el_nino

> This is not "apologetic BS"

You started by claiming it's "100% false" and ended up saying changing your mind and agreeing it's true but for a good cause.

I agree it's not BS but apologetic it definitely is. You are justifying a decrease in security for the benefit of usability. This in itself would be a worthwhile goal if it wasn't for the facts that it goes against reasonably expected behavior and as a user I am not made clearly aware of this or given the option to control it.

Everyone is used to being asked for password reconfirmation before changing the password so it figures that they have the same expectation for the 2FA. I know I did.

> There is NO human backup - all emails, google photos, google drive etc GONE.

That's also Google's decision. You can't use one bad decision to justify another. It's likely this 2FA decision wasn't taken to help you get easier access to your account but to allow them to have 0 support knowing 2FA issues are easy to happen especially to people who won't properly save recovery keys (most people).

It's also buying good will with users and regulators since privacy became a hot topic in recent times. Google decided to make it a default to delete any data older than 3 or 18 months. This is a clear sign that even 3 month old data has just marginal value, if any.

> auto-delete activity and location every 18 months by default

Does this mean any data older than 3/18 months is deleted or that every 3/18 months they delete everything?

P.S. I assume that they may have already put a price on 3/18 month old data and decided that by then it has lost enough of its value to make such a loss worth it in order to buy a bit of good will from users and regulators alike.

Google's business model is antithetic with "privacy". This is by design and very much out in the open, they are an advertising company, their revenue is literally and as publicly as possible coming from not keeping your data private. Expecting Google to give you privacy is like asking a funeral home to extend your life. It's just not their business model.

Wow, seconds to minutes after comments highlighted the crass hypocrisy of Google's "Privacy is at the heart of everything we do" they are all downvoted.

Many companies and worse, public institutions around the world are moving to solidify the destruction of evidence with data retention policies. They may automatically delete any email older than 1 or 2 years, every instant message sent via corporate channels in 30 days, etc. as a "disk-space saving measure". Including backups! Anyone can see through that explanation since any CIO claiming cost savings come from the few tens of GB of archived Office Communicator chats should be politely invited behind the barn for a dramatic reenactment of an age old saying.

Scandals like Boeing's and others that shook trust in public institutions, most of which are required by law to make any such material available to citizens, just convinced them that proactive destruction of evidence is the way to go. This is not punishable by law. And when the requests for data do come in all the have to do is delay the process until the totally legitimate automatic policy kicks in and removes the last shred of evidence.

At this point only whistle blowers diligently collecting all the data before it's destroyed could still help in any way but this comes at great personal risk. And when tools like Signal are involved good luck with that, one would have to be part of every conversation.

Just tested over Tor and it works: piratebayztemzmv.onion

P.S. Yes, it's their new official "readable" onion site link.

This might be a bit of a rabbit hole. My OnePlus has a relatively clean Android but comes with a few apps like Calculator, Notes, or Chrome that don't seem to be removable. They're also not core functionality. So I wonder how easy is it to draw the line between these and the crap that many phones come with.

Also stuff like Play services or the Google Store are somewhat replaceable. How could these be categorized?