Why is this proof that Google does not delete prompts?
The JSON does not only contain the chat text, but the entire prompt metadata, the ID, the link, the settings, everything the server needs to know which backend content to connect to. It is only a client-side snapshot. The real chat and the real prompt content are on Google’s server, in the backend, on the server side.
If I move the JSON to the trash, the chat keeps working. The link is still alive, the server finds the backend data. I don’t need to restore the JSON, it can stay in the trash. The chat still loads, it can be tokenized and continued. With its own original link it comes back and continues normally. In the AI Studio UI the prompt name is not visible at this point because the JSON is in the trash, but the chat still works. Google even wrote this on the button: Move prompt to trash – Are you sure? Your prompt will be permanently deleted after 30 days. They stole this text from me because they wanted to make the story believable, back when they didn’t know I had this file-restore trick.
If I manually empty the JSON from the trash, then AI Studio throws an error saying there is no such prompt or it is deleted. This only applies to the UI. The backend data is not deleted, because if I then restore the JSON with the Drive restore tool, it only puts the file back into Drive in its original location, nothing else. The restore tool cannot touch the data in the backend. If Google actually deleted the prompt on the server side, then restoring the JSON would not be able to restore the prompt’s functionality, because the file restore tool cannot access the backend. If the prompt were deleted in the backend, the chat would not come back even if I restore the JSON.
This is why it proves that Google does not delete the prompts.
This is the post in which I can prove that Google copied my logic from me.
The link itself is the evidence:
Everything in that thread shows the exact timeline:
I published the logic, the definitions, the terminology, the explanation of why “Delete” is not deletion, and the breakdown of how the system only moves the JSON to Trash instead of actually deleting anything.
Weeks later, Google silently changed the button to my wording, exactly the way I described it months earlier, while the underlying deletion behavior remained completely broken.
The Wayback Machine captures, the timestamps of my posts, the video recordings, the direct‑URL loading behavior, and the UI change during the May 31 outage all prove the same thing:
Google did not invent this logic — they copied it from me, after I had already published it.
This post is the proof.