With privacy concerns rising every day, Google LLC announced today that it will soon be rolling out a feature allowing users to auto-delete much of the data the company collects on them.

Google product managers Marlo McGriff and David Monsees wrote in a blog post that although users can already manually delete location history, as well as web and app activity, after reading feedback from customers they realized this operation was a little confusing and time-consuming

The solution to that, said Google, is giving customers a simple auto-delete method. That’s a setting which will allow users to set auto-delete for all data after three to 18 months.

“Choose a time limit for how long you want your activity data to be saved — 3 or 18 months — and any data older than that will be automatically deleted from your account on an ongoing basis,” the product managers said.

This might be a result of feedback, but likely also ongoing criticism. Following an investigation by the Associated Press last year, it was revealed that Google was tracking and recording the location of users across multiple apps even if they had turned tracking off.

As a result, Google was subsequently sued in the U.S. for falsely representing that users could indeed turn off tracking. An investigation is also currently underway in seven European countries under the General Data Protection Regulation.

On top of that, a recent investigation by the New York Times revealed that law enforcement inside the U.S. has been using Google’s location data vault to snare criminals, or in some cases innocent people. The Times called Google’s giant database, nicknamed Sensorvault, a “digital dragnet.”

Google said the feature will roll out over the next few weeks around the world. The company added that the auto-delete method will start with location and web and app activity, so it could become available for other data at some point.

Image: Matt McGee/Flickr