They just stop showing your history to you on the website. Don't think for a second that they don't still have it.

Do you have any actual evidence of this? It's a massive company with plenty of regulations and scrutiny, along with a rather outspoken employee base. Data privacy is taken seriously whether you believe it or not, and I'm sure you're not confused by the fact that this is the trade for free services?

They do delete it completely. They have the complete infrastrucuture to wipeout everything that is deleted. This was discussed before with some comments from Google SREs.

That sounds like tinfoil and fearmongering. Do you really think that if that were the case that no whistle-blowers would have come out?

There are many cases of conspiracies going for multiple decades before a whistleblower attempts to uncover it. And, of course, if a conspiracy never gets a whistleblower, we never hear of it at all.

In short, the observation that “there are no whistleblowers” is not proof of the non-existence of a conspiracy.

The only thing you can realistically do is to evaluate the incentives of all the parties involved. And, sure, Google’s public promises of privacy (weasel-words or not), provide some incentive for them. But you also have to look at their actual risk of getting caught. How many people inside Google would they need to siphon off this data, analyze it, and re-inject it into their existing personal models (shadow profiles) of everyone? Call it “additional weight-adjustment from machine learning” or something. No-one outside the small group could then see that the extra data came from data analysis. Would the small risk of one of these few people blowing the whistle be worth it for Google, who absolutely depend on having the best information about everyone?

> Would the small risk of one of these few people blowing the whistle be worth it for Google,

No. Public DNS isn't even 1 decade old and Google already has massive insight from google analytics, adsense/adwords, the doubleclick network, android and store, chrome browser, chrome os, google search, google maps, gmail, youtube, google play, google fiber, google fi, google cloud platform, and all the various web properties that carry 1st-party cookies that easily get around Safari's misguided cookie war and have GDPR consent.

Trying to secretly sneak in some crappy DNS data is not worth it at all.

Well, that may be obvious to you, but it’s not obvious to me, and (here’s the kicker), neither of us can know for sure. Only very few specific people at Google are in a position to absolutely know whether this is happening, and they can’t tell anyone.

>> Only very few specific people at Google are in a position

Why do you think you know this for sure then?

You must be confusing me with someone else; I explicitly said that “neither of us can know for sure.”.