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Comment by philovivero | Hacker News Reader

What I really want to know: how to permanently delete your entire presense of Google. All your emails, sent or received, all your G+, all your calendar reminders, Hangouts, etc.

Seems a daunting task. Especially the part where you have to contact everyone you know and ask them to delete their emails and hangouts with you.

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What I really want to know: how to permanently delete your entire presense of Google.

You can't. Google reserves the right to retain/use your data indefinitely:

The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps).

Source: https://www.google.com/policies/terms/

As long as Google does business in Europe, Google's license is subject to law: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...

While it's not a complete deletion, it's a step in that direction.

The thing is that it will be nigh impossible for you to prove that Google didn't just set a flag to hide your data from public view, but still has and uses it (e.g. to target you with advertising).

There are no repercussions to not abiding by the law if you leave no (usable) evidence behind.

And that is why the burden of proof will soon be on the company, not the user, cf the data protection regulation

Well, I can't be sure about what the entire company is doing, but I've had an awful lot of code dealing with properly deleting accounts cross my inbox.

If we're actually keeping data, then that'd be a shock to me.

Don't spoil the fun of the conspiracy theorists.

Outside of the crazies, for the rest, ever considered that maybe you are just uninformed?

Ten years ago, the ones telling people that agencies are storing everything by default, and Skype was bought/centralized to help with that were labeled as such. Nowdays it's "yea so"?

If we're actually keeping data, then that'd be a shock to me.

So, why not just state in the terms of service that data is actually erased within N days/months after deletion? One could always list exceptions (such as business listings).

Either Google cannot really guarantee that the data is deleted (due to its storage system); Google wants to reserve the right to retain some data in the future; or it is actually retaining some data. Otherwise, there is no point in putting this in your ToS. All three reasons are pretty worrisome.

Also, what you say is provably false in a more general sense. Google retains all kinds of analytics/tracking data of internet users that you cannot have removed. When you visit a site with Google ads or analytics, Google is keeping data on you.

> Google is keeping data on you.

IIUC that is anonymized data. The whole point then is that it cannot be associated to your account, i.e. cannot be removed when you delete your account.

Otherwise, there's a shit-ton of law and regulations around this issue. I'm sure there are plenty of options for you to take when you think a company violates EU law. Safe Harbor got wrecked because a young fellow from Austria thought so and courts determined he was right.

Well, do you also remove the data from the backups, the backups of the backups, and any "probabilistic models generated from the data"? That’s the more interesting question.

Where's the profit in keeping user data you can't openly use, and will get fined who know how much for keeping if caught?

GDPR will change that. Fines of up to 4% of global gross should make them adhere.

I don't know about other services, but Chrome history is kept for 1 year.

Kept or shown?

Wait, Chrome logs your browsing history with Google? Actually, I'm not surprised.

Encrypted, yes. It's so you can sync to other browsers.

Right, encrypted.

And who can decrypt that?

In Firefox, back when it was introduced in Fennec somewhere around 2007 or 2008 (I don't know how it is now), you'd need 2 passwords. One to log in to your Firefox account and gain access to your encrypted data, and one to decrypt the data. It is feasible a nationstate can get access to your encrypted data, but it isn't feasible they are able to decrypt your data.

Aside for the browser storage, they also log every search request made from your browser. Since the only way to type a URL is to put it into the search bar, that means they get a log of every page you visit, how often you go there, how long yu spend there, etc. without triggering any other licenses or boxes.

The same profiling is done from Safari and other Chromium / Blink browsers that have the "awesome address bar"

I have read that when you visit a page with Analytics (which is like everywhere) Chrome has special handling so as to give them a more complete dataset without it being the browser that is officially collecting it.

I think you're confusing the address bar autocomplete functionality with something more sinister.

It's simple and straightforward to disable the autocomplete functionality in Chrome.

they also log every search request made from your browser. Since the only way to type a URL is to put it into the search bar, that means they get a log of every page you visit, how often you go there, how long yu spend there, etc. without triggering any other licenses or boxes.

Not sure I follow. Why can't chrome just detect whether you entered a URL or not? If URL, load without sending to Google. If not a URL, send as search to Google.

facebook is not a url. facebook.com is. You need to type the first as part of typing the second.

I fail to see how this applies to deletion. "Stop using services" is significantly different from "deleting all my stuff"

Deleting your own data is easy: https://myaccount.google.com/deleteaccount

The problem, though you didn't put it that way, is deleting other people's data. That's not your presence on Google, it's theirs.

Exactly, as long as pretty much everyone I know uses Gmail, there's really no way to keep your emails away from Google. Encrypted mail would be an option, but it is such a hassle to set up for most people.

You can at least get a copy of all of it, and you can delete some of it.

1. Log in to your google account 2. go to https://www.google.com/settings/takeout (this doesn't work with the regional googles like 'google.co.uk' fwiw) 3. You should see a page called 'Download your data' with all the services selected. If you want to deselect anything, do, otherwise hit 'Next' 4. If you want to change the format or chunk size, do it here. Otherwise hit 'Next' 5. Wait. This can take a few days if your google account is big. 6. You'll get an email with a link to one or more archives to download. All your stuff will be in there in open formats. 7. You can delete your google account (I think from https://myaccount.google.com/preferences?pli=1#deleteservice... ) but it won't delete info they have on you in their caches

Have a nice day.

Sean

I very much appreciate the Google takeout service. I have switched to mostly using Fastmail, which is good but there is no easily used supported way to archive old emails locally on my laptop of backups. I don't consider using POP3 to fetch everything a good solution.

You can use tools like offlineimap to "backup" your Gmail account via IMAP. I used it to transfer all my mail to my own mail server when I quit using Gmail years ago.

Regarding your second part: Shouldn't this be just "how do I delete anything I interact with people?" Emails from privately run email server means you still have to find everyone and have everyone do the job (but I bet you most won't).

If you don't own the server, say no more. What about caches? PDF?

I'm curious about the right to ask others to delete an email thread where multiple parties are involved.

Is one individual entitled to the record of interactions and memories formed by 2 individuals?

There's definitely no "right" to ask others to delete an email thread. At best it would be a courtesy.

A real world comparison would be to letters. Would you claim the right to have a correspondent to burn any letters you sent? I certainly wouldn't.

Violate Google TOS. And You will need be able to get access back

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