Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Maps won't let you save home address without allowing all Google tracking

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 372 posts

Re: Google Maps won't let you save home address without allowing all Google tracking

#241

Post by circular_logic »

rjzzleep wrote: post #163
maxwellito wrote: post #143

But the funny part is Google keep your saved addresses. It only block the access. If you have your home and/or work address set in Gmaps, and you disable all tracking in myactivity.google.com. The address will disappear and GMaps will invite you to reactive App and Web tracking. If you do it, your saved addresses will reappear. This is slightly dodgy.

There is another interesting thing. You need to allow google tracking if you want to do searches in google maps. If you block it maps will crash. Turns out it needs a proper country code to work, regardless of where you're searching.

That could be related to how Google maps shows political borders depending on what county you are from.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3058283/why-google-maps-shows-yo...

Re: Google Maps won't let you save home address without allowing all Google tracking

#242

Post by PuffinBlue »

neltnerb wrote: post #224
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this, but I've had some great experiences with Microsoft support over the years, both on the hardware and software side. I hear good things about Apple's support too.

Agreed, even with a simple home license I've called Microsoft and been shocked at how competent they are. Pretty weird and complex issues too. But doesn't Google in particular have a reputation for nonexistent or terrible support? It's not part of their culture, everything is a beta and it's no big deal if it doesn't work right? An open phone cannot come fast enough. It may well be even buggier at first but if it's l…

I must give Microsoft credit too actually. I've spoken with them 3 times over home licensing of windows. Each time they were very quick and thorough in sorting the issue.

In fact, during one of the last big windows 10 updates something failed for me in carrying the license over and they took time to investigate the incident in order to determine how to prevent it again for future updates.

the thing that surprised me was they _cared_ that something was wrong and were _interested_ in fixing to and preventing it happening again. Been a while since I dealt with a company that did that.

Actually, thinking about it I should probably switch to companies that do care about this stuff.

Re: Google Maps won't let you save home address without allowing all Google tracking

#243

Post by mikejb »

pluma wrote: post #184
mikejb wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be an explanation, but IMO there's a huge difference between the two, and putting both concepts under the same wording is dangerous. Selling data means surrendering any and every control over it, and if from a user (trust) perspective there's no difference to offering a service based on data, companies will choose the more lucrative one.

There's a difference. But in practice the difference doesn't matter. As a user you expect a reasonable level of privacy unless the software explicitly requests your consent for providing certain information or explicitly asks you to provide that information manually. If the software then hands that information off to a third party you expect that only to happen with explicit consent. The problem in this case is that…

There is a difference, and in practice as in theory, it matters a lot. You can delete your data on your Google account - that gets rid of your data. Deleting that data after it was sold to 3rd parties is like trying to delete your drunk party picture from the internet. Sure, you can try to invoke GDPR, but that's going to be hard when the data was sold to some Chinese company that doesn't operate financially in Europe.

Re: Google Maps won't let you save home address without allowing all Google tracking

#244

Post by userbinator »

steve19 wrote: post #84
hellbanner wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their UX continues to g et worse. Google Voice on iOS has had 10-20 second lag (no joke) on older versions of iOS (used to be jus fine!) for 1-2 years now. One previous version of GV in particular froze for 10 seconds on your first key press, now I can't rely on it to open properly, or send messages. It seems intentionally sabotaged. I heard employees quit when G merged the YT with "real name" accounts. Personally I'…

I know I am flogging a dead horse here, but the constant retiring of Google apps makes me reluctant to adopt anything beyond Gmail and Youtube. I am a heavy Google Keep user, but I worry I am going to be kicked off that eventually. > And stop changing your UI. It The Youtube UI just gets worse and worse. I can only imagine what it must be like for non-Youtube Red subscribers. The add playlist button now defaults to y…

The way to use YouTube is as nothing more than a video hosting site, watching videos and managing playlists through other (offline) means. I wrote some shell scripts to do this years ago on my HTPC.

I'm not alone in this; others have made far more polished applications like https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

Re: Google Maps won't let you save home address without allowing all Google tracking

#245

Post by degenerate »

polkadotted wrote: post #221

I'm not sure why people are surprised. Google has been downright evil for quite a while now. They do this in all their products, down to the point of intentionally crippling them. For instance, since Android 5, the standard contact app doesn't allow you to modify a contact which is not synced with an account. Why even do this? The list of tracking settings that can be turned permanently on, but only temporarily off i…

The new Gmail, Adwords, and Analytics run horribly slow in FF, so I have a separate Chromium portable installation simply for those pages. It's so annoying that Google only cares how their own products run in Chrome.

Re: Google Maps won't let you save home address without allowing all Google tracking

#246

Post by userbinator »

gear54rus wrote: post #220
code_duck wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ‘watch later’ seems to have a problem catching videos. I add videos and they are gone from there. I created my own ‘Watch Now’ playlist, which consistently works.

This might be due to the fact that corporate shitheads decided to take down one of the videos you added. I've seen such videos transform into [video removed] in custom playlists (which is infuriating to no end, you can't even know what the video was about to look it up somewhere else), maybe it causes videos to disappear from Watch Later entirely.

If you want to really be able to "watch later", I recommend downloading the video.

Re: Google Maps won't let you save home address without allowing all Google tracking

#247

Post by dalai »

jamesb93 wrote: post #239
polkadotted wrote: post #221

I'm not sure why people are surprised. Google has been downright evil for quite a while now. They do this in all their products, down to the point of intentionally crippling them. For instance, since Android 5, the standard contact app doesn't allow you to modify a contact which is not synced with an account. Why even do this? The list of tracking settings that can be turned permanently on, but only temporarily off i…

Maps is insanely laggy on my Xiaomi Redmi note 4x. THis is with the performance kernel configuration on with GPU running 100%. Its just horribly optimised and has so much clutter now. Does anyone know a decent alternative? (please don't say waze)

I've heard good things about maps.me, but I've only used it briefly. The quality depends a lot on your location.

Re: Google Maps won't let you save home address without allowing all Google tracking

#248

Post by wittyusername »

digitaLandscape wrote: post #26

There was a lot of uproar about this internally but nothing changed. They told us that this was the only "practical" option. The company has rotted.

This reminds me so much of working at another, much stodgier big tech company and the feeling of slow malaise I developed over years.

I read some essays by Paul Graham, started my own business, and never listened to some faceless entity above me making bad decisions again.

I hope you don't put up with this nonsense.

Re: Google Maps won't let you save home address without allowing all Google tracking

#249

Post by MKinley »

jamesb93 wrote: post #239
polkadotted wrote: post #221

I'm not sure why people are surprised. Google has been downright evil for quite a while now. They do this in all their products, down to the point of intentionally crippling them. For instance, since Android 5, the standard contact app doesn't allow you to modify a contact which is not synced with an account. Why even do this? The list of tracking settings that can be turned permanently on, but only temporarily off i…

Maps is insanely laggy on my Xiaomi Redmi note 4x. THis is with the performance kernel configuration on with GPU running 100%. Its just horribly optimised and has so much clutter now. Does anyone know a decent alternative? (please don't say waze)

Have you tried Open Street Maps? You can get their app from F-droid.

Edit: Maps (Offline OpenStreetMap maps) - https://f-droid.org/app/com.github.axet.maps

Re: Google Maps won't let you save home address without allowing all Google tracking

#250

Post by josefresco »

degenerate wrote: post #245
polkadotted wrote: post #221

I'm not sure why people are surprised. Google has been downright evil for quite a while now. They do this in all their products, down to the point of intentionally crippling them. For instance, since Android 5, the standard contact app doesn't allow you to modify a contact which is not synced with an account. Why even do this? The list of tracking settings that can be turned permanently on, but only temporarily off i…

The new Gmail, Adwords, and Analytics run horribly slow in FF, so I have a separate Chromium portable installation simply for those pages. It's so annoying that Google only cares how their own products run in Chrome.

I can confirm that Google Ads and G Suite support reps ask you "what browser are you using?" as one of their first queries. The response in my head is always "why the fuck would that matter?" but what comes out of my mouth is usually "Chrome" even when it's Firefox because my issues have never, ever been browser related.

Here's how it should go:

Me: Hey support, feature X isn't working for me.

Google: What browser are you using?

Me: Firefox

Google: Ok, thanks for reporting a bug in our software. We'll address the issue with Firefox and get back to you.

What actually happens:

Me: Hey support, feature X isn't working for me.

Google: What browser are you using?

Me: Firefox

Google: Please use Google Chrome

Post reply on HN