By Malcolm Owen, May 02, 2019.
Google is offering users a new way to try and safeguard their privacy, by providing an option to automatically delete logs of Web & App Activity as well as Location History data after a specific period of time, rather than requiring users to manually delete it.
One of the biggest collectors and users of personal data from its audience, Google’s products and services rely on a healthy amount of data being collated and mined in order to provide the best results, or to serve optimal advertising. Google has been criticized for its collection policies, but while it does provide some controls to users for how the data is managed, a new option seeks to cut down on a user’s need to manually wipe data they no longer wish to be stored.
In a blog post, Google advises there are simple controls to enable or disable collection for Location History and Web & App Activity within the Google Account settings, with the ability to delete part or all of that data manually. Under the new auto-delete controls, users will be able to set the location and activity logs to wipe when they become three months or 18 months old, or to leave them as they are and to keep manually deleting data.
It is likely Google is willing to offer the option to automatically wipe the older data due to it being less useful to the company than newer logs. While there may be some value in keeping location logs beyond three months for some users, logs beyond 18 months is unlikely to be valuable to either Google or its users.
Google advises the new controls will be arriving first on Location History and Web & App Activity, suggesting there could be other areas within the Google account that could have similar deletion features applied, and will roll out to all accounts in the next few weeks…
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