I love the unintentional creepiness of this quote:
"Data deletion at the data source, e.g. in your Web History will have no impact on issued reports, however reports can be deleted at any time"
As in - if you didn't know already, GOOG's Web History is a superficial front-facing report, all your personal data is happily sitting in GOOG's databases, is tracked, related, and available to whomever has the appropriate power to access it.
I don't think the quoted sentence says that. It rather says that Web History is the source of the data, and even if you delete it there, it will not affect reports that have already been issued in the past.
The question is what they mean with "issued reports". Are these reports that are being issued or reports that have been issued? It's a bit ambiguous, I think. But then again, English isn't my native language, so maybe I am just confusing some Grammar rules.
I think you misunderstood the phrase (which has been removed since?).
I signed up (my web history has been disabled for months) and I only have data about my OSes/emails/locations, nothing about search "Web History No activity found."
It can be easily extended to allow storing ~everything~ ('The idea is that we can rollback any damage done to your account' or 'We can help you identify everything potentially malicious a 3rd party did by storing every detail').
How do you differentiate between legit (my account, my data) deletion requests and the bad ones? Right. Not at all.
I'm assuming that this we're talking about an aggregate built for the account statement. (I don't know if the account statement is a batch job or something built incrementally as you browse. But the original statement leads me to believe it's the second one.) If you want to actually delete the data, don't delete entries from your browsing history or search history; officially request deletion of all your data from the privacy page. Deleting everything Google knows about you is different from pruning one embarrassing search result by deleting it from Web History. The first is an action you take because you don't want Google to have your information. The second is an action you take because you want to be able to show people you search history without showing them a particular search you did.
(Remember: most people are worried about protecting their information from their friends and family, not from some future Orwellian society. Google gives you tools to do both.)
The first sentence is either incomplete or my non-native english parser stumbles and falls. Help me out, please.
Regarding the following statement: Your take seems a lot more sensible now. Still, I still don't feel that the matter's settled. If you claim that most people are worried about their petty problems of hiding their embarrassing search items from friends and family then I'd like to counter with the argument that the same 'most people' don't understand that removing one (the history listing) wouldn't remove the other (the data Google has).
Claiming that this wasn't the _intention_ is kind of hard. I'd say any layperson can expect that 'forget about X' or 'delete X' really purges the relevant data. That's what you're trained to believe. Even if the intention wasn't explicitly "I'm afraid of Google and want them to forget about my history":
Separating the data management like this is really just borderline abusive for casual users. Ask mom and dad if they expect that something is still stored and connected to their account if they remove it from the (browsing/web) history.
"Data deletion at the data source, e.g. in your Web History will have no impact on issued reports, however reports can be deleted at any time"
As in - if you didn't know already, GOOG's Web History is a superficial front-facing report, all your personal data is happily sitting in GOOG's databases, is tracked, related, and available to whomever has the appropriate power to access it.