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Throw away account...

As someone who works with Google partners and partnering with Google's data, we see a lot of personal data in it.

You simply might be someone that doesn't work with such data. I do and we use a lot of it and it gets very personal.

> and it gets very personal

What does this mean? Are you reading people's depressed love poems and looking at pictures of their exes?

Could you share more? Perhaps some example or products?

I literally work in logging / analytics, so I do know a good bit about what we store and how we store it.

I didn't say that we don't store any personal data. That's ridiculous. Of course we store SOME personal data.

I said that we hardly store any data that we receive. Of what we store, we hardly store anything longer than 30 days. It's important to note that we receive an UNIMAGINABLE amount of data. Even a small fraction of a small fraction of that is still unimaginable amounts of data.

I don't know anything about our partnerships. I didn't say anything about that.

I think it is not about storing data but it is about learning from it.

After you learn that I'm into fitness (or vice versa) and manage to serve me an article in a news feed and direct me to a health blog (served by Google ad sense), then job of the data is done.

Amazon sees a lot more and all they really care about is what you view and what you buy. Everything else is noise with current tech.

Every model I know about is retained from scratch on the raw data as often as possible. There are several reasons for this:

Anything derived from PII is also PII unless it is anonymized by aggregation. Everything that is PII is aggressively TTL'd from the time of its collection from the user. The privacy review team knows what they're doing and won't let you get away with clever lifetime extension tricks. If there is a model specifically for you, it isn't going to be causally connected to anything that's aged out.

You can delete individual items and categories from your history. It would be an unimaginable pain in the ass, both mathematically and engineering-wise, to propagate the updates for individual deletions through an incremental pipeline. Even worse, I can't imagine how you'd possibly argue that such an operation would satisfy a legal deletion request (HIPPA, GDPR).

If you need to change your learner - say you found a bug in your training code - but all you have is a trained network and no data, you're screwed. You lose all your history and your user's search, spam-filtering, or voice recognition quality tanks, and people really care about those things. Pure incremental pipelines are incredibly brittle.

All of these problems are trivially solved by retraining from the raw data. Disk is cheap. Compute is cheap. Engineer time is expensive. Fancy infrastructure is expensive. Mathematicians are super expensive. Legal compliance is fantastically expensive and grows in cost incredibly quickly with increased engineering complexity.

I work at Google. My views are not the views of my employer and so on and so forth. I build data quality infra for the knowledge graph. I haven't worked on a ton of projects that dealt with PII for public users, but even so the privacy reviews for the tools and pipelines I build get reviewed and occasionally changes are demanded to protect tool-use information about employees that use the infrastructure that I build.

Data in what state? Does data need to be stored long-term to be used in analytics? The outcomes of those analytics is the data that is needed and would need to exist for a time, but the day-to-day, I don't know why you would expect all that to hang around.

Google isn't making money from selling actual raw user data, its selling data about that data.

Google (and similar businesses) get into trouble because they have to do enough surveillance and algorithmic profiling to make their advertising effective. You have to admit that it's a stretch to ask us to trust them.

From the perspective of a user this sounds positive, but do you have any idea why they don't store more data? Worry about public backlash? Lawsuits over data breaches? There would seem to be a financial incentive to store more given how cheap storage is and the fact that seemingly unimportant data could be useful in future models.

I mean, I'm new and just a lowly engineer, so I can't speak too much for the company.

I do work in analytics / logging, so I do have pretty decent insights into our different storage systems and logging policies.

The people that I interact with view data as a liability, not an asset. I think this is because of lawsuits mostly. We've been bitten by a few big ones. But also, storage is expensive, and even storing a Boolean on one type of log, we could get billions of those logs per day. It starts to add up and cost money.

I think we're pretty confident in our security and take it very, very, very seriously. So I don't think we're worried about necessarily a specific piece of data being stolen. If anything is stolen at all, that would be viewed as an existential catastrophe. So I don't think there's too many pieces of data that we'd care about specifically.

But again, I'm not anyone important here. And I'm new. And I don't know that much.

If you're actually a new engineer you might want to check your company policy on communicating details of internal systems in public; your external communications people probably don't allow you to speak about such things ... on the other hand, if you are allowed to talk about such things then you're probably just a persona adopted by someone in external comms.

Take care!

It's not a trade secret that we store data. I'm not giving away anything that isn't already public information. This is literally me giving a summary of our Terms of Use.

As far as I know, I'm allowed to say that: people I work with tend to be liberal. As far I know, I'm also allowed to say that: people I work with tend to view data as a liability not an asset. It's also public information that Google receives billions of requests per day. For me to extrapolate on that and say that even storing a single bit of data on those logs starts to add up and cost a lot of money isn't a trade secret either. It's common sense.

Upthread you appeared to be making definite statements about exactly what information Google shares, you also mention working for the company which suggests you're speaking authoritatively and in a way that is endorsed by the company (and that's why external comms people don't like it).

A couple of actionable statements

- you don't store anything for more than 30 days (that doesn't mesh with analytics data which might be de-anonymisable IMO).

- you don't do any facial tracking. Which doesn't surprise me too much but I can imagine a future trial where a barrister is saying "your engineers claimed in public you didn't do this sort of tracking" and that providing extras jeopardy for damages.

It's not my area, however, I appreciate the openness. Thanks for sharing.

> We don't analyze your face as you browse Hacker News

You disappoint me ;)

> You need to jump through a million hoops to get permission to store anything at all!

I guess you don't work with Android.

Today I wanted to set up my smartwatch. My phone told me to enable Bluetooth _and_ gps. I turned on GPS, it asked if it was okay to send positioning data to Google for some vauge reason. I said no. So it turned off GPS altogether. So now I won't be able to use my watch. (This is a clear GDPR violation btw)

Why am I telling you this story? Because someone at Google is trying really really hard to get his hand on all possible data. Maybe you two should have a chat.