User Enthusiasm for Data-Minimization Project Surprised Google
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- It’s important to think about the value proposition for users when developing a privacy product, Miguel Guevara, a member of Google’s data protection team, said Tuesday at the USENIX Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR) conference.
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A successful data-minimization project at Google involved flagging users’ stale data and asking them if they wanted to delete it, said Guevara. The idea was to make it easier for users to delete outdated data and increase the amount of storage they had, he said.
About 80% of those contacted responded to Google’s emails, said Guevara. Users’ eagerness to delete stale data surprised the company, with more than half interested in deleting. "A lot of data was deleted" and "continues to be deleted -- more than we ever expected."
The Google engineer quipped that his company’s “cloud team, however, is not very happy about it, because they charge for storage, and they don't want us to find a way for … cloud clients to not pay as much for storage.”