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.
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.
Removed by mod
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.
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.
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.
