> The EU does not regulate keeping historical records though.
My experience dealing with GDPR and other EU regulations across several companies is that the laws are very vague in their wording. We encountered a lot of scenarios where the law was just vague enough that our lawyers advised us to avoid anything that could be interpreted as infringing. The penalties assigned in some of these laws are indicated as a percentage of global profits, so we would play it safe to avoid any possibility of some EU politician trying to score political points by getting headlines about a big fine they extracted from a tech company.
I don’t know about their political advertising laws specifically, but I would not be the least bit surprised if they deleted these ads to be 100% safe in dodging potential fines under vague laws.
> because we can't imagine a good reason they'd go out of their way to have someone spend time on deleting information.
Note that they didn’t remove the archive for non-EU countries. They only did this in the EU. By this logic, they spent extra effort exclusively doing this for the EU while keeping it for other countries. That suggests to me that some EU specific reason is in play.
I’m not sure what you’re saying exactly: you had a bad lawyer or you operate in a place where the spirit of the law is not known?
> That suggests to me that some EU specific reason
That was my point as well - Google is being shady for no apparent reason. I guess we’ll never know, or they’ll release some clickbaity statement like Apple’s recent “commentary” on the DMA. Baddies gonna do bad things.
My experience dealing with GDPR and other EU regulations across several companies is that the laws are very vague in their wording. We encountered a lot of scenarios where the law was just vague enough that our lawyers advised us to avoid anything that could be interpreted as infringing. The penalties assigned in some of these laws are indicated as a percentage of global profits, so we would play it safe to avoid any possibility of some EU politician trying to score political points by getting headlines about a big fine they extracted from a tech company.
I don’t know about their political advertising laws specifically, but I would not be the least bit surprised if they deleted these ads to be 100% safe in dodging potential fines under vague laws.
> because we can't imagine a good reason they'd go out of their way to have someone spend time on deleting information.
Note that they didn’t remove the archive for non-EU countries. They only did this in the EU. By this logic, they spent extra effort exclusively doing this for the EU while keeping it for other countries. That suggests to me that some EU specific reason is in play.