Look at what companies do, not what they say they do.
Yay, you can delete all your data... says the company which puts hidden microphones in consumer products, leaks copious amounts of user data across unrelated services, releases a browser which automatically logs you in to google services, lifted its ban on personally identifiable info in its ad service etc. etc.
Because "letting you delete your data" seems to be a thing the company is doing. Which you say we should look at.
Moreover, this is a very, very, very small "modicum of privacy". A very small number of users will use that. It makes the company look good, for sure [1], but it will in no way, shape, or form affect what they are already doing, and will continue doing.
Should we celebrate them for being so gracious as to let the users delete their own data? Well, it's literally the least they should do anyway (once again, [1]).
[1] I wonder how much of this is related to GDPR, which requires Google to provide users with means to delete their data.
You and I read very different comments. Not being able to tell you, a random HN commented, the exact procedure by which a specific piece of data's lifetime is managed is different than not being able to, in the abstract, describe, monitor, and alert on the intended lifecycle of a piece of data.
> I wonder how much of this is related to GDPR,
Probably not at all: Google was already GDPR compliant (it was already possible to manually delete your data), this goes beyond the GDPR mandate, and allows you to set a ttl on your data, essentially.
It's becoming more apparent to me that you, either intentionally or not, aren't clear on what the status quo was, or what this change changed. To be clear, deleting your location data has always been possible (or at least, has been possible for a long time). There's a UI for it. This is, in addition to being able to manually delete data, have Google automatically delete any data older than a certain time.
It's becoming more apparent that the whole conversation kinda derailed from "privacy engineering team" which engineers privacy (whatever that means at Google) does a shitty job to "we should celebrate them for doing just the minimum amount of work for something that has already been possible, if spread across many UIs".
Literally despite multiple complaints about how Google handles data with regards to location and activity tracking (original complaint: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19809168, summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19812861), the "privacy engineering team" answers "just disable it": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19810083
This is what I'm talking about, and this is the status quo that was, is, and is going to be in the future.
Actually no, it was you who derailed an otherwise unrelated conversation to that topic.
> we should celebrate them for doing just the minimum amount of work for something that has already been possible, if spread across many UIs
The "minumum amount of work possible" was doing nothing. Let's isolate this: is this change a good thing, or a bad thing, in your opinion? That is, all else equal, would you prefer Google provide this specific privacy control, or not?
If not, why not? What is bad about this feature?
If yes, why are you attacking the very people implementing features that you think are good? Isn't it better to support the people doing work you support?