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Comment by timsally | Hacker News Reader

This is a step in the right direction but my question is what information derived from your data do they retain? Getting rid of the raw data is great but there are still serious privacy implications if they retain highly sophisticated models trained on the data. The simplest example would be retaining a feature vector of your face while deleting the raw photos.

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IIRC from looking at this feature somewhat recently, they explain that they are not necessarily deleting the data, only not associating it with your account. OTOH, from what other commenters are saying it sounds like they may want to delete (some of) the data but currently do not do so because it is shown in the account. Presumably they will still keep whatever they find useful.

I hadn't used my account in a while and was going to just "delete" what I could and keep the account. They have a "download your data" button but refused to let me use it claiming they couldn't be sure it was really my account (but not providing any way to convince them), so at that point I decided to delete. Hopefully they did actually delete it. For me, it still showed the older history after I enabled the "delete" older history option (possibly it would have been removed after some delay), so I manually deleted it (it wasn't all that much) and that did seem to remove it.

I hate that I basically can’t ever delete any of my accounts any more. Usually the only option is “deactivate.” I think hn uses that policy too actually

agree with you. I have kept location data on, because its something I revisit a lot, the other stuff is set to delete after 18 months. If I dont notice anything different ill set it to 3 months.

The original post from Google had this line https://www.blog.google/technology/safety-security/keeping-p...

"As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period."

>"As always, we don’t sell your information to anyone, and we don’t use information in apps where you primarily store personal content—such as Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Photos—for advertising purposes, period."

Wait, what? Is this some weasel word soup going on?

I do not believe this for one second.

I'd actually take them at their word that they don't sell your data directly. That'd be fucked up.

They do, however, use your data to make money by slotting you into segments and selling the anonymized _segment_ data to advertisers. It's still extremely invasive, just in a sorta subtle way.

Selling your data directly is the sort of behavior I'd expect out of companies that are evil and don't care about being seen as evil (see: wireless carriers, "location intelligence" companies, etc)

What about this is unbelievable to you?

That the largest for-profit, personal data collection effort on earth would not try to exploit data about email, calendars, photos, files, etc. to sell me more stuff?

What about that is believable to you? You just take them at their word and call it a day?

there was a link where that text is https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/

Advertising use is one of the uses I am least worried about, and yet is the only use that they promise to not pursue

Also, while this move is good, surely data that's 18 months old just isn't that useful to Google anymore, right? They've already trained their models and extracted the data they needed. I do see how this can have any real practical privacy effects, beyond someone's account being hacked.

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