Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private • Hacker News Board

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#51

Post by swader999 » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #41

JCM9 wrote: post #13

There’s a huge privacy battle on the horizon in tech. The initial scuffles are just the beginning. Google and Facebook’s business models depend deeply on being able to track information that consumers are increasingly unhappy to share. Both companies attempts to diversify their dependency on such info for their revenue have been broadly unsuccessful (Google fiber or a Google car anyone?). Meanwhile the likes of Apple…

> Google and Facebook’s business models depend deeply on being able to track information that consumers are increasingly unhappy to share I see no evidence that regular people are particularly unhappy with sharing their information. While it's true that on the internet there's a loud privacy activist movement that's grown over the past few years, I don't think this movement reflects the true preferences of the silent…

75 million in the USA that voted for the Red team saw close up the stifling censorship and deplatforming. Awareness is growing but I do agree behavior will be slow to change.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#52

Post by ForHackernews » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:30 PM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #46

Vespasian wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google even managed to incur heavy losses from offering cloud infrastructure services. A business which usually is a guaranteed golden goose. They are really bad at making money with anything that isn't advertising.

I'm pretty sure they're doing that to draw folks from AWS and similar.

Yeah, but you'd have to be a fool to go.

Google has proven over and over again that they don't value customer support or long term maintenance. They will get bored and sunset services you depend on, or switch off your entire business because some employee sent suspicious email on his gmail.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#53

Post by JCM9 » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:30 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #41

JCM9 wrote: post #13

There’s a huge privacy battle on the horizon in tech. The initial scuffles are just the beginning. Google and Facebook’s business models depend deeply on being able to track information that consumers are increasingly unhappy to share. Both companies attempts to diversify their dependency on such info for their revenue have been broadly unsuccessful (Google fiber or a Google car anyone?). Meanwhile the likes of Apple…

> Google and Facebook’s business models depend deeply on being able to track information that consumers are increasingly unhappy to share I see no evidence that regular people are particularly unhappy with sharing their information. While it's true that on the internet there's a loud privacy activist movement that's grown over the past few years, I don't think this movement reflects the true preferences of the silent…

A key point if the article is that consumer sentiment is shifting, Google knows it, and isn’t happy about that.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#54

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:30 PM UTC

arkades wrote: post #31

Earlier this week there was a post regarding Google and its utilization of private health information. A number of Googlers came forward to describe how very seriously Google takes user privacy and keeping inappropriate data from being shared across silos. I got the overall impression of Googlers taking the position of “you guys don’t know how seriously we take peoples privacy.” If any of those Googlers would please…

Health care data is the only thing with regulations in the US. Everything else is fair game. That is how Google rakes in the billions. They aren't going to leave money on the table to satisfy an ethical code.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#55

Post by bpodgursky » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:30 PM UTC

Amusingly, I've shared my location permanently with a couple close friends on Google Maps, and Google will not shut up about it, reminding me every month about it.

I get aggressive monthly warnings "Are you SURE you want to share your location with XX,YY,ZZ?". I wish there was a toggle where I could say "yes, I absolutely positively am OK with the privacy implications here, because I don't care very much; please forever stop bothering me."

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#56

Post by jeffbee » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:32 PM UTC

arkades wrote: post #31

Earlier this week there was a post regarding Google and its utilization of private health information. A number of Googlers came forward to describe how very seriously Google takes user privacy and keeping inappropriate data from being shared across silos. I got the overall impression of Googlers taking the position of “you guys don’t know how seriously we take peoples privacy.” If any of those Googlers would please…

Which specific factual aspect of this story do you believe contradicts those claims? I'm a Xoogler, not a Googler, but in my post-Google experience I haven't seen anything that was even in the same league as Google's privacy controls. In my personal privacy threat model I think Google scores 10/10. They protect my data against external attackers, which in my view is the main problem faced by personal data, and their protections against insider risk are also excellent. Other places where I've worked, that you've definitely heard of, have security and insider risk practices that are a complete f-ing joke. There's nobody at Google who is "the DBA" who can just covertly access your data, there's no ad-hoc logs access (every logs access flows through a proxy that ensures only limited access for pre-defined purposes), and there are software controls that trigger privacy incident response (by a 24x7 user privacy incident response team) whenever an insider attempts to access user data in excess of their authority. In protocol buffer definitions, every field has an annotation for whether it contains private, sensitive, or non-private information so that even in crash dumps and debug logs those fields are censored before being printed. I really think Google has a pretty strong privacy story, compared to virtually every other company (except Apple and Microsoft) who leave themselves highly exposed to both outside and insider attacks, software (and even hardware) supply-chain attacks, accidental leaks, leaks into debug systems, poor encryption practices, and generally wanton behavior.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#57

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #29

Sounds like lots of people are going to have to re-take the "You Said What‽" training. But seriously why would a product manager know with certainty how different settings interact? The only person who really knows would be the authors of the features that read those settings, and possibly not even them. These systems are too complex, no intelligent person should claim to understand them perfectly.

Considering all the dark patterns they've implemented to force location tracking there's no way management doesn't know about what the settings are meant to accomplish.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#58

Post by adamcstephens » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

ppf wrote: post #23

ttt0 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can also try to break up Google into something more granular and see if it helps.

I'm always amused by calls for the breakup of the "unbearable monopoly" of Google, when it is itself the epitome of the Silicon Valley "monopolies need disrupting!" business model.

Except SV investors actively avoid competition with the monopolies. They will try and disrupt for sure, but there’s a dead zone around monopolies.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#59

Post by swader999 » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

sthnblllII wrote: post #36

toastal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ran into this today logging into PayPal (the password-must-be-8-20-characters payment service) for the first time in a long time to buy a band t-shirt. After jumping through two different types of CAPTCHAs, now they require you share your phone number to log in. I contacted support via Twitter saying they have my email if they want to verify a login because I'm not comfortable with SIM jacking nor how data-mining is…

Stuff like paypal exist so that powerful people can shut you out of the economy if you challenge their power. They complain about money laundering while the CIA is the biggest money launderer in the world and no one goes to jail when Deutsche bank launders Jeffery Epstein's payments. But operating a Bitcoin mixer is a federal offense. They are scared.

Just imagine lock downs augmented with geo fenced official national wallets with cash no longer accepted anywhere.

Re: Google made it nearly impossible for users to keep their location private

#60

Post by vishnugupta » Sat, May 29, 2021, 2:37 PM UTC

lazyeye wrote: post #15

It used to be "don't be evil". Now its "hide, deny and obsfucate our evil".

I've internalised the adage "Don’t listen to what people/corporations say, watch what they do" and found it very useful to see through these fancy statements.

It's especially useful at workplace to observe what people do and understand the politics. And at a different level observing how Google was acting more evil by the day made me completely switch over to the Apple ecosystem.