a lot of companies have a standard corporate damage-limiting process that actively deletes old email. You can't have subpoena'd data you really no longer possess. That's a (potentially significant) legal win. OTOH, if you claim you've gotten rid of data to one party, and then another party is able to dig that same data up in a legal proceeding, I expect the first party might be upset, and seek compensation. Quite apart from that, if you have metrics that show long tail data are infrequently accessed, but do take up an appreciable (and ever growing) amount of resources, it's a OpEx/engineering win to actually get rid of that on a proactive basis.
JJzD 6y ago
Imagine how hard it would be to keep the lid on this operation, and how damaging it would be if it ever came out and what the legal repercussons would be, for example from EU side? So, you'd need to vet an ultra secure team, who is not allowed to talk about this data both to use and store it. Or you have to publish a representation to wider teams telling them 'these are secret feautures'. So, you'd need a secret code base nobody is allowed to talk about. Corporations can do shady things, but it's hard to imagine this old data being useful anyway, to be worth all this hassle and possible repercussions.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

Do they use your data to train an algorithm and "simulate" what you like? Toss the data afterwards. I'm a machine learning noob but it feels like they could train a vague representation of you with your data to throw products or sites against and get a thumbs up or down.

optimaton 6y ago

Not a popular opinion, but I have a feeling that this is going to quickly go from your privacy is our responsibility to gatekeeping is virtuous, so we won’t let you do that.