Google announced yesterday that instead of just giving you the option to set your deletion settings to happen, it will do so for you. Instead of defaulting to not deleting your Google history, Google will set your search data to delete after 18-months, YouTube data after 36-months, etc.
The new setting will just default to auto-delete as opposed to never delete:
Google said "today we’re changing our data retention practices to make auto-delete the default for our core activity settings."
Here is Sundar Pichai's tweet about this:
Privacy is at the heart of everything we do, and we’ll keep challenging ourselves to do more with less. As a next step, today we’re changing our data retention practices to make auto-delete the default for our core activity settings. https://t.co/4hW0L23iZV
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) June 24, 2020
In 2007, Google began to anonymize this data after 18 to 24 months. Then in 2018, Google made it easier to delete the data completely. In 2019, Google added auto-delete controls. Now, those auto-delete controls will be set to auto-delete.
Apple having an influence here or is it government?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
