Not trying to make a case for large scale data collection without purpose - but if clickstreams are going somewhere I would rather it no be to a company selling me ads.
> The maximum amount of time that Analytics will retain Google-signals data is 26 months, regardless of your settings.
First party can be longer, but is usually shorter than this.
Disclosure: I'm a Googler. Logs of my product are retained for 14 months and until recently it was 1 month, but it turned out we need to debug cases older than that.
Google and Facebook are arguably better because they at least are somewhat incentivized to keep your data to themselves.
Even though that's like arguing about which STD is better instead of using condoms.
Let's do some research before crying foul. Google doesn't have to share your data with outside people directly, they are more than enough of a customer for that data themselves.
I did read the terms and it was anything but clear on that, it only says that data generated is owned by the customer but also allows them to create "anonymized" versions of the data that they do own.
Even if the terms didn't give them a free pass to share the data (and that they don't sell it anyway like many do) that data is only a company policy change from being sold... The probability of that happening quickly approaches 1 with data brokers sitting on their doorstep with bags of money.
> Does aws share your data with 3rd parties?
Assuming that you're talking about the data stored on rented servers - and not their customer and usage data which they very likely do share with third parties - they have very obvious incentives to keep that data readable only by the customer.
Not that I would be all that surprised to learn that some cloud provider had been mining their customers disk storage for data...
> Google doesn't have to share your data with outside people directly, they are more than enough of a customer for that data themselves
That's what I meant with that they are somewhat incentivized to keep it to themselves. That's marginally less disgusting than having it being sold in bulk to companies that specialize in aggregating, de-anonymizing and re-selling data.
Fundamentally it is guaranteed that sharing your data with a third party for free is gives you less recourse/expectation of privacy than a company that is getting paid to do so (like AWS S3 in my example).