Their stock just took a 20% dive because their main cash flow engine up to this point, the FB app, is showing stagnating engagement. Unless they want to take even great stock hits, which would lead to: greater difficulty to hire, greater difficulty to finance, more employee turnover, decreased ability to fight government regulation, et cetera, then they can't let this investment be wasted.
Zuck paid $19 billion for it and needs some form of return on that investment? You can't just lose $16,000,000,000 in personal wealth in a day and come up with a plan that maxes out at ~$1 billion a year in revenue.
You don't need to sign in. Everybody knows everything about you. Whether it's through tracking cookies, or through Google Analytics, or through device fingerprinting.
Google quoting privacy concerns is especially disingenuous, as they can track you and your activities across multiple devices.
Huge DCs like Amazons and ours at Google are very efficient, cooling uses at most 10% of total power. So cranking up this wouldn't help. Nor wouldn't it be possible usual anyway, as these are typically using evaporation cooling, which can't really be cranked up like traditional compression cooling. And keeping a huge tank and heater ready would introduce another point of failure. The easiest is just to have your servers do some heavy calculations.
Compared to heating a water tank, it would be a much more responsible use of power to fire up some folding@home images.
Perhaps a more financially responsible solution would be to spin up a bunch of instances that mine some sort of cryptocurrency. I doubt it'd cover electricity costs, but it could offset it some.
Not sure where you get this from, I'm not in an Android team, but from what I can see the top offered workstation one can get at Google has 64 GB of RAM.
I would assume that there was a special policy in place for people working on teams with a requirement for that amount of RAM.
I interned on Chrome in 2013, and at the time all Chrome engineers got a computer with an SSD (which I was told wasn't standard at the time), since they had to build Chrome on their desktops (whereas most other engineers could use Google's distributed build system).
64 seems a bit low, that's what I need for my hobbyist work. Granted, it doesn't take 64GiB of directly-allocated RAM to link Chrome (anymore), but there's almost no amount of page cache that would not be worthwhile if you have the whole AOSP on a box.
PS. Kindly explain why Google Maps really wants to stalk my location even when not using it actively. It's been forced down Android users a few years ago via a "Yes/Not now" dark pattern, it's coming on iPhone under the guise of "share location with your friends".
PS2. Kindly explain why anyone would ever trust Google to not expand their data acquisition behavior once the sensors are in place. For example, GPS, but always on mics and cameras in the future.
Did you knew Chromecast refuses to register in your network unless Google has your exact GPS coordinates?
Try setting up one from a phone with GPS turned off and see what happens (assuming the wifi AP you are using is not already in their location mapping database)
It's actually deleted, though it can take some time for deletions to propagate through various Google systems and backups - we can't violate the speed of light and we wouldn't want a bug in the deletion code to result in a catastrophic loss of things users wanted us to keep.
Note that if you opt out of Google keeping this history, I believe Google still keeps all your voice recordings, you just lose the ability to review and "delete" them, and they aren't tied to your account anymore.
This is one of the crazier notions I've seen in a privacy dark pattern: "Let us track you or we'll keep your data forever".
"When Voice & Audio Activity is off, voice inputs won't be saved to your Google Account, even if you're signed in. Instead, they may only be saved using anonymous identifiers."
Ergo, Google is going to collect your voice data no matter what you do, the only question is whether or not it's connected to your account, where you can manually go in and delete it.
So the question now is, if you opt in and later delete your data, does the data actually get deleted, or just disconnected from your account and left only with "anonymous identifiers"?
I actually had this argument out with a former Googler who expressed with incredible strength how importantly Google addressed deletion of data users said to delete. And so his argument was that if you deleted it from your history, it'd be deleted, but if you turned off your history, you'd have no way of telling them to delete it.
