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Google deletes your data within I think 64 days if you request them to or delete your account.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/32046

There's nothing there which clarifies that "delete" isn't a euphemism for "flag it to no longer be displayed to users" like it is everywhere else where companies collect data on users, so you'll excuse my skepticism.

Exactly and they have the perfect excuse:

"Well when talking about deleting we mean we do the exact same thing the file system does to a file, it flags it, but doesn't actually erase it's content. Acting like a filesystem delete operation is what people expect when using that word"

That would be somewhat reasonable if it were just an implementation detail. But unfortunately, it's not just an implementation detail. When a filesystem has data to write and runs out of hard drive space, it overwrites the data which was flagged for deletion. But when a web 2.0 company has data to write and runs out of hard drive space, they buy more hard drive space, usually automatically.

It probably is an implementation detail. I'd bet you 64 days is time is takes for all their backups to be rotated.

Not that I think that's legitimate! Implementations can be changed, just like you could write a filesystem that shreds files when they are deleted.

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