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Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off

#421

Post by grog454 »

ramblerman wrote: post #190
riverguardian wrote: post #70

Hello hello, PM for the feature checking in here. amf12's reply is quite on-point. Web and App Activity is designed to store search activity across all Google services, and we're splitting Workspace data out since it's governed by strict data handling guarantees, with the hope that more people will feel comfortable getting the benefits of better search in Workspace without having to opt-into search history being trac…

Look we all know how the world works so please, spare the BS. By all means do your job, and hit your metrics. But this is just a dark pattern, which comes up with some new product boundaries so you can default these settings back to on. There's a certain arrogance to coming into HN of all places and offering a sales explanation that it's actually in our benefit.

It's unfortunate that this post is being downvoted and considered a "personal attack" (debatable) as it seems to be one of if not the only comment suggesting the most likely explanation: a Google employee trying to maximize engagement / usage metrics for their feature without really thinking through the broader implications. This seems much more likely to me than a grand conspiracy to sneakily collect more peoples' data.

Re: Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off

#422

Post by tedivm »

IgorPartola wrote: post #357
tedivm wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really should be more personal culpability, at least on the exec team and board of directors, for things like this. I also hope Google gets sued in Europe over this. I live in the US and work for a European company and I'm reasonably sure they're going to be super pissed off about this.

Is it possible to sue executives and project managers involved in this decision directly in civil court? I imagine quite a few have juicy enough salaries that it would be nice to take a bite at them.

The entire point of corporations is to shield liability from the people inside the corporation from civil damages.

Re: Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off

#423

Post by scim-knox-twox »

thrtythreeforty wrote: post #46
slater wrote: post #2

That reads as "too many users were disabling our creepy shit, so we're re-enabling it!"

Google Maps did the same thing in its latest update. There's an undismissable modal that asks you to "enable Google location service to continue" which I very explicitly have off. They make it feel like a technical requirement; if you tap "no thanks" it cancels your nav. Meanwhile the whole thing is obviously a charade because voice guidance and the GPS enabled map are happily running behind the modal!

I tried Chromecast, but Google Home (app to configure Chromecast) required location. Without enabling it, I couldn't complete (or better: start) configuration…

Re: Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off

#424

Post by scim-knox-twox »

ryeights wrote: post #260
diamondage wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG leaks data like a sieve. When you type a query it's present in the URL. Use an engine like onesearch.com which obfuscate this. (or get DDG to add this basic feature!)

With HTTPS this shouldn’t be a problem, no?

It's visible in browser history

Re: Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off

#425

Post by scim-knox-twox »

Graffur wrote: post #227

What are the barriers to entry for the new google/search engine? Is it storage/index space and crawlers being blocked?

Resources. The Internet is huge, it takes a lot of hardware and energy to index as many pages as possible.

Re: Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off

#426

Post by pmontra »

0xedd wrote: post #242
pmontra wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have thrown the VSCode and WSL candies to the world and most of us don't notice anymore that they keep behaving as they always did.

You mean the metric hog that can only be turned off with a recompile? No, thanks. Wsl, the barely usable product with breaking bugs, such as simple disk io, until wsl2 came to improve _some_ of the features? Nah. The most detrimental change to IT, containers, still depends on hyper-v for networking in the latest version and can only build for the same kernel. Cheap PR for garbage products to try and push PC monopoly.

They have been extremely successful with VSCode. I keep using emacs but nearly everybody I work with switched to VSCode. It even happened that a guy told me on a call "why doesn't your VSCode show [something]?" "Because emacs can show that but I don't care so I didn't install the package."

And yes, the people using Windows and deploying to Linux use WSL2 now instead of WSL. They used to run a Linux VM or dual boot. Another success for Microsoft. WSL2 can also run GUI applications. They'll end up controlling the Linux desktop.

Re: Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off

#427

Post by stephenr »

vertis wrote: post #365
zht wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel sort of bad for this comment. The reason is because the reason given is perfectly sound. “We have to split this out because of perfect reasonable reasons like laws, data retention policies, etc etc”. And everything afterwards is pure unadulterated propaganda. I don’t know if the commenter knows how patronizing they sound. “We did this for you because even though you’ve previously explicitly opted out, we think…

There was this thing in Melbourne cafes for a while (and maybe still, I'm not in Melbourne any more), where you would walk in and order your usual from other cafes "a large Flat White" and the barista would go "We only make coffee in one size". At which point I would walk out and go to another cafe. The same experience, "I want coffee in a certain way", "we know better than you and will only serve you coffee how we l…

Isn't that just a case of only having on size of cup though?

Re: Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off

#428

Post by stephenr »

riverguardian wrote: post #70

Hello hello, PM for the feature checking in here. amf12's reply is quite on-point. Web and App Activity is designed to store search activity across all Google services, and we're splitting Workspace data out since it's governed by strict data handling guarantees, with the hope that more people will feel comfortable getting the benefits of better search in Workspace without having to opt-into search history being trac…

> Search history can be immensely useful for our users

This is imminently true, but the real context here is maybe more of a Freudian slip, and perhaps forgotten by some people.

Remember kids: Google's "users" are the people buying ad spots. People looking at *.google.com are just the eyeballs they charge to get access to.

Re: Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off

#429

Post by matkoniecz »

mankyd wrote: post #308
matkoniecz wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of the Workspace data you provide is ever used outside of Workspace, nor is it used for any other purpose than for the benefit of you and your users (...) that data is never used for ads. This is a blatant lie. Google will share this data with law enforcement, also on request by evil and/or totalitarian regimes. --------- And even for use within a Google: It is as believable as FB promising to not use 2FA for…

> Google will share this data with law enforcement, also on request by evil and/or totalitarian regimes. This is true of one's employer in general, no? "this data" is theoretically all related to one's work.* If a gov't approached your employer and asked for whatever they have on file, they could/would be compelled to provide it. * My spouse has done employment law in the past and likes to remind me _never_ to use wo…

> This is true of one's employer in general, no? "this data" is theoretically all related to one's work.*

(1) some companies simply to not start storing data that users explicitly requested to stop collecting (so it cannot be leaked)

(2) some companies are not operating for example in China so there is lower risk of forwarding your data to their government

(3) some companies operate in places where police/intelligence agencies at least pretend to not have direct access to private data without order from a proper court. Not some "allow all" like USA has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

Re: Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off

#430

Post by matkoniecz »

dang wrote: post #377
matkoniecz wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of the Workspace data you provide is ever used outside of Workspace, nor is it used for any other purpose than for the benefit of you and your users (...) that data is never used for ads. This is a blatant lie. Google will share this data with law enforcement, also on request by evil and/or totalitarian regimes. --------- And even for use within a Google: It is as believable as FB promising to not use 2FA for…

Please make your substantive points without name-calling and personal attacks. We don't need them, and they poison the ecosystem. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Sorry, I will try to handle it better.

Which parts are a problem? Would following substitutions be enough to fix the problem? (I cannot edit it anymore, checking for future)

"This is a blatant lie." -> "This is clearly untrue."

"malicious tracking of users who explicitly demanded to stop doing this" - drop "malicious"

I think that "evil and/or totalitarian regimes" is OK there.

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