Comment by rcMgD2BwE72F | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcMgD2BwE72F | Hacker News Reader

They just proved that Google never forgets anything, even when you do your best to remove/delete/erase/destroy your personal information.

I thoroughly and repeatedly deleted all stock-related information from my Google account: all portfolios removed, all search history erased, all past Google Now topics suppressed, past emails deleted, Google chat conversations removed. Just everything (and I know really well how to control data on a Google account, I was once a Google fanboy and explored every little feature I could get my hand on, so customizing my Google account/products settings is something I'm quite good at).

Guess what? Going to their new google.com/finance brought all the stocks I've once added to Google Finance and removed. More than a dozen of stock tickers were automatically added to my account, and listed as "following".

It's impossible for me to completely delete my Google account because of some work-related obligations, but Google just proved that it will NEVER allow you to get forgotten.

We're forced to feed a beast we can no longer escape.

PS: the only Google things I occasionally use now are Gmail & Google Contacts (planning to switch to ProtonMail, but waiting for a contact syncing service on Android) and search (when Qwant isn't good enough).

Google Now had a separate list of stocks it would show you alerts for that differed from Google Finance. There was a way to manage that stock list from with Now. Maybe the new Finance UI pulled stocks from that?

This is old, but shows the Now setting for stocks[0].

[0] https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/41357/how-do-i-r...

All these entries were deleted. I repeatedly reset the Google Now entries and settings.

Google forgets. I cannot find any of my social media stuff from 15 years ago. There weren't many walled gardens back then. Everything was open to indexing and yet it no longer seems to exist.

That’s not what OP was talking about. OP is talking about the reemergence of personal Google data he/she deleted, not a de-indexed search result for a website that is offline.

The fact that you can no longer publicly access the information is not proof that Google lost the data.

In other contexts "Google does not forget" means what can be found through web search, but here the grandparent was using a broader meaning, closer to "once shared, data is no longer yours".

I once tried blocking all Google domains from my hosts file. Every domain they own set to 0.0.0.0. It was fascinating to see how sites break because of this. The most annoying were logins and registrations failing because of recaptcha. And also embedded maps not being displayed, incorrect fonts, and sites just showing a blank white page when failing to render. That being said there was an noticeable boost in speed for most sites.

Google "my stocks" and click the star to unfollow them.

Of course I promptly did that. The things is that I already unfollowed everything in the past. More importantly, I asked Google to remove everything multiple times.

This Whac-A-Mole is not a game, and that will not end well.

Weird. I'm having the exact opposite experience. There's literally one quote a care about because it's the only stock I currently own. And it's nowhere to be seen on that page.

Either way, anecdotal cases like this don't really support or refute your claim.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

A long time ago, it was possible to remove Google products and services on a case by case basis.

There were public URL from which you could request the deletion of your data. You could find it at http://ruscoe.net/google/google-account-service-names/ ("Google Account Service Names" link, which now redirects to some notice about the blogger's life). The list was crowdsourced by Blogoscoped's members and maintained by Tony Ruscoe (who made the list unaccessible right after being hired by Google).

You can find some in these "EditUserServiceData" URLs on this post: http://blog.ruscoe.net/2006/06/google-rs2-ssd-and-mobile-dow...

Times have changed a lot (for the worst) since 2008...

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