Everything Google does is functionally built to track you and sell ads based on that tracking. Any "legitimate and useful functionality" exists to give you a reason to feed data into their ad company. Google Maps doesn't exist to help you get around, that has never been it's purpose and never will be. Google Maps exists to give you a reason to tell Google where you are and where you're going so they can target ads to you.
You can delete it from your view, but you can never delete it from Google's servers. And they (like Facebook and others) have an advertising id tied to your profile even if you don't have an account with them. Try deleting that.
No, when you delete your data (history etc.) it is also deleted from servers and backups. This was previously discussed on HN before, with some input from google SREs.
And you know this how? They can just remove it from your view, claim they deleted it, and keep it on their servers for future profiling, just like they do with people who do not have accounts with them.
Well it is google engineers words against random speculation, why sould they bother creating all that infrastructure for deleting stuff thoroughly. I take theirs.
Google is an ad company, full stop.
Everything Google does is functionally built to track you and sell ads based on that tracking. Any "legitimate and useful functionality" exists to give you a reason to feed data into their ad company. Google Maps doesn't exist to help you get around, that has never been it's purpose and never will be. Google Maps exists to give you a reason to tell Google where you are and where you're going so they can target ads to you.