That’s fascinating, it sounds like the cost for Google to store, categorize, and disseminate this information is higher than the profit. Morals are unlikely to be relevant, after all. Or are they simply using devices as their storage medium?
The data has costs associated with it: they’ll want to back it up, they need to migrate it when they change formats, they need to maintain the hardware it resides on.
And, as the article mentions, there are liabilities around law enforcement requests, costs due to data breaches, and regulatory requirements.
Three months is plenty for them to target ads.
It’s likely now your device does the initial processing of your data (store, categorize, and disseminate) and the aggregate is sent through as telemetry. They save on processing costs and users think it’s privacy friendly.
But it’s Google we’re talking about here and smartphones are more than capable these days.
It is privacy friendly.
They don’t want any more headlines of governments using their data to victimize people receiving abortions than they need to. I’d be shocked if that continued trend isn’t the instigator of this.
That tracking is super invasive and gross, and not having it tied to an ad profile is a good thing, regardless of their motivations.
I guess they’re discovering that your grocery store trip on Feb 17, 2017 does not help them target ads.
Or they figured out short-term tracking is more effective at predicting future shopping than your entire driving history. 🤷♂️
They’ve actually discovered that being out into compliance with data privacy laws is expensive.
We can’t prove this. When they get a copy, nothing will bring our data back.
Yes and no. If they get under regulatory investigation and are not in compliance with laws about storing minimal PII or deleting records that they said they deleted, then the fines are pretty bad. A lot of the regulatory fines scale with the annual revenue of a company, so even the tech giants can feel the pain.
The risk to the business for fucking around is pretty high. My guess is that some of this legacy behavior data just isn’t worth the risk.
I can’t find any email from Google or any info on my account settings that this will be happening? Can anyone point to official Google comms about this? As my settings say “keep everything”.
https://support.google.com/maps/answer/14169818
Update Google Maps to use Timeline on your device
Important: These changes are gradually rolling out to all users of the Google Maps app. You’ll get a notification when an update is available for your account.
Location History is now called Timeline, and you now have new choices for your data. To continue using Timeline, you must have an up-to-date version of the Google Maps app. Otherwise, you may lose data and access to your Timeline on Google Maps.
Timeline is created on your devices.
Basically they’re getting rid of the web version because they’re moving the data to being stored on local devices only. Part of this might be because they got a lot of flak for stuff like recording location data for people who went near reproductive health clinics and other sensitive things. They can’t be forced to respond to subpoenas for data if they don’t have the data and can thus stay out of it, so I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s all that altruistic on their part.
Altruism is never going to be the way to get companies to do the right thing. Instead, making the wrong thing a financial liability is.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But all the data required to make the feature work will be saved locally, to their own phones or tablets, with none of it being stored on the company’s servers.
In an email sent by the company to Maps users, seen by the Guardian, Google said they have until 1 December to save all their old journeys before it is deleted for ever.
Users will still be able to back up their data if they’re worried about losing it or want to sync it across devices but that will no longer happen by default.
In a blogpost announcing the changes, Google didn’t cite a specific reason for the updates, beyond suggesting that users may want to delete information from their location history if they are “planning a surprise birthday party”.
But the company has come under increasing pressure to help users preserve their location privacy in the face of aggressive law enforcement efforts to weaponise its stored information.
So-called “dragnet” surveillance requests, for instance, have compelled Google to hand over information about every user in a particular region at a particular time, necessarily including many with no other link to a crime beyond a ping from a GPS signal.
The original article contains 433 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 54%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This data can still be stored by the government.
In fact, google may be being told by the government to tell people that this data isn’t being stored so people will be less concerned about it and not think it’s being collected since many people know google collects data but may be naive as to the possibility that google is lying about the data being completely erased.
google may be being told by the government
There’s an X-files episode about this, with Morris Fletcher.
Hah doubtful
Makes me wonder if they are making contingencies for a Trump victory.
The US government could force Google to reveal if people are accessing abortions or contraception, or participating in protests.
That’s just one country of many, I don’t think that guy winning leadership of that country would affect how Google manages my information.
OMG, so evil!
They are doing this because they care about you. And totally not because hoarding the data wasn’t profitable enough anymore. It’s only logical when you think about the fact that they were, up until now, going out of their way to save every GPS coordinate you ever visited with your phone in your pocket. It’s all for you and because they care about you very much.
They probably realized it’s not profitable because 90% of a user’s visits are home, work, store… wash rinse repeat day in and day out. They can probably get more meaningful data from the person through their other various tracking methods.
There’s the “Google can do no right” attitude I come here for!
