Thoughts on the Earthquake a Week Later

At 10:22 a.m. on April 5, an earthquake shook the buildings in New York City and on Long Island. We hadn’t had an earthquake of this magnitude since 2011.

Some people remembered that last year an earthquake was recorded in California not far from a stadium where Taylor Swift was performing; the reverberations and cheers had caused an earth-like tremor.

The April 2 one, however, was apparently caused by Google. A group of customers filed a lawsuit in 2020 saying their privacy was being violated. Millions of users had checked off a box saying they didn’t want Google to share their private information, but Google had shared it anyway.

Google agreed to a settlement to avoid having to pay some staggering sum in a courtroom. And so they agreed to go into their databanks and delete all this private information they’d wrongly entered. And, as it happened, that deletion — a huge demolition of nearly 690 billion bits of online data stored — happened on the morning of April 5 at 10:21 a.m. Two minutes later, the earth shook.

You read this first in Dan’s Papers.