[mfer]

There are many ways to look at this...

1. It is great that Google is working to come up income sources other than ads. This will help diversify their business and motives over time.

2. This may cause some to think that the money is the only method of payment for the service that's happening. That payment via our data isn't happening because money is involved. I hope this does not happen.

3. It opens the door for competitors who want to charge for a service. If Google can charge this gives some emotional motivation for others to do it instead of harvesting and selling data. It's a tiny thing and a bit part but still a thing.

4. This is telling that Google isn't making enough money on this data to justify storing more of it. What does this say about enough for them? How much data do people want to store and what would it mean?

I'll stop at 4 things. I hope people wonder down these different paths that are not mutually exclusive.

[bryanrasmussen]

Given that search data is not very valuable after 3 months I suppose the other data is less valuable after the same time. This may prompt some users to help google out by deleting their old less valuable data when they get near their limits, or if not they may help Google out with some money for storing old data that otherwise is not valuable for Google.