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by pbhjpbhj 1454 days ago
I'm guessing you're speaking non-authoritatively.

The cloud documentation suggests a deletion period of 180 days; so for cloud data, at least, when it says it is "deleted" it seems to mean it will be [fully] deleted within half-a-year. https://cloud.google.com/docs/security/deletion
2 comments
mjg59 1454 days ago
Former google employee, no knowledge of current situation, not involved in any of this stuff even when I worked there: different types of data get handled differently. If material is important enough then it's going to be backed up onto tape for disaster recovery purposes. If a user then requests it be deleted, that's a huge pain - the easiest thing to do is just wait until that tape has rotated out of backup, which may take a while.

More sensitive user data is likely to be handled differently - both for privacy reasons and because it's honestly just not as important to keep hold of it (a user's cloud data gets lost? That's a big deal. A user's location history data gets lost? Meh), so it's unlikely to end up in long-term backup storage.

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deanCommie 1454 days ago
Why would the Google Cloud data deletion policy for 1/ paying 2/ enterprise customers deleting their own data that they 3/ opted in to store, and then 4/ opted in to delete have anything to do with the retention policy for Google Maps' 1/ free 2/ consumer customers having data deleted by Google that the customer 3/ did not choose to store, and then 4/ did not choose to delete?

At least 4 meaningfully different qualifiers about the situation for entirely separate parts of Google.

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pbhjpbhj 1453 days ago
Oh for sure, can you point me to some documentation closer to the specific services in question (free maps data)?

I was only suggesting that it might be indicative of the period deleted data ordinarily takes to leave the backup cycle.

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