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.
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.
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!
I guess they’re discovering that your grocery store trip on Feb 17, 2017 does not help them target ads.
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.
