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Comment by Name_Chawps | Hacker News Reader

This is particularly funny because one way Google scams people to get them to buy more storage space is by moving deleted drive/Gmail items to the Drive Trash instead of deleting them. So when you try to clear space by deleting emails etc., it doesn't seem to help.

Furthermore, even if you clear your Trash, it can take hours to take effect (for Some Reason), making it seem like you need to just give up and buy more storage.

Apparently Google execs don't have the same problems deleting their own files.

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When I click on trash it says "Items in trash are deleted forever after 30 days", so I don't really understand this complaint. Trash is a feature that most users have come to expect in file management systems.

Also, "turn off history" - which seems to be what this complaint is about - is just a public feature of the Chat app built into gmail.

Exactly.. But the funny thing is as an IT admin at hospital, I have seen people who literally were saving mail in their trash folder in hopes to "archive" then got mad when we did some house keeping in Exchange.

Hyrum's law strikes again! Perhaps users wouldn't have been surprised if the deletion policy had been applied consistently.

Yeah, but most non-technical people see that their gmail is full, try deleting a bunch of emails, see that it didn't help, and then have to buy more space. They're not aware there's a trash, they perhaps don't even use Drive at all. They just know that what they're doing isn't working.

> one way Google scams

If you see a sentence like this, you can be certain you don't have an interlocutor that is acting in good faith.

Apples to oranges.

(... and the reason Google does Drive Trash is that destroying user data is a much worse user experience than letting the delete be lazy, even when the user has given signal they want the data destroyed. There's decades of UX research to back that assertion; it's why "trash cans" were created in the first place as a UI abstraction.

Internal to Google, if you want to blow your whole leg off and disrupt your career by deleting some critical info, that's on you. Outside Google, they try to provide a better experience for their users).

> Internal to Google, if you want to blow your whole leg off and disrupt your career by deleting some critical info, that's on you.

They should consistently apply the deletion policy, in fact, they should go even further and do what governments do to their own sensitive information: keep a deletion log that stores item IDs, authors and content types (but not the contents) that had been deleted along with the initiator and the date of deletion and the IP address of the machine that received the deletion. Something at Google's scale deserves ğovernment-level scrutiny.

Do you think users would want them to keep such a log?

Hard delete without recourse is a horrible user experience for most.

My Gmail Trash folder auto deletes after 30 days. I have never made that as a change, its a default.

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