Does Deleted Mean Forgotten?

Let’s talk about Retention Policies and Data Sovereignty.

Google, one of the world's largest data repositories, has recently updated their policies. This may mark the beginning of a profound shift in our digital landscape. Starting later this year, Google accounts that have not been accessed for at least two years may be permanently deleted by Google, along with all the content within them - from Gmail and Google Workspace applications to Google Photos.

This announcement brings to the forefront an ever more relevant question about personal data: who truly owns it, and what is its long-term value? As consumers, we have been producing vast amounts of data through our interactions with these services, for years, and in some cases, decades. This data, ranging from emails and documents to digitally stored photos, which often contain significant markers and milestones from our lives, forms a comprehensive record of our digital lives.

For the most part, this type of data stored with a variety of companies and services has been more useful to those services and their ad targeting than it has been to us. But that’s changing.

Personal data not only carries sentimental value but also holds immense potential for personal future insights. In many ways, our data functions as a personal historian, capturing our individual histories, decisions, and milestones over time. By analyzing our data, we may gain insights into our behaviors, preferences, and potential future trajectories. Google's new policy raises concerns about the potential loss of access to this valuable resource.

The importance of this personal data extends beyond its current utility. It serves as an invaluable resource, a digital ledger of our lives that has potential to provide insights into our behaviors, preferences, and future paths.

This means what may appear to be a minor bigtech policy change can also be read as having profound potential data sovereignty implications. As our digital past becomes ever more valuable to us, ensuring we don’t lose control over it becomes critically important, crucial to ensuring that as the tools available to us to make use of it advance, we have control of and access to the data those tools need to enable powerful personal outcomes.

Google's new policy, while perhaps practical from a data management perspective, underlines these data sovereignty concerns, showing what can happen when control and lifespan of our data is not in our own hands.

It’s not just storage costs that are driving Google’s decision. This policy shift could also be seen as a response to the mounting pressures of privacy regulations worldwide, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the U.S. These regulations compel companies to take greater responsibility for the data they collect, often necessitating expensive infrastructure changes to ensure compliance. By deleting inactive accounts, they also delete potential liability.

We all may end up looking back on this minor change in a data retention policy as a warning shot. As regulatory scrutiny increases and the cost of long-term data storage becomes more prohibitive, we may see other companies follow suit.

As these sorts of policy changes become more common, it will become more and more evident that personal data that can be arbitrarily deleted is not really yours. For the individual user, these changes underscore the necessity of protecting and preserving our digital histories.

This is part of the problem we’re working to solve with Fulcra. The potential loss of valuable information necessitates a proactive approach to data preservation. The only way to ensure true sovereignty over the data your life has created is to bring it under your control.