If any community has the power to reverse that trend, it is HN and the rest of the software community that actually builds the tech. I am constantly battling it in my own company, where they want to track everything our users do. And they even have some legit reasons for it, to use the data to build better UX, etc. I am the only person fighting against it, saying that tracking should be limited to only the cases where there is truly a compelling business question it can answer.

If Google were to apply the same logic to their tracking, we'd be in a better place. For example, they may want real-time location data for the traffic alerts when using Maps. And they may desire some aggregated form of that data long-term. But I cannot see any business benefit to Google maintaining my personal location data at specific times and dates in the past. There is zero business benefit to keep that level of detail in their logging.

Or, to answer your question more directly, that is the line I do not want to cross - where we are logging personal data "Just in case" we ever might need it. I'd like to see every piece of tracked data tied to a specific business need, and then have it deleted when that need no longer is relevant.