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Google apparently* has good, accessible privacy controls, however by using them to increase your privacy, you effectively break many of their apps. They are designed to work with your personal information.

* I have no way of knowing if they actually delete any personal data when I ask them. I suspect that they just don't show it to me anymore.

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This is not true. Deleted data is indeed deleted. Making sure deleted data is actually deleted is super important to Google and any other company because of GDPR compliance.

This is the kind of thing that you go over laborious detail in over privacy design docs at Google to make sure you have it covered.

Source: I'm a Xoogler.

That's cool, but my privacy isn't about compliance. The government can't keep up with the likes of Google. The top-level comment was about the alignment problem between my interests and Google's. I'm sure there's plenty of cases where the data meets the government's definition of "anonymous" but it really isn't. Also I'm sure that there are cases that data is kept for law enforcement even though I've been told it's gone.

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