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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

#241

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

soup10 wrote: post #238
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The change was made exactly in response to PRISM. In fact, it was something that was already rolling out at the time, but the disclosure of that program caused the effort to be dramatically accelerated. At this point, and for quite some time, they've been using encryption for almost all traffic on the internal network. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/google-en...

you think that the thousands of NSA employees whose mission it is to collect and analyze that data just sat around and declared defeat after they started encrypting it? lol

I don't think the NSA has thousands of people to dedicate to the slurping of Google's data specifically. More like hundreds, if even that.

But I mean if your position is that the NSA has cracked modern encryption technologies, then I guess you better get off the internet. Whether you use Google or not, you're screwed.

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

#242

Post by JetSpiegel »

callmeal wrote: post #227
tylerl wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 loc…

Because otherwise Waze doesn't work.

You can also imagine the other sub-rosa reasons for this.

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

#243

Post by scarface74 »

eitally wrote: post #224
scarface74 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Without going into confidential information, how could a report that didn’t analyze the code find possible sql injection attacks or over posting vulnerabilities?

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

#244

Post by soup10 »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #241
soup10 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you think that the thousands of NSA employees whose mission it is to collect and analyze that data just sat around and declared defeat after they started encrypting it? lol

I don't think the NSA has thousands of people to dedicate to the slurping of Google's data specifically. More like hundreds, if even that. But I mean if your position is that the NSA has cracked modern encryption technologies, then I guess you better get off the internet. Whether you use Google or not, you're screwed.

i'm sure they've cracked some of them and can brute force others faster than anyone realizes. but they also are probably very good at targeting specific people/machines and getting the encryption keys they want, especially if its being used to encode a large amount of data. i keep a low profile and avoid doing illegal things so i'm not really concerned but it still sucks that privacy is disappearing because its convenient and profitable

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

#245

Post by bduerst »

jefftk wrote: post #177
bduerst wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right - Article 3 of GDPR defines the scope as applying to any user residing in the EU. If the users are not logged in then you don't know where they reside (IP address != residence), meaning any international company that operates in the EU needs to err on the side of caution for non-logged in users everywhere.

IP address geolocation is the normal way people determine if GDPR applies.

IP address geolocation is not always accurate, can be spoofed, and is flat out wrong for EU residents who travel outside of the EU.

Maybe it's normal for a startup, but for a billion dollar company, they're not going to roll the dice on 4% revenue fines and IP address geolocation.

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

#246

Post by jefftk »

bduerst wrote: post #245
jefftk wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP address geolocation is the normal way people determine if GDPR applies.

IP address geolocation is not always accurate, can be spoofed, and is flat out wrong for EU residents who travel outside of the EU. Maybe it's normal for a startup, but for a billion dollar company, they're not going to roll the dice on 4% revenue fines and IP address geolocation.

If you send some test requests to any big company including Google I believe you'll see they're using IPgeo.

(Disclosure: I work at Google, I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice)

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

#247

Post by user17843 »

jefftk wrote: post #246
bduerst wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP address geolocation is not always accurate, can be spoofed, and is flat out wrong for EU residents who travel outside of the EU. Maybe it's normal for a startup, but for a billion dollar company, they're not going to roll the dice on 4% revenue fines and IP address geolocation.

If you send some test requests to any big company including Google I believe you'll see they're using IPgeo. (Disclosure: I work at Google, I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice)

Do you think my interpretation of Google not having long-term user-profiles of non-logged in users due to GDPR is correct? I read that Google has rolled out their GDPR compliance worldwide.

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

#248

Post by justcodebruh »

aiiane wrote: post #31
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.

'justcodebruh' your comment is marked as dead, but to answer your question I work on Google's privacy engineering team.

thanks

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

#249

Post by sam_goody »

Google builds a profile for each user.

Even when the data is deleted, I assume the profile stays (as far as I can tell from the meager writing so far), and can continue to be developed with further info, even if all the old info has been deleted.

At the end of the day, the profile is more important than the data that was used to build the profile, so its great for Google - and it doesn't help me that much that my data was deleted.

In addition, Google could save in that profile all sorts of useful metadata (how many emails, from what range of countries, etc.) that might someday be useful.

Other commenters have stated that Google's algorithm currently rebuilds the profile when any data has changed. Obviously this will have been fixed (...to include the fact that the user wants deletion in the profile) before this feature gets rolled out.

1. Only a tiny percentage of users will use this, so the benefits in a legal sense are big compared to the loss.

2. The only loss is that future development will have been able to squeeze more from that info, and the metadata is enough to offset most of that risk.

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

#250

Post by riverbender »

mehrdadn wrote: post #119
riverbender wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's probably some other explanation. I wasn't under the impression Google employees can just go read your data like this. And if you want to believe imagine they can -- it'd be dumb of them to do it in this fashion. If you didn't leave your number on your emails/website/resumes/Facebook/etc. or given it out previously then maybe the employee got it from someone else who had your number.

Thank you for sharing your completely uninformed opinion, and asserting it as fact with literally no reason to think it's more correct than mine.
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