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Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

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Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#61

Post by 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).

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#62

Post by puzzle »

loudtieblahblah wrote: post #21
aiiane wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

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.

I'm an ex employee. There's actually a whole team whose sole job is making sure that all other teams have policies, measurements and alerting for deleting data. They'll chase you if any of the above doesn't hold. It's non-trivial work and slows down your development, if you believe in releasing early and fast. For everybody else, it makes total sense.

I bet it's not free to run, but it's cheaper and easier than elsewhere, because Google's infrastructure is built in-house and mostly integrated. I don't envy other companies that want to do the same.

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#63

Post by shereadsthenews »

hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #34
aiiane wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At this point the big companies probably need to submit to some external audits to really get trust back.

I've worked on wipeout compliance at Google and IMHO there's no possibility that an outside auditor would ever be able to understand those systems to such an extent that they would discover a flaw in them that wasn't previously known to the many engineers who work full-time on wipeout. The systems are just too complex. One does not simply `find -type f /google` to figure out what data is available.

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#64

Post by shereadsthenews »

josefresco wrote: post #57
aiiane wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Curious, as a Google employee would you believe a Facebook employee, on HN making the same claim?

No, because Facebook does not have a detailed written policy regarding user data deletion and retention, which Google does have.

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#65

Post by user17843 »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #2

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?

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.

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#66

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

user17843 wrote: post #65
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #2

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?

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.

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.

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#67

Post by ben_jones »

aiiane wrote: post #55
ben_jones wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 controlle…

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…

Again, appreciate the reply. Myself and others post a lot of criticisms towards Google on HN, and though I feel much of it is deserved, its the commentary from actual Google employees that turns it into a much more substantial and informed conversation.

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#68

Post by 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.

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#69

Post by chris_mc »

puzzle wrote: post #52
chris_mc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, Google Maps still shows my home and work locations on the Commute tab from before I disabled almost everything in my Google account, but won't let me change the work address since we moved locations. So I guess when I change houses (the only one I really care about, since I use it to send an ETA to my wife) I can just turn everything on, change the address, then turn it all off again. It's illogical dark pattern…

Is this on desktop or mobile? It could match the theory in the grandparent post that they preferred sticking to one backend. That also allows handling conflicts in one place, with one protocol. E.g. what would the behaviour be if you edited the home address with a ZIP code on your phone, while offline? What if you try to make the same change from your laptop and e.g. you set a ZIP+4 code? And then what happens when y…

It's on mobile. I haven't tested it much, but I'm really not interested in doing so. I only keep Google Maps because my wife and I like to share locations, which I am trying to do via some direct method between our phones eventually anyways.

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#70

Post by puzzle »

ben_jones wrote: post #44
aiiane wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 controlle…

Google retrains models all the time. They gave a presentation about ML and production last year:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon18asia/presentation/...

You can see there's a section on privacy and deleted data as well.

Each team has its own policies, because each product is different: at a bare minimum they might be using different storage systems, but it's very likely that their data pipelines are quite different, too. In any case, each team's targets are at least as strict as any published ones, of course.

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