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Comment by low_battery | Hacker News Reader

They actually do delete.

How do you know this for a fact?

If the roles were reversed would you delete? Or would you just like and say you did?

If I were representing a big, well known company with lots of money to give out in settlements, I'd be much more likely not to say anything than to bother lying.

That's not universal. When a company screws up, an individual rarely goes down for it. The impact of the crime is often absorbed by many people (or no one).

If I were in charge of a publicly traded company I most definitely wouldn't want a scandal like that lurking beneath the surface. It would absolutely leak.

The existence of classified programs that remain classified and unknown for years is evidence against this oft-used argument.

The only reason you know of the existence of these programs is because they leaked...

Which would almost certainly imply there exist programs that have never leaked...

ie, datasets that are maintained and properly encrypted in a 'CEUE' (Create Encrypt, Update, Encrypt) app.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

I can happily endorse the company's public statements on this subject: personal data will be deleted within the timeframes specified (for obvious technical and that's-a-bad-idea reasons, it's not instant). Part of SRE's function is to arrange for SLAs to be met, including deletion SLAs.

from any data warehouse as well?

It is fully deleted.

does the data get sent anywhere else before it gets deleted?

Dont worry the NSA keeps a copy for you just in case.

Dropbox's #1 Competitor

Backhaul as a Service

Yes. The only way to delete things at scale is to ship them over the network to a dedicated cluster of machines running a proprietary fork of /dev/null. Google has invested man decades into this system and holds numerous patents on the design.

Why wouldn't they just use MongoDB? It's already web-scale.

What's an SRE?

"Site Reliability Engineer", I think.

What matters much more than whether Google deletes is whether some other group has access to and stores that data before Google deletes it. Almost assuredly the answer is yes. Search history is a tremendously powerful tool and insightful data point for anyone. There's no way government groups aren't using it. It takes up almost no room for storage, either.

> "Search history is a tremendously powerful tool and insightful data point for anyone."

Can confirm. Near the end of internships I use my browser history, and mostly the search history contained in that, to figure out what I've done so I don't forget anything in the report. It's a near perfect way to tell what I've been up to any day.

> Almost assuredly the answer is yes.

[citation required]. Google goes through great lengths to make sure that's not the case, both technically with legal defense against overreaching subpoenas.

No they don't. They just don't show it to you. They hide your search list, but it's still included in your Google profile.

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