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Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

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Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#261

Post by jdietrich »

fixermark wrote: post #240
lern_too_spel wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Google Maps that's doing the tracking. He turned off notifications in Google Maps, not location history, which does the actual tracking that other apps consume. He agreed to location tracking when he first set up the phone because the first run setup explicitly asks whether he wants that on or off.

A harder, deeper question, is whether the average user is informed enough about "location history" to know whether they want that on or off, and whose responsibility it should be to inform them. ... as a wise man once observed, people talk a long game about how important their privacy is, but then empirically, researchers continue to discover you can get people to divulge a lot of personal information for a Snickers…

Google are miles ahead of the other big players in terms of transparency and user control. They actively prompt users to review their privacy settings. They provide a plain-English guide to what data they collect and a simple process to choose your privacy settings.

I do find Google's level of data collection a bit creepy, but I also don't see how they could reduce the amount of data they collect without reducing the quality of their service.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6227261

https://privacy.google.com/your-data.html

https://myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#262

Post by JepZ »

fixermark wrote: post #248
JepZ wrote: post #53

Yeah, Google could still be the cool company they were around 2000, if they just were not so greedy about collecting data for their Advertising business... Another thing is that every time you start using an Android phone, all Google sync services are activated. So you have no chance to disable them until its too late and Google uploaded all your contacts into their cloud. That should be illegal.

I'm not sure why people think the data is being collected for advertising, as opposed to, say, improving the ground-truth on the Google Maps dataset. I've contributed some images to the photo request. They end up appearing in Maps as the picture of the establishment.

Yeah, sure the pictures are for maps, but in the end Maps turned into a place where businesses have to be present as it is the de facto location based search engine. At the moment, I am not sure how they are making money with maps, but I find it a little odd that they keep asking to contribute pictures when it clearly shows that they are tracking every movement of you.

So something is wrong there (at the very least that they are tracking us all).

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#263

Post by roma1n »

ucaetano wrote: post #257
roma1n wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be more expensive? Google's annual revenue is 13 billion for around 1.3 billion users. That is $10 per user per year or less than $1 per user per month. Google certainly has a rationale for not providing a subscription option, but it is not 'raw revenue'

Because not all users use the same services in the same way, so that would actually lead to a mass breakdown in the services. That's not how companies price services. Not by very, very, very far. There are many pricing strategies designed to make heavy users pay more and light users pay less, or rich users pay more and poor users pay less. Ideally, a company would charge a different price from every single user, and…

Precisely! Offering this as an option (a simple option, not a new business model in itself) would tap into a user base that uses ad blockers already anyway. So yeah, that would establish a sort of ceiling and communicate some information to competitors, but not much more. Anyway I'm convinced there's a solid rationale for not doing it, but I'm not sure what it is.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#264

Post by jdietrich »

turc1656 wrote: post #210

Serious question for the HN community - why do you leave your GPS on/activated by default? I have mine disabled unless I specifically need it for something, which is rare. Usually the only time I ever need GPS is for driving instructions. Otherwise, it's off. GPS is also the biggest battery hog on the device. Why would you leave this on? Do you all use it far more frequently or was it something you never thought to s…

Hot location fixes are much faster than warm fixes, even with aGPS. Turning GPS off usually causes a substantial delay before you can start using a location-dependent app or feature, plus the manual effort of turning GPS back on. The delay is far greater if you're in an urban canyon with high levels of multipath interference.

For a suburban user that occasionally uses driving directions, this delay probably isn't an issue. For an urban user who is frequently using maps, location-based searches, ridesharing apps etc, it's a total dealbreaker. If I'm the kind of person who often says "OK Google, where's the nearest coffee shop?", I don't want to have to turn on GPS and wait for a location fix before I get a useful answer.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#266

Post by Rudism »

mrweasel wrote: post #193
tacomonstrous wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can turn off these notifications in the Maps app. It's annoying they're on by default though.

They're on by default because only one person in this debate has said that he/she would turn it on. Most of these features have to be shoved down our throat, because there's on incentive to turn them on.

When doing any kind of user behavior funnel testing, regardless of what the product and feature actually are, and largely regardless of how prominent you make the on/off switch, you find that the same tiny percentage of users that would turn it off is equal or greater to the percent of users who would turn it on. So if you want lots of users to use a given feature the only reasonable thing to do is turn it on by default and make it opt-out.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#267

Post by tclancy »

someguydave wrote: post #84
geofft wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge and meaningful distinction about the technical ability to violate your privacy, and actually doing so, and trust (slash non-creepiness) is largely about not doing so when you could. For instance, the fact that my roommate can open my bedroom door at any time does not mean that I have no privacy when making phone calls in my room; it means that I have privacy because I trust my roommate not to do so, ex…

Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation) at all times. This information is known to the phone company, at the very least. The phone company almost always records and retains that information. Similarly, you cannot communicate to anyone on the internet without using an IP address, which your counterparty must know and nearly always retains.

Right, but "to some approximation" is very squishy for the phone company, whereas I got in my car today and the phone told me how long it would take to get to my shrink. It's fairly impressive they could be so tone deaf as to not see why people wouldn't be delighted with this kind of auto-discovery.

Re: Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch

#269

Post by KhanMahGretsch »

dwg wrote: post #146

Growing pains on the way to a true digital personal assistant. The industry has to figure out how to deal with privacy concerns, because a digital assistant which is continuously aware of your location and what you're doing will be tremendously useful. It's a little friend in your pocket that we won't be able to imagine living without. Traffic jam ahead? Got you covered. Can't remember someones name? I've got it here…

>It's a little friend in your pocket

No, it's not. Google is entirely incentivised to extract the maximum amount of value from those reliant on their services, and the level of dependence is proportional to how much much they can potentially make off you. This is how a company works, and this is fine, but it is very dangerous to imagine that Google has anyone's best-interest at heart except their own.

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