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Google – My Activity

myactivity.google.com

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Re: Google – My Activity

#51

Post by Redoubts »

_gmnw wrote: post #14

Pulled from the other thread, a way to delete all of your activity. https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity

Does this work at all for location history? My web activity has nicer controls like "delete after 3 months", but Maps keeps everything years after I learned and disabled the 24/7 location tracking from my old Android phone.

Re: Google – My Activity

#53

Post by amelius »

truebosko wrote: post #44
booleandilemma wrote: post #25

Just gonna leave this here: https://duckduckgo.com/

What's notable is that when I search though DDG, Google still is able to see and track my search item there. I did not even think about that, but a bit eye opening. (I am using Chrome, afterall)

DDG should warn about that.

Re: Google – My Activity

#54

Post by amelius »

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #35
O_H_E wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can build a full profile of me with all this data. They pretty much do

I think that part is generally out of mind for most users; what's so surprising when you look at the My Activity page is seeing many of the details that make up those profiles laid out in one place. It appears more...real, even without seeing the insights they're pulling from it.

This would be nice if you were in a discussion about privacy with someone. You could ask if you could borrow their computer for a moment, then visit their myactivity page and show it to them.

Re: Google – My Activity

#55

Post by docker_up »

The only real solution is to fill your history and your Gmail purchases with fake emails and fake clicks and fake purchases. If you add so much random data then there's no way Google can pick up anything useful.

I think the other tactic to defeat Google is to click on EVERY SINGLE AD you see. It will destroy their ad tracking capabilities and it will also destroy their business since they won't be able to tell what is a good click and what isn't. I've started doing this and I don't think there's anything else that can get them to stop actively violating our privacy.

Let me pay for my Gmail account. Let me pay for good support instead of automated decisions and getting kicked off the platform with no recourse. Otherwise I will render myself useless to your algorithms by changing my behavior so that algorithms won't be able to make sense of it.

Re: Google – My Activity

#56

Post by lotu »

tantalor wrote: post #10
amelius wrote: post #5

Totally irresponsible. What if another person (colleague, family member, friend, spouse) opens this on your computer? This should be opt-in, not opt-out!

Should browser history be opt-in, too?

I actually think that might be a good idea. I feel like a lot of people's privacy concerns would would be muted if browsers defaulted to private browsing.

Re: Google – My Activity

#57

Post by la_barba »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #29
ceejayoz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can delete purchases from there. When I hit the "remove purchase" button, it even says "To remove this purchase, delete the email."

I'm not sure I fully understand the objection here. The purchase list is a view over your email. They have the email, and they have the code to construct the purchase from the email. What possible additional security would there be in deleting the derived object if they still have the source material and the means to reconstruct the derived object? If you don't trust them to handle the derived object according to you…

I think the problem also is that Google scans incoming emails sent by non-google users who haven't agreed to such scanning. (Edit: also with personal domains, a sender may have no idea if this email will eventually find its way on Googles servers)

> at least if you believe the news and Google's public statements, it doesn't use the contents of your email for ad targeting.

True, but its important to note that it used to do that for many years. They didn't make it clear if they removed information mined from previous scanning of emails.

Re: Google – My Activity

#58

Post by kelp »

danShumway wrote: post #13

On this subject https://myaccount.google.com/purchases Turning off all of the controls under myactivity won't stop Google from scanning your emails to track any purchases you make. The only way to stop that is to switch off of Gmail.

This is what finally prompted me to move to Fastmail after being on G Suite since 2007. Even though I have to pay for Fastmail and was grandfathered into free on G Suite. Pretty happy with it so far.

Now going through the process of reducing all the places I use Google services. Moved my personal stuff from GCP to Digital Ocean. Gmail to Fastmail. Chrome to Firefox / Safari. Currently seeing if Zoho is a good substitute for Google Sheets and Docs.

Not sure I'll go so far as use DuckDuckGo fulltime, but maybe i'll give it another try.

Re: Google – My Activity

#59

Post by SnowingXIV »

danShumway wrote: post #13

On this subject https://myaccount.google.com/purchases Turning off all of the controls under myactivity won't stop Google from scanning your emails to track any purchases you make. The only way to stop that is to switch off of Gmail.

This is pretty awful. A bad assumption to make was that by turning off all activity monitoring this would have also been stopped. You can delete these items by deleting the email itself but that's a ridiculous burden to put on the end user. Oh, you don't want us to know you spent hundreds of dollars on baseball tickets? Better delete the email invoices.
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