Google Ads announces 11-year data retention policy | Hacker News Reader

Google Ads announces 11-year data retention policy

searchengineland.com

48 pointsvednig21 comments

Anyone from the Google Ads team here on HN? I am struggling with Kafkaesque warnings inside of my account after using the Shopify Google Ads app (which apparently opened a second/duplicate Google Ads account), resulting in warnings about "circumventing systems" due to having 2 accounts for the same business. I just want to sell the car parts I make in my garage as a hobby online, but Google doesn't make it easy...

Any Google Ads team members who might be able to help, I'd happily donate to your favorite charity (or send you some parts for 1982-1992 Chevrolet Camaro's), my username @gmail.com is my contact info

Google Ads for Publishers has increasingly complex interface, idk what purpose it serves. I hope maybe someone reach out to you. Google's Support as a whole sucks in my experience at least, and no amount of any other form of compensation can improve that for me.

That's significantly longer than I would have expected. That's longer than the retention policy on my work emails, and this is data for ads...?

Pretty funny juxtaposed with their legal case where they were destroying evidence setting a company wide policy not to retain any communications.

There should be a law requiring Google to not retain ads data any longer than the retention period for their own internal communications.

Different countries have different laws around financial transaction data retention. US laws allow for audit up to 10 years, so they made it 11 to be safe yes?

Some countries don't have any data regulation laws that allow for your data to be expunged. Since, Google is also an ISP in US saving that amount of data for 11 years would include a lot of data, more than anyone could think of, without having any control over it.

Can your work emails be used to promote candidates in elections? Long ads data retention seems reasonable to me.

I litigate elections cases and I only have to keep client records for five years after termination of representation.

We are in 2024 someone needs to wake them up to Privacy standards

That is the duration some of us have been using web for, as a reference.

"will not be returned"

Doesn't sound like a retention policy.

Google’s own announcement uses more straightforward language saying that data won’t be retained.

https://ads-developers.googleblog.com/2024/10/new-data-reten...

They still use the terminology that the data will not be returned in the following paragraph.

The announcement is totally explicit that data will not be retained.

That sentence is obviously explaining what happens if you try to query outside the retention window: no data will be returned for data before the retention window. That needs to be stated, because there are other possible ways it could work, like the entire operation failing with an error if any portion of the query window is outside the retention window.

It sounds like an access policy for others, while big G gets full access. Yikes!

I think it was indefinite before...

>These Data Processing Terms will take effect on the Terms Effective Date and, notwithstanding expiry of the Term, remain in effect until, and automatically expire upon, deletion of all Customer Personal Data by Google as described in these Data Processing Terms.

Their legal docs do not point to a pre-existing duration after which they delete the data.

https://www.google.com/analytics/terms/dpa/dataprocessingame... https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10769131?hl=en

Imagine using google products in 2024 Lol

So that means lifetime, really. Pointless.

No it just means they now keep the data only as long as they are required to by law.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com