I do work in analytics / logging, so I do have pretty decent insights into our different storage systems and logging policies.
The people that I interact with view data as a liability, not an asset. I think this is because of lawsuits mostly. We've been bitten by a few big ones. But also, storage is expensive, and even storing a Boolean on one type of log, we could get billions of those logs per day. It starts to add up and cost money.
I think we're pretty confident in our security and take it very, very, very seriously. So I don't think we're worried about necessarily a specific piece of data being stolen. If anything is stolen at all, that would be viewed as an existential catastrophe. So I don't think there's too many pieces of data that we'd care about specifically.
But again, I'm not anyone important here. And I'm new. And I don't know that much.
Take care!
As far as I know, I'm allowed to say that: people I work with tend to be liberal. As far I know, I'm also allowed to say that: people I work with tend to view data as a liability not an asset. It's also public information that Google receives billions of requests per day. For me to extrapolate on that and say that even storing a single bit of data on those logs starts to add up and cost a lot of money isn't a trade secret either. It's common sense.
A couple of actionable statements
- you don't store anything for more than 30 days (that doesn't mesh with analytics data which might be de-anonymisable IMO).
- you don't do any facial tracking. Which doesn't surprise me too much but I can imagine a future trial where a barrister is saying "your engineers claimed in public you didn't do this sort of tracking" and that providing extras jeopardy for damages.
It's not my area, however, I appreciate the openness. Thanks for sharing.