As I said, I last worked at Google more than 8 years ago, and I didn’t have a role relevant to this news story. Therefore I don’t have any more insight to add

As I said, I last worked at Google more than 8 years ago, and I didn’t have a role relevant to this news story. Therefore I don’t have any more insight to add in response to your question than the general public, with one exception: I’ll note that Google is generally at least more technically able to honor the privacy promises it makes than a lot of small startups, such as robustly deleting data it claims to delete and giving you a lot of controls to request deletion of various categories of data. Many startups do just enough lip service toward these compliance obligations to avoid negative financial, regulatory, or reputation consequences but don’t actually uphold their end of whatever they’re supposed to do (especially in places like the EU where strong privacy laws exist). Google goes well beyond that. Clearly Google is far from perfect in privacy matters. I wish Google made stronger privacy promises and didn’t do dark patterns or deceptive explanations like what this settlement is punishing. But it’s easy to forget how much of the industry is worse than Google in these regards and how little of it is better, just because Google is so big and so prominent.