How to Set Your Google Data to Self-Destruct
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Yes, that's what I do. But then Google Maps on the phone nags you constantly that it should be on.
Removing the nagging would be an immense improvement and proof of commitment to privacy on Google's part.
Can you set up an API key app that pings an API weekly?
If you end up in a position to tet this you'll want to keep an eye on multiple account logins as well since the link they send you in the warning doesn't go to a specific account. If you're logged in to more than one account and the first one isn't the one you got the warning about you'll end up looking at the manager for the wrong one and need to either log out entirely or find it manually. A minor design issue, but it can be confusing for a few minutes.
For example, what if I wanted to implement loading automatic nearby locations? Naively, I could fetch the results within a radius R of the current received location. However, that's not good if I'm on the highway. The smarter algorithm would take into account the car's position, velocity, and angular velocity to calculate a better spot to query around, or perhaps a different shape to query in other than a circle with radius R.
I should be able to decide what "experience" I want. I don't want "more", I'm happy with "good enough".
Anyway, I'm very fine with how it works now, except for the nagging. I allow the app to know my location, of course, just not to store any history.
You can. You can use their 'free' app that you pay for with your location data or you can pay a one time fee for a road atlas with no updates.
Good enough indeed.
I, too, don't want to give my data away. But when I'm in my car, the most important thing is that I get to my destination safely and on time. That acute need vastly outweighs my own philosophy on who I think should have my data.
I'm just being honest with myself. I can't deny that I make heavy use of products that make heavy use of my personal data. People in this community seem to think of personal data collection as a form of parasitism, but in reality, it is far closer to mutualism.
Some amount of advertising is expected in a free app.
I don’t have any faith that I’m going to be protected from current / future persecution because I ticked / didn’t tick some box on some control panel on some service provided by Morally Bankrupt MegaCorp.
If your data is supposed to have been deleted but they ignored it, they have it illegally.
If someone from the state wants to prosecute you and requests the data, the company wouldn't own up to having it, because they're not allowed have it.
Why would they lie to you, and then sell themselves out to the state?
Fine, they might keep it, but not in order to assist in prosecutions lol
That is they look for loopholes and places they can use dark patterns to nudge users into giving up more data. They stay within the rules but push the envelope of what’s acceptable to the legal limit.
It’s not that they are holding onto data specifically to support prosecutions it’s that they hold onto data because that’s what Google do.
They’d hand that over because they have it and to not cooperate would unnecessarily cause them business friction they could easily avoid.
I don't think that would go down well for the prosecution if you ever ended up in court.
The reality is that 99.99% of users never even open their account settings, let alone micromanage their identity's state across dozens of platforms. Google wouldn't even notice if all hn readers deleted all of their data and deactivated their accounts tomorrow.
The most reasonable thing for them to do is to actually delete the data, and avoid all headaches. It's the more profitable move. You look like good guys and avoid legal problems.
If you could find the right button I’m sure it would delete the data...
except that it’s down the UI equivalent three flights of stairs to the basement, behind a filing cabinet in front of a locked door with a sign on saying “Beware of the leopard”.
Oh and every tracking feature is on by default even if you’re not logged in.
Even then, the UI's for these things usually aren't actually that darkpatterned. Once you get down the first dark tunnel, it tends to open up quite well.
I think we ought to assume Big Corp doesn't delete anything and shares that not-deleted data with, at least, the Five Eyes.
I imagine that even if you trust the platform holder to handle the data responsibly, you might still worry what someone could do to you if it fell into the wrong hands due to a hack, or some future government that might abuse it.
As someone who supported a major database in Google some five years ago: the amount of development effort that went into the GDPR compliance (we haven't even heard that name then, only that the EU is brewing a law that requires us to be able to delete data) was very surprising. So at least one corp does actually delete the data correctly.
But the boiling frog analogy is something that just isn't true:
> "According to Dr. George R. Zug, curator of reptiles and amphibians, the National Museum of Natural History, 'Well that's, may I say, bullshit. If a frog had a means of getting out, it certainly would get out. And I cannot imagine that anything dropped in boiling water would not be scalded and die from the injuries.'"
> "Professor Doug Melton, Harvard University Biology Department, says, 'If you put a frog in boiling water, it won't jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot -- they don't sit still for you.'"
> "Vic's (Dr. Victor Hutchison of the University of Oklahoma) answer was as follows: 'The legend is entirely incorrect! The 'critical thermal maxima' of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so. Naturally, if the frog were not allowed to escape it would eventually begin to show signs of heat stress, muscular spasms, heat rigor, and death.'"
Quotes from: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=758865
Additional info: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2006/09/the-b...
Once you get into the tool and click on Activity Controls, you will see an option called Web & App Activity. Click Manage Activity and then the button under the calendar icon. Here, you can set your activity history on several Google products to automatically erase itself after three months or after 18 months. This data includes searches made on Google.com, voice requests made with Google Assistant, destinations that you looked up on Maps and searches in Google’s Play app store."
"It's deleted" is (or could be) another term for "You can't see it anymore, but it's there somewhere"
Haven't gone into ToS, but regardless, there's no way we can determine if it's really gone.
In my view, if I say I want to "delete" my account, I don't want a single trace of my existence on that platform from then on. No emails, no backups, nothing.
Either way that clause showed a hint accountability from Amazon that I haven't seen too often. Not that I've spent much time comparing ToS either.
While the data is likely inaccessible forever in this case, the reason the company can't just say it's been deleted is if they actually do need to restore one of these backups, the data you deleted will come back.
* Encrypt each user's data to a user-specific key
* Keep the key in hot replicated storage
* When you get a deletion request, delete the key
Backups aren't just about replication/redundancy, they also protect you from bugs and other sources of corrupted data.
A backup that can be edited to delete data like an encryption key instantly when the user tells it do is also a backup that can be easily lost or corrupted.
The only person who doesn't have access to that data will be the subject the data originated from.
Plausible deniability.
“We don’t have your data because you told us to delete it. Chortled chortle.”
If Google actually cared about your privacy you'd be able to delete the info for shorter intervals, or even have it not stored at all.
I wish there was a tool that regularly nuked my Facebook history as well, from comments in random groups to likes across the site. I have no use for things I commented 10 years ago.
This attitude confuses me. Looking back at things I wrote ten years ago makes me think "huh, I used to believe X and now I don't, why did I change my mind?" and "X used to be really important to me and now it's not, what happened?". If I'm writing something today I'll often look back at what I've said about it previously (and I like having most of what I've written as blog posts so that's easy).
Then there's the benefit to others: being able to look back at what people were thinking in the past is super useful for understanding how the world has changed, and textual comments are great for that.
But it feels like everything can cause outrage these days and I don’t want to know what will look bad in 10 more years, out of context.
I’ll take out the archive and keep the memory on my computer, not online, for everyone to see.
There we go again, shaming mental health :(