Google and privacy: will erase the history of new users after 18 months
In the same way that for a few months the main technology companies started a career for what they have called “digital well-being”, now everyone tries to make it seem that the privacy of users is the cornerstone and inspiration of all their actions. Probably because they have more than enough data to know that they are reaching the limit of what we are willing to allow.
Be that as it may, and just 48 hours after Apple’s keynote on the occasion of WWDC 2020 and its new privacy rules for iOS 14, Google has responded with a statement announcing the new measures. that you are implementing to protect the data (!) of users. Something that many will think does not seem very compatible with what it has been doing in recent years (and the odd decade).
Automatic history deletion
Among all the measures that it has announced that it is launching, there is one that is particularly striking and which, according to their statement, will affect all new users unless they modify the option that comes by default. And it’s that of automatically delete all your activity history in the Google account after a specific period of time. In this case 18 months.
And we are not just talking about the location history of Google Maps, but about everything we have done with the Gmail account This is web and application activity and, of course, also those places that we have visited, consulted, etc. Another important detail is that the location history will be deactivated by default for new accounts, so it will have to be the user himself who reactivates it within the options of his Google account.
As we mentioned before, it is very possible that the users’ satiety, added to some demands that those of Mountain View in the US have received, has helped the company see the privacy problem and data collection from a more correct perspective and leave in the hands of the users, in a much more transparent way, full control over what they want or not to share.
Now, we will have all these configuration options closer thanks to the fact that Google is locating them in the menu that appears after tapping on the avatar of our account, within the “Take the privacy checkup” function where we can configure this erasure to three or 18 months, or deactivate it if we do not want anything to be deleted.
