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It would be really nice to have companies destroy algorithms based on knowledge obtained illegally (pretty much all of Facebook and Google). I just don't see it happening anytime soon.

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As the article notes, the policy has been used, including against Facebook's partner Cambridge Analytica. So I cannot say that it will be "happening soon", but it is certain to "have happened already".

What evidence do you have for these claims? What knowledge do you believe was obtained illegally?

Facebook was forced to pay $650 million in 2021 for violating Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act[1]. That's not necessarily grounds for a federal regulatory action, but if something like this happens in the future the does violate federal law (in the article, this was caused by not paying sufficient attention to COPPA), it could mean Facebook has to delete/re-do quite a bit of work in addition to purely monetary damages.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/01/facebook-illinois-class-ac...

That's a great example. I can say that for a very long time (at least 5 years, probably more but I wasn't there to know for sure) Google has had explicit policies and training for all employees about not sharing data across projects without explicit user consent for this and many other reasons.

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