201–210 of 263 posts
On a web forum for programmers on a website known for funding startups there are numerous discussions about Google being inconvenient about privacy and some of them are thinking about buying Apple products. As opposed to rooting their smartphone and using MicroG.
can we export our location history?
But only if you have a google account. If you don't have a google account, there's no way to request your shadow profile get scrubbed. As usual.
If you don't have google account then your data is stripped from all PII making identification virtually impossible. How do you want to instruct Google to delete your data if it cannot tell what's your data?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Google retrains models all the time. They gave a presentation about ML and production last year: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon18asia/presentation/... You can see there's a section on privacy and deleted data as well. Each team has its own policies, because each product is different: at a bare minimum they might be using different storage systems, but it's very likely that their data pipelines are quite dif…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then you will be "punished" for being off the grid, and the images will take 8 seconds to fade out and fade in...
I've experienced this too. Are you saying Google's algorithms know (or at least strongly suspect) I'm human but throttle me anyways because I've taken steps to protect my privacy? Out of spite?
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…
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…
This is hilarious. Every single Google conspiracy is basically because some Google Engineer tried to DRY up functionality in an insanely complicated system.
Which is perhaps generally applicable to "conspiracies" in fact. There are some instances of powerful people making plans; but there are even more instances of results from systemic rewards and punishments, people acting independently with certain interests, from just how the system works. It doesn't make em always great. Systems can be changed.
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…
This is hilarious. Every single Google conspiracy is basically because some Google Engineer tried to DRY up functionality in an insanely complicated system.
The only way out for Google is to actually start paying attention to that issue and make a conscious effort. And it'll take time before they'll regain the trust.
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…
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.)
Google may disassociate your data from your account, but your data lives on.