Google to Auto-Delete New Users’ Records by Default
https://www.bbc.comGoogle is changing its default settings to automatically delete some of the data it collects about users.
Web and app activity, including a log of website searches and pages visited, as well as location data, will now be wiped after 18 months. YouTube histories – including which clips were watched and for how long – will be erased after 36 months. The changes apply to new accounts only but existing users will soon be shown new prompts to adjust their settings. The auto-wipe policy would not apply to logs linked to Photos, Gmail and its Drive cloud-storage facility, which it said it did not draw on for advertising purposes.
Google introduced auto-delete controls in May 2019, to let users force the regular erasure of logs gathered about them by the company, but made this an opt-in option at the time.
