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Comment by htag | Hacker News Reader

So your position is "buyer beware". A company can make untrue claims about their product, and all of the responsibility rests on the consumer.

I do not want to be a consumer in that world.

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> Location History: Location History is a Google account setting that is off by default, and for those that turn it on, we provide simple controls like auto-delete so users can easily delete parts, or all, of their data at any time. Some of the places people visit — including medical facilities like counseling centers, domestic violence shelters, abortion clinics, fertility centers, addiction treatment facilities, weight loss clinics, cosmetic surgery clinics, and others — can be particularly personal. Today, we’re announcing that if our systems identify that someone has visited one of these places, we will delete these entries from Location History soon after they visit. This change will take effect in the coming weeks.

This seems to be pretty clearly what was happening, as described by the author of the article. *If* the systems detected an abortion clinic visit, it was deleted. No further guarantees were made in the blog post. The same post provides links to documentation on managing your location settings and history, so the user can adjust if they are unhappy with Google's behavior.

The blog post spends lot of effort talking about the importance of privacy, and protecting your health data. It shames other organizations for not protecting your privacy. It describes how privacy is a value at Google. Then it announces auto-delete as one of their major features. A journalist reported auto-delete works about half of the time.

Strictly speaking I'm unsure if something illegal happened. Ethically it feels like Google is overpromising and making empty political gestures. I just hope no one relies on this feature for their personal or legal safety.

Come on. The VP of whatever signed off on the press release and moved on. There’s a problem here.

You're leaving out the critical part where the VP of whatever signed off on the press release, then moved on while the feature was implemented as described in the release.

My name is Rene Wiltord. It is actually horrific that HN has violated my privacy so badly that my name is publicly visible here. I propose that the site be shut down.

Also I did not consent to your comment being the parent in this thread to mine. When will the rights of consumers like mine be respected. We can't expect a non techie to even know what comment thread parent and child relationships are.

Please don’t troll in the comments.

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