From Fast Company:
While Google has spent years insisting that users are in control of their privacy, it’s never given users a way to wipe old data automatically. If you wanted to keep Google from building up a lifetime of personal information without opting out of personalized features entirely, you had to remind yourself to delete the data on your own.
That’s about to change: Google will soon introduce an auto-delete function to its account activity page. This will give users the option to delete old searches, location history, and other activity, either after three months or a year and a half. Google says the auto-delete feature will roll out “in the coming weeks.”
Google’s tendency to save everything indefinitely was the subject of a recent New York Times investigation, which found that police are using Google’s location database to trawl for potential crime suspects, and sometimes ensnaring innocent people in the process. A wave of stories on how to disable Google’s location tracking followed.
Link to the rest at Fast Company
PG says some people have been regularly creating new Google accounts while abandoning old ones due to Google’s collect-and-hold-everything practices.
PG regularly uses several Google accounts for different purposes as a simpler method of just about accomplishing the same thing.
If you would like to do something like this or just start a new Google (or Facebook, etc.) account every few weeks, PG recommends getting a password manager like LastPass, 1Password or Dashlane to keep track of multiple account names and passwords. The last time PG checked each of these organizations offered a completely useful free version that you could upgrade into a paid account with more bells and whistles.
If this was facebonk I’d guess that it was just them hiding from you what you’ve told them to forget.
One of my shorts shows the other way that ‘right to be forgotten’ can be used …
.
“That’s all ancient history – you shouldn’t be holding on to things that happened over twenty years ago!”
“Are you saying we should have deleted your old data?” Alex asked in surprise. “That would play havoc with keeping track of this area’s buying and selling trends,” he protested, even as Tess was flashing a suggestion on his screen.
“That’s your problem; I insist you remove all that outdated information.”
“Well, okay,” Alex pretended to grumble, “It looks like there’s an option here to remove old and expired data. I’ll send you the link and you can load your company name and added data. Be advised that’ll take a few hours for a deletion to process through all the data bases.”
“Good,” the caller muttered before dropping the display but not the data link.
Alex grinned once the display blanked. “Okay, Tess, why did you want me to offer him that option?”
“Think of what he’s about to give us. Every company and employee link he gives us will be that much more information on his groups and holdings. We can then use them to follow where their credits go.”
“And he thinks he’s removing – not adding to your database.”
“That’s okay, as far as he’s concerned, we will have forgotten he’s ever existed,” Tess assured him with a chuckle.
Even ignoring Terence’s point about backups and the like, I wonder what it will actually delete? You can currently go to your account activity page and delete all activity – quick and easy and sounds good – but your browsing history is unaffected and has to be separately deleted (fortunately also easily done, though I’m not convinced that Google doesn’t still keep a copy). Whilst deleting your searches may remove the record of some questionable activities it’s of limited value if the record of where you browsed after the search is retained.
Auto-delete from where? Backups? Mirrors?
What does auto-delete mean?
After auto-delete, where will the data persist?