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Welcome to the Google Privacy Policy

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Re: Welcome to the Google Privacy Policy

#3

Post by danso »

I like the related materials at the end, particularly the layperson's description of their facial recognition tech https://www.google.com/policies/technologies/pattern-recogni...

I'd like to think I'm so savvy that nothing in that Privacy document would surprise me. But I haven't really read the whole thing. It'd be a good class assignment to make students read the policies of major services and write down what they were most surprised by, just to get a sense of how technically savvy they are.

Re: Welcome to the Google Privacy Policy

#4

Post by akerro »

> Example Whilst we currently don’t ask for a credit card during sign up, verifying your age through a small credit card transaction is one way to confirm that you meet our age requirements in case your account was disabled after you have entered a birthday indicating you are not old enough to have a Google Account.

Pay us some small amount so we can keep tracking you.

Re: Welcome to the Google Privacy Policy

#8

Post by mattlondon »

amelius wrote: post #6

Yes, and they leak info to advertisers, as I point out here [1]. And I know it is against the rules to complain about this, but somehow that link got downvoted for mysterious reasons. I think I'm raising a valid point here. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12899160

I think it got downvoted because it is inaccurate.

* You can opt-out entirely on interest-based advertising with google [1]. You can also just delete your cookies/only browse in incognito/etc.

* Advertisers cannot target audiences with less than 100 people (1000 for search ads)[2] so they can only get a 1% chance of identifying "you" (this will go down as the list grows above 100), and even then that is only if you click on an ad for their product which is typically way under 1% as well. So less than 1% of the time, they have a maximum of 1% chance of identifying "you".

* They do not sell your personal information [3]

[1] - https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662922?hl=en-GB

[2] - https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2472738?hl=en-GB

[3] - https://privacy.google.com/intl/en-GB/how-ads-work.html

Re: Welcome to the Google Privacy Policy

#10

Post by amelius »

mattlondon wrote: post #8
amelius wrote: post #6

Yes, and they leak info to advertisers, as I point out here [1]. And I know it is against the rules to complain about this, but somehow that link got downvoted for mysterious reasons. I think I'm raising a valid point here. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12899160

I think it got downvoted because it is inaccurate. * You can opt-out entirely on interest-based advertising with google [1]. You can also just delete your cookies/only browse in incognito/etc. * Advertisers cannot target audiences with less than 100 people (1000 for search ads)[2] so they can only get a 1% chance of identifying "you" (this will go down as the list grows above 100), and even then that is only if you c…

* That is inaccurate: Google's ad controls panel says this (after fully disabling targeted advertising): "Ads you see may still be based on your general location (such as city or county) or recent searches"

* Even if advertisers can target audiences in groups of at least 100 people, advertisers can run multiple campaigns and make an intersection of the sets of people they find, to still "identify" me.

* Yes, they don't sell personal information directly. This one is correct, and there is no reason to believe otherwise.

You can argue that my points are far-fetched, but in the end I am the one who determines the value of my data, not Google.

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