Do not panic! Google is absolutely not deleting any of your Chrome bookmarks. If you have been worried when reading this news in other media, rest easy, because confusion has reigned in the last few hours. We can assure you, as we will explain below, that your bookmarks are safe.
The deletion that Google is doing is very different from that of the bookmarks and very possibly it is not affecting you at all. Panic gripped the media and users a few hours ago when the hare broke about how Google seemed to be deleting bookmarks stored by users. What audacity! The presses stopped and many media warned about it with hype and cymbal. But calm down, because everything has been a misunderstanding.
What has Google deleted?
Delete something, yes you have deleted. That is undoubted. But what Google has done is to attack URLs that users have stored in the Google Saved service, which you may not even know existed. At first, it was thought that what the company was doing was removing the addresses in question from both Google Saved and your bookmarks folders in the browser, but it has finally been confirmed that this is not the case.
The confusion was caused by the way the save system is displayed in a similar way to the bookmarks in the mobile app. But the tests that have been carried out and that we ourselves have been able to replicate, confirm that the markers are completely safe. At least, of course, for the moment.
Sensitive links disappear
Google is getting very serious about ending the presence on the Internet and on the computers of users of those web pages that do not comply with its policies. In particular, what he is doing is fighting illegal content the way he knows best: using all the resources at his disposal. The company, in the email that it is sending to users who have had a page that they had saved in Google deleted, informs that the effect of this moderation is indefinite and that it affects both collections of saved items that are public and the private. This is how we see it in the mail as a user has shared it on the Mastodon social network.
The links that Google is removing from the Saved service are those that violate its policies and have been reported for copyright infringement. There are around seven billion links that have also been removed from search results, making it clear that the entity has a lot of work to do if it wants to carry out its intentions effectively. But it also demonstrates what many experts were already considering: that Google has very immediate and simple control of user activity and that it can do, in a certain instance, what it needs with it.
As you can imagine, the links that are being removed correspond to piracy pages, but as we told you, they have not disappeared from the bookmarks. You can check it if you try to put one of the pages that have disappeared from Saved in Chrome bookmarks, since there will be no problem in doing so. We can also tell you that, following the indications of the source of our news, we have been able to verify that the URL addresses that are being moderated are independent links within the domains. That is to say, Google is moderating each of the links one by one and not nipping at the root of the presence of the domains marked in Google Saved. This is why there are pages that can still be saved to your home page, but not to many of your internal links or directories.
As we said, the Google Saved service is not used much, but it may have affected you in some way. You can access it by entering the path “https://www.google.com/save” in your browser. You might come across things you accidentally saved that you didn’t even know were there, so going inside will be a good time to clean up a bit. On your bookmarks or your history, rest, because for now there are no changes.
