Not only is Google's auto-delete good for privacy, it's also good news for competition

Earlier this month, Google announced a new collection of auto-delete settings for your personal information that allows you balance some of the conveniences of data-collection (for example, remembering recent locations in Maps so that they can be intelligently autocompleted when you type on a tiny, crappy mobile device keyboard) with the risks of long-term retention, like a future revelation that you visited an HIV clinic, or a political meeting, or were present at the same time and place as someone the police have decided to investigate by means of a sweeping "reverse warrant."

Writing in Fast Company, Jared Newman suggests that the new features are just window-dressing,, "practically worthless for privacy." Newman's argument is that after three months -- the minimum duration for the self-deleting feature -- "Google has already extracted nearly all the potential value from users data, and from an advertising standpoint, data becomes practically worthless when its more than a few months old."

This is true! But that doesn't make it useless.

First, the privacy threat model isn't that you'll be targeted for ads. This can be obnoxious or even distressing, but despite all Big Tech's self-serving boasts to the contrary, there's not much evidence that ad-targeting is a form of mind-control (instead, it's that ad-targeting allows disinformation pushers to find people whose trauma makes them vulnerable to conspiracy theories).

The privacy threat is that the data that Big Tech collects on you could be used to harm you: weaponized by identity thieves or stalkers, or by repressive states or petty martinets who fancy themselves the president's Praetorian Guard, or by insurers or other price-gougers who use that data to gouge you, or by elite colleges' corrupt admissions committees.