Google will now allow you to set your data history to self-destruct

Google has long allowed you to delete all the data it's stored on you, or to turn off collection, but turning off collection altogether made its services a lot less useful (for example, it made the auto-suggested locations in the Maps app of your phone worse, forcing you to do more typing on a tiny keyboard while on the go), and otherwise you had to remember to periodically open Google's privacy dashboard and delete your stored history.

The latest iteration of Google's privacy dashboard solves this problem by allowing you to set a window for the retention of your data, so that Google will automatically purge records after a set time (the shortest is 3 months, the longest, 18 months). Google is rolling this out across all its services, the latest being Youtube.

The move comes as Google is also improving the privacy defaults in Android: I got a software update last week that has a surprisingly easy-to-use feature that warns you when apps that you aren't using try to get your location, and then allows you to configure those apps to only get your location when you're actually using them, or never, or always.

All of this depends on your trusting Google to honor the implicit promises in these privacy settings, of course. It's a difficult risk to assess: Google has broken its promises in the past, and even done sneaky things to subvert its users privacy settings.

But the company is also operating in a new world where multibillion dollar fines are becoming par for the course when this sort of misbehavior is detected, and there is burgeoning political will to revive antitrust law and break up Big Tech companies. Read the rest