While it's not a complete deletion, it's a step in that direction.

There are no repercussions to not abiding by the law if you leave no (usable) evidence behind.

If we're actually keeping data, then that'd be a shock to me.

So, why not just state in the terms of service that data is actually erased within N days/months after deletion? One could always list exceptions (such as business listings).

Either Google cannot really guarantee that the data is deleted (due to its storage system); Google wants to reserve the right to retain some data in the future; or it is actually retaining some data. Otherwise, there is no point in putting this in your ToS. All three reasons are pretty worrisome.

Also, what you say is provably false in a more general sense. Google retains all kinds of analytics/tracking data of internet users that you cannot have removed. When you visit a site with Google ads or analytics, Google is keeping data on you.

IIUC that is anonymized data. The whole point then is that it cannot be associated to your account, i.e. cannot be removed when you delete your account.

Otherwise, there's a shit-ton of law and regulations around this issue. I'm sure there are plenty of options for you to take when you think a company violates EU law. Safe Harbor got wrecked because a young fellow from Austria thought so and courts determined he was right.

Ten years ago, the ones telling people that agencies are storing everything by default, and Skype was bought/centralized to help with that were labeled as such. Nowdays it's "yea so"?

The same profiling is done from Safari and other Chromium / Blink browsers that have the "awesome address bar"

I have read that when you visit a page with Analytics (which is like everywhere) Chrome has special handling so as to give them a more complete dataset without it being the browser that is officially collecting it.

It's simple and straightforward to disable the autocomplete functionality in Chrome.

Not sure I follow. Why can't chrome just detect whether you entered a URL or not? If URL, load without sending to Google. If not a URL, send as search to Google.

And who can decrypt that?

In Firefox, back when it was introduced in Fennec somewhere around 2007 or 2008 (I don't know how it is now), you'd need 2 passwords. One to log in to your Firefox account and gain access to your encrypted data, and one to decrypt the data. It is feasible a nationstate can get access to your encrypted data, but it isn't feasible they are able to decrypt your data.