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

Google Will Soon Let Users Automatically Scrub Location and Web History

buzzfeednews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 263 posts

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

#221

Post by Sheep_McSheepy »

whenchamenia wrote: post #203
Sheep_McSheepy wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not sure if this is sarcastic or not. Psudeoanonymization is a paragon of plausible deniability.

Deniability of what? Google cannot reliably identify logged out users. There're different lawyer groups that make sure it's the case. I was working with the log data and this is actually a big pain, having to go through data reviews and remove all identifiable data.

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

#222

Post by eitally »

ben_jones wrote: post #44
aiiane wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're welcome to believe whatever you want, but a decent chunk of my day job is making sure that it's true.

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…

Yes. The former is governed by commercial terms, and the latter is governed by consumer terms.

That's different from your second question about model training/retraining -- there is an answer to that questions elsewhere (but it is taken seriously and training data is also deleted upon deletion of the source data where it contains PII). I don't know this next part, but I suspect models use such vast amounts of data that any arbitrarily small deletion wouldn't have much impact.

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

#223

Post by eitally »

puzzle wrote: post #70
ben_jones wrote: post #44

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…

And additionally, it's probably useful for external folks to know that each product team has a designated product counsel and [usually] designated/dedicated POC on several different security & privacy teams, all of whom provide strict guidance on what is or is not allowed, and why.

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

#224

Post by eitally »

scarface74 wrote: post #138
hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the point of the audit would be to demonstrate that you take it as seriously as you say you do. Not so much to check the fine details.

In other words, it would be the same type of theater that most companies engage in. I know plenty of companies with "strict security standards" administered by the infrastructure department so they can pass an audit or some other type of security compliance. But most security breaches happen because of badly written software that the "compliance department" never reviews and they wouldn't know what to look for if the…

This isn't necessarily true. At my previous company we had a serious finding (DoD audit) as a result of poorly written software. The finding was discovered by running one of our standard internal reports and looking at who touched what, when, and where. Pretty straightforward, and although the fix was in code, the discovery didn't require any technical analysis.

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

#225

Post by tylerl »

riverbender wrote: post #113
JoshTriplett wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise. I don't think it's reasonable to require these permissions in order to use a Google Home device or the Google Assistant, for instance. I can understand needing to remember the last query, in order to provide context for the next one. Automatic scrubbing would be helpful...but it's missing an "every 10 minutes" option. (Today, my solution is a completely separate Google account that only gets used for Google…

It would surprise me if Google didn't have those accounts linked anyway, thus undermining your policy. A Google employee once called me on my personal cell phone when I was a few minutes late to a business meeting. I still don't see how that could've happened unless they'd linked my work (g-suite) account with my personal (gmail) account, and then allowed their employees to access personal data in a totally inappropr…

Employees don't have any more access to your information than anyone else.

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

#226

Post by tylerl »

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's your answer:

There's no such thing, at least at scale, as sharing your information without also storing it. Not if you want the system to be reliable. So in order to make Google share your location with others, you have to give them permission to store your location. This should be self-evident enough if you take a moment to think about it.

As for lumping web history together with location history, it turns out you can derive the latter if you know the former. There's been a lot of fuss and breathless reporting about that fact. So authorizing them to know the one without the other is a bit of a fiction, especially in those cases that get written up by tech journalists. Best not to pretend that it's possible to keep them separate.

This new thing is an acknowledgement of the fact that the whole point of using Google services is sharing information with them and asking them to hold on to it, at least for a bit, at least until you've gotten the desired use out of the service... but also of the fact that a certain kind of person, the kind you often find on HN, would sleep better if Google deleted that data after it had served it's immediate purpose.

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

#227

Post by callmeal »

tylerl wrote: post #226
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's your answer: There's no such thing, at least at scale, as sharing your information without also storing it. Not if you want the system to be reliable. So in order to make Google share your location with others, you have to give them permission to store your location. This should be self-evident enough if you take a moment to think about it. As for lumping web history together with location history, it turns ou…

>So in order to make Google share your location with others, you have to give them permission to store your location.

Sure. I have no problem with that. What I have a problem with is, why is google insisting on storing all the locations that I am not sharing?

I only want to share this current location. So yes, that will have to be stored somewhere. But for the love of everything I don't see why sharing my current location requires saving all my future locations.

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

#228

Post by codedokode »

gonyea wrote: post #206
o10449366 wrote: post #23

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.

How can you explain this: in Android 5.1, every time you enable GPS, a popup appears asking you to share location with Google. There is a checkbox titled "Don't show again", but if you tick it, the button "Decline" gets disabled [1].

I don't have the exact screenshot, but the popup looks approximately like this [2].

They intentionally wrote the code to make sure that the user doesn't make the wrong choice. And this popup is not really necessary for the user, mostly for Google.

Also, this reminds me of Google's "Amateur Hour" story with Firefox. Every time they make a mistake, it's in the favour of Google, what a coincidence.

[1] https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/115944/how-to-pr...

[2] https://i.stack.imgur.com/9VGfbm.png

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

#229

Post by jakecopp »

Is there an open source replacement for Google Maps timeline that doesn't destroy battery life?

I know how bad it is privacy wise but I get so much utility of being able to see all the places I have been on a map, it's so wonderful after travelling or for finding places in my hometown I haven't yet been to.

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

#230

Post by gaogao »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #64
josefresco wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, as a Google employee would you believe a Facebook employee, on HN making the same claim?

No, because Facebook does not have a detailed written policy regarding user data deletion and retention, which Google does have.

The policy is up to 90 days to fully delete all user data, stated here https://www.facebook.com/help/359046244166395/
Post reply on HN