81–90 of 263 posts
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uBlock with dynamic filtering takes care of that for me, but I recognise it isn't practical for >95% of internet users.
I use uMatrix, but the amount of sites where you need to allow Google domains and cookies for reCaptcha to work is depressing.
The funny thing is that Google will still let you store your home address and they'll display it on the map, but if you have Location History turned off they'll refuse to list it as an autocomplete option when you search for addresses or directions. They know what it is, but they won't let you actually use it unless you expose everything else. It's extremely user hostile and there's no good reason to do it. Edit: To…
Yep, Google Maps still shows my home and work locations on the Commute tab from before I disabled almost everything in my Google account, but won't let me change the work address since we moved locations. So I guess when I change houses (the only one I really care about, since I use it to send an ETA to my wife) I can just turn everything on, change the address, then turn it all off again. It's illogical dark pattern…
You can't - or, rather, I can't. It may be a problem that only affects me, I haven't talked to other people about it, but that was exactly my thinking a few months ago. So I activated location services, changed my home address to my new address, checked that it was set right, and disabled it again. And whoops, it's my old address again.
They might've fixed that in the mean time, I haven't checked it recently, I've just given up on using maps.
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Yep, Google Maps still shows my home and work locations on the Commute tab from before I disabled almost everything in my Google account, but won't let me change the work address since we moved locations. So I guess when I change houses (the only one I really care about, since I use it to send an ETA to my wife) I can just turn everything on, change the address, then turn it all off again. It's illogical dark pattern…
Is this on desktop or mobile? It could match the theory in the grandparent post that they preferred sticking to one backend. That also allows handling conflicts in one place, with one protocol. E.g. what would the behaviour be if you edited the home address with a ZIP code on your phone, while offline? What if you try to make the same change from your laptop and e.g. you set a ZIP+4 code? And then what happens when y…
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I simply do not believe this. Unless they're audited by a source that can be trusted and have the findings made public, I will not believe it either.
You're welcome to believe whatever you want, but a decent chunk of my day job is making sure that it's true.
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Google is not allowed to collect PII data of users who visit google services without registering. So everytime you delete your cookies, you are a new user, and they also are not allowed to log the ip address of non-users indefinitely.
Do you have a source, or any evidence that they don't? Google doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt. This is literally their business model.
So does this actually delete it ... for Google? Deleting it from say my browser, maps, or other history is one thing. Does Google no longer have any of it? Also the top and bottom bars that leave me with like 1/3 usable space on google's blog is really frustrating to read on: https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/automatically...
Yes, if you choose to delete it, it will be deleted. (It takes nontrivial amounts of time to delete it across distributed service architecture but the deletions do get propagated.)
Edit: Nm, I see you're a Google engineer in this domain.
I'll be happy when they let me use their products like Google assistant without collecting all this info in the first place. Even a degraded experience would be fine. Why does assistant need to know where I was last week or what I searched for to answer simplistic questions?
You're in luck! Those requirements were removed months ago. You can use Assistant with those settings disabled no problem.
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I value your contribution to this thread, can I ask some follow-ups? Does Google have multiple "Deletion policies" such that deleting data from i.e. your GCP bucket follows one policy, and the "scrubbing" described in this article follows an entirely different policy? If so, do different deletion policies have different processes and different audit trails such that the end "deleted" state is subjective and controlle…
First let me say that I can't speak to whether anything "significantly impacts Google's revenue" - either I don't have any material information in that regard, or if I did the SEC probably wouldn't want me making statements about it. :) So with that caveat in mind, let me see what I can help answer. I'm not entirely sure what nuance you're implying when you say "different deletion policies" - while for instance Cloud…
No offense to you, but I remember when Amazon was releasing their home devices, and many people rang alarm bells in these forums only to be answered by supposed Amazon employees or friends thereof explaining why these devices couldn't possibly been sending data. Well low and behold, they are sending all sorts of data to Amazon. Were those commenters just lying? Were they misinformed? Were they trying to spread disinformation for whatever reason? Perhaps all three..
Here in America, the gig is up. Everyone, even our grandma's, understands that security and privacy is always going to take a back seat to profit. Always.
So again, no offense to you personally, but everything you are saying must be taken with a ginormous grain of salt.
The only answers are either open source or objective third party auditing, or preferably some combination of both. Words from google employees mean nothing.