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Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

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Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#191

Post by joshuamorton »

dmitriid wrote: post #183
joshuamorton wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one can say for certain how, and when they delete the data. Even the person from the privacy team said as much. You and I read very different comments. Not being able to tell you, a random HN commented, the exact procedure by which a specific piece of data's lifetime is managed is different than not being able to, in the abstract, describe, monitor, and alert on the intended lifecycle of a piece of data. > I won…

> It's becoming more apparent to me that you, either intentionally or not, aren't clear on what the status quo was, or what this change changed. It's becoming more apparent that the whole conversation kinda derailed from " privacy engineering team " which engineers privacy (whatever that means at Google) does a shitty job to "we should celebrate them for doing just the minimum amount of work for something that has al…

> derailed from "privacy engineering team" which engineers privacy (whatever that means at Google) does a shitty job to

Actually no, it was you who derailed an otherwise unrelated conversation to that topic.

> we should celebrate them for doing just the minimum amount of work for something that has already been possible, if spread across many UIs

The "minumum amount of work possible" was doing nothing. Let's isolate this: is this change a good thing, or a bad thing, in your opinion? That is, all else equal, would you prefer Google provide this specific privacy control, or not?

If not, why not? What is bad about this feature?

If yes, why are you attacking the very people implementing features that you think are good? Isn't it better to support the people doing work you support?

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#193

Post by mceachen »

devereaux wrote: post #94
mattlondon wrote: post #3

This is welcomed, but they might do better to remove the requirement to have the Web/Location/App history enabled for apparently unrelated features. E.g. I cant store my home location in Google Maps without turning on Web & App activity history. Why? I cant share my current location (not historic, just my latest location - they only need to store one) with my partner unless I turn on Web and Location history. Why? I…

Here is another nudge: how easily can you write a rule to delete from gmail inbox after say X days? (same question for outlook.com, icloud.com etc) There are ways for technical users, but it nudges users to leave all the juicy data to the company, which can then use it in any way it feels (including monetization)

There's a new "confidential" toggle on the web Gmail (at least for gapps accounts) that let newly composed email expire after a certain amount of time. Not available on Android Gmail yet. Just saw it yesterday.

The actual email to non-gmail addresses is just a link to fetch the mail body, which can be validated with SMS.

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#194

Post by incompatible »

pixelperfect wrote: post #46

Doesn't Google keep track of web history through IP/browser fingerprinting even if you don't use an account? And when asked about it they give vague answers about what information is being kept and for how long. That's why I switched to using DuckDuckGo for most of my searches.

Probably. I also switched to DuckDuckGo, and it generally works fine. On Google, I would get banners suggesting that I set my privacy settings, but it would say I had to log into a Google account to use it.

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#195

Post by britch »

luckylion wrote: post #159
Sheep_McSheepy wrote: post #144

One thing that I find very interesting in the comments is people's approach to Google services. It's no secret that Google makes money from ads and models based on the user usage on their free services. A lot of people are complaining that if they disable data collection, try their hardest to not contribute to these data models and block the ads with ad blocker then some feature doesn't work for them. So you just wan…

> So you just want to use Google services completely for free without contributing anything. Not necessarily. I believe that google's services are good enough to use them, and I'd certainly pay a few bucks a month to do so and be their customer - and not be the product that they sell to their customers. I'm also pretty sure that they'd make more money off of me paying them for providing a service to me than they make…

This is it for me as well.

A lot of online publications frustrate me with this as well. They're only supported through advertisements, and request that you disable your ad blocker.

LET ME GIVE YOU MONEY! I would pay for the ability to read your site. Right now I have the choice of ad blocking and preventing them from earning much of anything or giving up my privacy to support them.

It's especially ironic given that many of these sites are increasingly writing about the dangers of "surveillance capitalism" and big tech.

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#196

Post by soup10 »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #190
soup10 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes.. they split fiber pipes, if encrypted they use undisclosed zero days to steal encryption keys or try to break the encryption with super computers. these tactics are are all well known.

All Google internal traffic is encrypted, and I'd guess they use some sort of forward secrecy. I guess it's going to be basically impossible to use split fibers to sip at that data.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/prism-heres-how-the-nsa-wireta...

this is just naive

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#197

Post by dylan604 »

DEADBEEFC0FFEE wrote: post #189
dylan604 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the light of the recent story on how YouTube and Google Docs put up banners about not working with IE6, I would not put it past them to do something similar any time the user did something that Google did not like.

That IE story was specifically about YouTubers during the transition to Google. A story about how they used a legacy YouTube permissions role to circumvent process and oversight.

It also specifically talked about Google Docs team doing the same thing which people at the time attributed to being first. This is what provided cover for the YT team.

Not sure if you're trying to provide defensive cover to Google with your comment or not, but it clearly goes to show they are not above these kind of dark UI patterns.

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#198

Post by jeromegv »

brandonhorst wrote: post #17
owaislone wrote: post #13

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.

False. Got a home a few weeks ago. I had web activity disabled, and while the home “worked”, it was nagging me to enable it all the time for all kind of unrelated reasons. Need Spotify? Oh you need web activity sharing. ?!?!

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#199

Post by shereadsthenews »

greendestiny_re wrote: post #148
shereadsthenews wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on wipeout compliance at Google and IMHO there's no possibility that an outside auditor would ever be able to understand those systems to such an extent that they would discover a flaw in them that wasn't previously known to the many engineers who work full-time on wipeout. The systems are just too complex. One does not simply `find -type f /google` to figure out what data is available.

Saying that systems are too complex to be audited is a horrifying statement that reveals an environment ripe for abuse.

That’s not what I meant. Outside auditors are the dumbest people on the planet and all they are prepared to understand is that you deployed Norton Deletemaster Enterprise Edition or whatever. Trying to explain to them that you’ve got a mathematical proof of why the backups are unreadable is a big waste of everybody’s time. I’ve been in that meeting and it’s worse than death. Still, the audits exist and the reports are public.

Re: Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

#200

Post by xvector »

mehrdadn wrote: post #116
chefandy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why this would be down-voted, unless people are really just that tribalistic about phone/tablet OS choice.

Didn't downvote, but Android has had dynamic permissions (since v6?) whose repeated notifications you can suppress, so I'm confused if the comment is still valid.

Kind of misses the point - I do mention the robust permission system in Android.

The issue is that the developers themselves don't really seem to care as much about privacy etc as iOS developers. This effectively renders the privacy measures mostly meaningless. If I'm writing my dreams into your app and you can read them on your own server, I've already lost all semblance of privacy.

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