this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
228 points (97.9% liked)
Privacy
32442 readers
817 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So the e-mail I got with them claiming they will delete my location history is a lie?
To the best of my knowledge - from a spirited but doomed attempt to read Google's privacy policies - Google is committed to deleting your location history after sharing it with 10,000 or so vendor partners.
Each of those vendor partners have pinky promised to comply with the rules outlined in the same privacy policy that I failed to read.
For context, I'm not convinced any living person has read the entirety of Google's privacy policies.
Sadly, I'm quite confident - by the law of averages, human nature, and corporate corruption - that not all 10,000 trusted partners also deletes our location data history.
Google does take privacy preserving steps to anonymyze what it shares.
My educated opinion is that no amount of attempted anonymozation is sufficient for the breadth, scope and quantity of data that Google collections.
Shorter answer for you: yes, I believe that is a corporate lie. True only in technicality, but likely false by any reasonable persons expectation of what "delete" means.
Not to defend Google because they violate privacy in many ways, but they absolutely do not share that level of data with partners. This is not some ethical decision. The data is just far too valuable to Google. Google is extracting as much value as they can from users, advertisers, and publishers, and if they sold access to the data itself, publishers and advertisers could begin cutting out Google. Instead Google gives advertisers a lot of control over what users to target, and uses the data inside a black box to show those ads.
Google is hoarding your data and using it to show you ads with minimal built-in opt-outs. But they aren't sell your data.