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Comment by thwarted | Hacker News Reader

Deleting your search history at Google is like three clicks (Web History | Remove Items | Clear entire Web History ) -- however, I've never done this, since I like being able to browse my search history. Now, of course, Google could be keeping the data around even though you've elected to delete it, or may be attempting to anonymize it to use it for a different purpose, but that's another issue.

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Yeah I've seen this - but the EU's dispute with Google is that they keep history for 2 years regardless, so that implies that clearing your history is merely cosmetic.

That implication neither confirms nor denies the "difficulty" of deleting your search history; three clicks means it's as difficult to delete your search history as it is to move a file to the recycle bin in Windows and empty it. Fact is, you can't confirm that it gets deleted, whatever that exactly means, no matter what the UI is, but that has nothing to do with the ease of finding or using the delete functionality.

However, does the fact that a cosmetic delete function exists say that Google wants to allow you to actually delete something or just wants you to think that you are deleting something, and is this better or worse than Facebook, which doesn't even have a cosmetic interface to do so, other than perhaps removing your account all together, and has established and known TOS that say they can do whatever they want with the data you give them?

I don't see how that is another issue. Either they get rid of your data or they don't. If you've ever worked with data at that scale, you'll know how hard it is to keep any sort of promise to actually purge it from all systems.

Seriously, I don't think it should be that hard to purge user data, unless it has already been assimilated/linked to other user statistics.

That's Facebook's issue; if you delete your account, photos you've tagged remain tagged, messages you've sent remain in people's inboxes, groups you've created still exist, and so on. Google doesn't have anywhere near that level of linking between users.

While some may insist that once you delete your Facebook account, messages you've sent and are in others' inboxes, groups you have created, tagging on photos (actually do they, at least does the UI indicate who tagged?) should be deleted, I think it is actually reasonable to expect:

When I delete my account, any files (photos) I have uploaded are deleted. I don't care if I tagged someone in another photo which I didn't upload, it's their name there, not mine. If a message I sent is in someone's inbox, I obviously don't have any control (actually it depends, but let's take it this way).

It's like if I deleted my email account, I expect my inbox to be deleted, not an email I sent, which is in someone elses inbox.

It's not just that though. At all large organizations handling data, it is processed into several databases, statistics, aggregations, archives. There aren't any systems that can keep track of all this and purge all the data correctly.

Probably not if you have a static IP.

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