Google had previously come under fire because the settings in their privacy controls weren’t as clear cut as they should. For example, you had to dive quite deep into the settings if you wanted to completely turn off tracking (check out our guide on how to turn it off). However, we have some good news for you.Google, it seems, might have had a change of heart in how it handles your location history and web activity data, so much so that the company has announced that they are planning on introducing a new auto-delete feature which will let users automatically delete their location history and activity data on a periodic basis.
This means that you can set a time in which you want all that data to be erased, so in the event you forgot, it will still be deleted. According to Google, “Choose a time limit for how long you want your activity data to be saved—3 or 18 months—and any data older than that will be automatically deleted from your account on an ongoing basis.”
It seems that 3 months is the minimum duration before auto-delete kicks in, so if you’re uncomfortable with Google holding onto your data for that long, you will still have to delete it manually, but we suppose it’s still better than nothing. The feature has yet to go live but is expected to begin rolling out to users in the coming weeks.
Filed in . Read more about Google and Privacy. Source: blog.google