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Comment by ubercore | Hacker News Reader

Google Now has done the same for me, told me how long it will take to get to a bar I frequent. My reaction was quite exactly "Oh that's neat, thanks!" and I went and had a great burger that night.

Totally OK for me Google. I respect that people have different privacy thresholds, but I think the fact that it's different for everyone is being lost in articles like this.

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One tiny caveat being that, Google (and others as well, to be fair) will be able to indirectly collect data even on the privacy-aware part of the population who don't use Google much. The simplest example being, even if you don't use GMail, still some part of your emails inevitably end up in GMail inboxes. Now also consider this: just being a guest in a Google-stuffed house means you are under surveillance.

So no, it is not just my problem or your problem, it's everyone's.

Sure, and to illustrate your point, I have an email very similar to someone else's. I very frequently get their emails (invoices, church events, travel itineraries, purchase receipts). Google thinks they're _my_ trips, and updates me about flight times.

I think this example serves both our points. To your point, it's totally leaked this other person's info into my "google world" because I'm on gmail. On the other hand, that person is leaking his information directly to me just because of typos when he fills out online forms. Perfect privacy requires a lot of vigilance in a digital world, with or without google/gmail/hotmail/yahoo/etc.

I have a fairly uncommon name and predominately use Gmail. Still, I receive a surprising amount of other people's mail in error. Apparently lots of people guess at email addys. I do often wonder at both the lack of privacy this engenders and what the Goog machine must make of it all.

I definitely worry about my life being affected by situations like this.

I receive a ridiculous amount of other people's email - for serious things like email account reset, to banking info. When the Ashley Madison hack happened, my email address was there multiple times! Imagine if my then-partner had bothered to look, what a mess that would be.

Lay down a trail of public comments for plausible deniability. Smart!

Your current or next partner might not like that you've signed up either :)

> for serious things like email account reset, to banking info.

I've called American Express a couple of times to report errant emails with account info ending up in my email. THEY didn't care that one of their customers had an issue, they thought it was a great time to have me fork over MY info "to check".

My partner received a few emails which a government representative had tried to forward from their work account to their private Gmail account whilst getting the address wrong. These contained personal information relating to correspondence with constituents.

From time to time I have had messages relating to a government planning committee as one of the members got the domain of someone's departmental email account wrong and the messages come instead to the domain I administer.

I know someone who has his (common) first name @gmail.com as he was an early employee on Gmail, and he regularly gets grandparents guessing their grandson's name as the correct e-mail address. He told me this happens several times a day.

I just got a funny email last week... welcoming me to the NRA. I was like... but I didn't join the NRA. I sent them an email about it, but I'm probably going to have to CALL the NRA to tell them to remove my address from their database.

Getting these things corrected can actually be quite difficult. I regularly get emails from an optician in another state. I have replied multiple times that they are sending information to the wrong person, but they continue to do so. Fortunately this has never included detailed health information, but merely revealing a patient relationship with a specific medical provider can be a breach.

In another instance I was getting emails about an account someone created with American Express using my email address. I sent multiple emails to their customer support to get them to stop sending financial information to the wrong person with no results. In this I also found it difficult to even figure out what agency to report them to for failing to take action when notified. Eventually I took the time to call them. It took around 20 minutes (not counting time on hold) of talking to multiple people to get them to remove the email address from the account. This included them asking me several times for my social security number - which I flatly refused to provide since I had zero business relationship with them. This refusal actually seemed to confuse them.

The thing that gets me is when people seem to be guessing at their own emails when filling out forms and such. How do you not know your own email address?

Many of the people I know who have very common gmail addresses have set up canned replies to let senders know they've reached the wrong person.

This is often useful even if you're not the flier. When I'm picking someone up it lets me know when their flight was delayed, and when I'm traveling it lets my wife know when I'm available.

This situation is not like that. Presumably, ubercore is getting email for someone he does not know.

That's one of the interesting things about AI. There's no way to clairfy/correct when something is wrong, and most of the time you don't even know something is wrong.

It's not clear whether these AI models have much incentive to correct anything. If 99% of people with attributes x,y and z are bad candidates for a job, will you even get an interview? Is there any attempt to account for the fact that attribute x is something you were born with? Or that you are actually in the 1% and really are a good candidate? Or that you don't actually have attribute y, and it was just inferred from something else or some kind of mixup like an email address typo?

There are all kinds of interesting thought experiments. What happens when a classifier innocently discovers that the best classification is by race? Do we care? How about if we remove race but it happens to discover that four features which are very strongly correlated to race are the best way to classify?

There are ways to account for that. A model can be fit to race, and then you only predict "on top" of race (meaning residuals). You use that model, which is independent of race.

This only works if you're aware that race is even a factor. If you're not aware of the problematic factors, then you can't correct for them.

How do you know you have the correct model, and isn't making the system more racist instead of less?

Machine learning is also very opaque.

But if the racial factors aren't all the same, then that creates an incentive for people to lie about their race.

If you verify the race field, then now you're in the business of enforcing racial definitions.

If that second scenario were to happen, then I think we should take a serious look at why that correlation is occurring rather than just throwing out the data because it's "racist". That we removed the classification and then it was re-discovered by other correlations really should suggest something. On the assumption that it wasn't engineered to be biased and was naturally arrived at by the algorithm itself, then that actually seems like an important data point, and could even be a nice litmus test of how we're addressing racial differences if the models evolve to be more positive over time.

> If 99% of people with attributes x,y and z are bad candidates for a job, will you even get an interview? Is there any attempt to account for the fact that attribute x is something you were born with?

Why would that matter to the company? People are born with stupidity.

Wonder if one should press for having these services accept a public key alongside the email address that they then are obliged to encrypt all outgoing emails with. Thus even if the address is wrong, the recipient can't easily read the content.

How does that solve anything? Either these services will have to publish the key on your behalf (so you can lookup the public key for bob@gmail.com with some public API), or you will have to provide the public key every time you hand out your email address.

The former doesn't fix the issue at all, and the latter is unworkable because the guy reliably giving out the wrong email address will absolutely not remember his public key.

> the guy reliably giving out the wrong email address will absolutely not remember his public key

Have the browser suggest the key IDs from `gpg --list-secret-keys`.

> On the other hand, that person is leaking his information directly to me just because of typos when he fills out online forms.

I often get some misdirected emails because of a very banal name in my country.

When the email contains a thread history, I sometime noticed that the address was simply corrupted by a recipient, such as numbers getting dropped from the genuine address in their reply.

I guess some systems can't handle correctly numbers or other characters in email addresses.

> Sure, and to illustrate your point, I have an email very similar to someone else's. I very frequently get their emails (invoices, church events, travel itineraries, purchase receipts). Google thinks they're _my_ trips, and updates me about flight times.

Fun story there. Because Google's internal privacy safeguards are so strict, the people working on features like that can't look for example emails to train their ML models with.

They can only look at emails that were explicitly sent to them in order to improve the feature (and almost no one forwards along positive nor negative examples). What they can do across the email corpus is run jobs that return aggregate stats, where each stat must be coarse enough that it is infeasible to trace back to original users (often 100k+ users per data point).

So, AFAIK, training & testing models under these safeguards is more or less done blind. Build a model with the few examples you do have, and then run it against the corpus. If you see numbers change, you have no idea if that's good or bad, since you can't actually inspect the run.

(at least, this is the way it was a few years ago)

> and almost no one forwards along positive nor negative examples

One time, when I marked a bunch of incorrectly-classified emails as "not spam", the Gmail web UI asked me if I wanted to send these emails to the Gmail spam team. Was this what you meant, or something else?

Yeah, that sort of thing - by giving permission on a per email basis, they are then allowed to look at that particular email to see how/why the model is miss classifying it, AFAIK

(That's different than just marking an email as spam, though)

Had the same thing, Google swore I was supposed to be booking into a hotel in Copenhagen, but most definitely wasn't me - interesting to see what happens are these predictive features become more prevalent.

If you visit a place of business you are potentially under surveillance. I'm sure there is a distinction but I'm failing to come up with it right now.

I was somewhat radical about privacy in the late 90s (only person I knew that read every EULA) and am still a supporter of the EFF but I don't really understand the issue here.

The distinction is that when you visit a place of business, the data is under the control of the business owner.

When you visit you friend's house, the data is not under their control, it is under Google's control.

Therefore, Google has a WAY bigger responsibility than most people realize, once they decided to collect this data.

You are assuming that the business doesn't use a third party monitoring firm.

Ultimately, whenever you visit any place, business or home, the data is under the control of the owner and anyone they abdicate those rights to.

I tend to agree, though I tried to do some searches for a law citation here, but struggled to find anything concrete. I imagine this will be a big area of research and exploration for law in the coming years.

Some interesting scenarios to consider: If I visit a friend's house, and I start getting targeted ads for a service I didn't subscribe to without prior consent or my knowledge, can I sue her/him? What about a scenario where some service collects my data, said service is hacked, and someone commits identity theft on me, who is liable for damages? Do I need my buddy to sign a waiver when he visits to play some Xbox for a bit?

Do you normally use your friends' wifi? I do that when it's family, but generally not with my friends (don't do LAN parties anymore).

With LTE, I don't need wifi.

Wasn't there a story recently about android phones still being tracked and tracking wifi hotspots even with wifi turned off? I believe location services still works pretty well even with GPS and wifi off.

I would imagine if you walk into a home with google's AI doodads all over the place, you're gonna be picked up.

Makes you wonder how reliable airplane mode is.

Airplane mode doesn't turn off the radios, IIRC; it just stops transmissions.

Rumor is that even when your phone has been turned off, it can be turned back on remotely.

Yes, there was recently a question of how Android knew someone's location with such high resolution, even when wifi and GPS were both turned off. The answer was a passive probing of wifi identifiers and using those against the Google SID to location database even when wifi was turned off.

There was even a note about this feature in the privacy policy, IIRC.

Perhaps people should be required to post a notice on their front door if their house has a Google surveillance device in it (or I suppose, verbally inform every visitor). It's common (and often required) for businesses to post notice that people on the premises are under video surveillance.

I have a couple of cameras, and at least one visitor has been uncomfortable with their presence, despite the fact they're not sending the data to a third party.

> When you visit you friend's house, the data is not under their control, it is under Google's control.

But it was your friend's decision to delegate that control. So, Google having that control is still a consequence of your friend's control.

> If you visit a place of business you are potentially under surveillance. I'm sure there is a distinction but I'm failing to come up with it right now.

A business is typically located in a public space, where there is no expectation of privacy. In contrast, a home is by definition a private space where there is a strong expectation of privacy.

Exactly! In a public space, you can expect someone to be collecting data about you, even if it's only photographing you in the background. In a private space, you expect no one to be collecting data about you, except the people you are directly interacting with.

Aren't there some wiretapping laws around this sort of thing?

A home may be a private space but it isn't <i>your</i> space. When entering someone else's space you open yourself up to having to abide by their rules, listen to their music, and be captured by their cameras.

This seems a bit analogous to the treatment of attorney-client privilege (at least in the US.) If I have a discussion with my attorney in my house, or in my attorney's office, with no one else there, the conversation is generally privileged. If I have that conversation in the presence of a third party, the conversation is no longer privileged. So, if I'm in someone else's house, I may have implicitly consented to the fact that I don't control the environment and can no longer assume the same level of privacy.

(IANAL, YMMV, etc.)

Its one thing to be under surveillance by a grocery store's security cameras and another thing when those cameras are sending all your data to the same central organization. Right now we aren't that great at integrating all that data — knowing that I'll be in a certain bar on Sunday nights is a little disconcerting, but if I knew that was the limit of AI assistants' invasiveness I'd be embracing it for the convenience. But technology for AI and data processing will improve, and data gathering will become more pervasive and more centralized, and soon megacorps will have a much more complete profile of you that they can query if ever they or one of their employees develops malicious intent (not to mention the non-malicious actions that can cause harm).

Tl;dr there's privacy in decentralization.

There's privacy in decentralization but you have to recognize that for many of us, there's value in openness.

I'm very optimistic about Google making my life better in lots of little ways. I have virtually no concerns about my openness to Google causing me trouble.

"making my life better in lots of little ways"

I think that's a common goal and widespread belief and find its implication of having given up on "bigger ways" troubling.

Our industry was going to change the world. Rewrite the cultural rules of socializing. Rebuild the economy in a new form. Encourage major cultural and political shifts by empowering the little guy. Bring knowledge to the ignorant, companionship to the lonely, power to the powerless, jobs to the jobless.

What we have now is, well, maybe, with some luck, timidly, sometimes google can analyze the last time I went to a gas station, the number of miles I've driven at various speeds since then, the time of my next appointment, then it can adjust my google now card to encourage me to leave home earlier so I'll have time to fill up the tank and it'll find the cheapest advertised price along the way. That's nice ... but wheres my revolution?

Even worse in context of the article, OK well say I have to give up all privacy and go hard core 1984 telescreen big brother is always watching, to save endangered species and house the homeless and feed the starving and bring peace to the victimized. Well OK I'll think about it. Oh wait, we don't get any of that, all we're offered is slightly better appointment scheduling. Eh, no thanks.

Nothing is ever really new, and this era is likely similar to pre-quantum era Physics around 1890 where nothing is left to discover other than adding a few more decimal places here and there. The meme and speech patterns are all the same (although I'm not quite that old)

While it doesn't seem like that much of a revolution, things have changed significantly.

For centuries, people have navigated using stars and maps, yet now you have turn by turn navigation in your pocket with real time traffic and crowd sourced traffic incidents. You can reach most of the world population instantly by dialing a few numbers or even sending them a text message or mms, no matter where they are.

In the context of the article, a couple of years ago, Google Now told me I had to leave for a meetup in my calendar that I completely forgot about, gave me transit directions for a part of a city I've never been at and got me in exactly at the meetup start time.

While that all seems like modern conveniences nowadays, even thirty years ago if you'd have told people that you couldn't get lost anywhere in the world and could get ahold of just about anyone at anytime instantly, they'd think you'd be talking about science fiction, not today's reality.

I'm not sure you are any less responsible for your own privacy despite the fact that companies like Google as well as others are making it more challenging. The example you mentioned seems easily fixed by using GPG.

Granted there may be a place for regulations to help us restrict what companies are able to do(perhaps making it easier for you to identify a region that is being recorded, right?), but, at some point society can't help the fact that you'd prefer if machines were unaware of your existence. That's just something you have to solve for yourself.

> The example you mentioned seems easily fixed by using GPG.

GPG doesn't hide that one is emailing, or when, or with whom; it only hides content.

Perhaps we need to start normalizing encrypted email. Just like https everywhere is no longer considered necessarily "tin-foil hat" SOP, moving this direction for email needs to be socially normalized.

Going further, given that an encrypted email to Gmail will simply be unencrypted and then available to GMail, include in the protocol authorized (via both white and black list means) agents of the recipient. So, if you are hosting your own email but the intended recipient is expected to be not hosting their own email, the sender can blacklist "agents" such as Gmail and Yahoo! Mail, or blacklist all except for those chosen to be white-listed such as Proton Mail.

Sure, except the recipient will read your email in Google Chrome, while sitting on a Google Sofa sipping Google Coffee? :)

ha, so true. one prob at a time :)

I was thinking about this just yesterday. It would be great if email providers made tools to painlessly create encryption keys and get them synced up to all your devices securely. From there each email you send can include an automatic signature of where to find your public key. On the other side when you receive emails from others with such a signature you can then choose to have the email reader fetch the key and let you start trusting it with a single confirmation click. From then on your emails to that person will be encrypted without you having to think about it.

For almost all users getting a message from someone you personally know containing a message that they would legitimately send would be sufficient to trust the referenced key. If you are a little paranoid you could ask them over the phone or in person to send a specific message that you would then trust, or just ask for the URL itself. I believe that in-person key exchanges utilizing large trust networks are overkill for the vast majority of people sending everyday communications.

Make it so simple as 1) one time key creation and copying to each device 2) one time trust per other person that is completely streamlined by the software. If the gmail team implemented this for example other email providers would soon do the same and it would spread like wildfire. Very quickly a huge amount of email would be encrypted. Of course this would require an open design that anyone can implement.

Maybe there's a fundamental flaw with this idea that I'm not seeing. If so, please say so because otherwise I'm going to just be disappointed in five years when email is still 99% unencrypted.

a non-insignificant proportion of hacker news seems to actually work at google and run to their defense at anything somewhat critical of their overlord.

There just isn't any point to accusing people of shilling without evidence. The idea that one must be paid to hold a different opinion that you is offensive, and expressing it here isn't something the community wants.

i actually had 3 upvotes until the google people started to change that. so some do. i'm not accusing anyone of shilling. i've personally seen these threads and some proportion of people admit openly they work there. others, you click their profile and see they work at goog. don't need you to condescingly assume you speak for the community. Also forgot to mention all the people who defend google because they're desperate to work there

Sorry, but you don't think that it's somewhat unfounded paranoia?

Personally, I would have downvoted you because your original point seemed to condescendingly assume something about a large proportion of the community and their intentions - then you assume again that it's "The Google People" (and only them)?

Unless you can show that your downvotes came because of a specific reason, and from specific people...

my original comment was " a non-insignificant proportion of hacker news seems to actually work at google and run to their defense at anything somewhat critical of their overlord. ". it isn't paranoia. Like i said i've seen threads where 4/10 comments are defending Google and the commenters openly say they work at Google or one can click on their proifle and see that they openly list they work there. didn't imply shilling.

If you don't care for the products or services, you could always opt not to buy/use them. That includes avoiding areas where Google appliances are present. I'm fine with trading privacy for AI-driven convenience, though I already have a phone I like and an Echo, so I have no compelling reason to buy these particular products right now.

And how are we going to know where google appliances are present or not?

By looking around and/or asking? Life isn't that hard.

"Excuse me, is that an android phone in your pocket?" Also, what about google self-driving cars with full arrays of cameras, radar, etc. recording everything as they drive past you?

Google has top notch practices in my opinion regarding privacy. If anything I would be more worried about smaller companies with shadier practices and lower security standards holding my personal information. There have been seemingly illegal practices from companies like Sears with how personal data is collected and used. It's easy to throw shade at a big companies, write a sarcastic title, then get clicks.

Example: "Intuit’s TurboTax stores highly detailed financial data for millions of users who import their W2s, their banking data, info about their mortgages and more. Right now, all of this data is locked into TurboTax, but the company is now thinking about how it can do more with it by giving its users the option to share this data with reputable third parties." ... https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/22/intuit-wants-to-turn-turbo...

> I would be more worried about smaller companies with shadier practices and lower security standards holding my personal information.

True, I don't mind Google today, but what about tomorrow? What about N years from now when they have failed to hit their financial targets 2 years running. Will that company have the same set of standards as the one today?

The reality is that once you've given up your privacy there is no getting it back.

"Google has top notch practices in my opinion regarding privacy."

Google might handle the data it collects better than other companies, but it would do much better still if it didn't collect any personal data at all.

Hands off my data, Google!

Google wouldn't be Google without all that personal data though.

For me the real problem is that large and trusted companies like Google are softening the public perception of what privacy should be and making it easier for smaller and more malicious companies to abuse the trust that Google and others generate.

I fear you will be unable to recognize when that burger was your choice and when it was a reaction. You probably won't notice. And that is harmless.

I also fear you will be unable to notice in which areas of life and information the distinction between choice and reaction is harmless and which it isn't.

Of course, I'm not talking about "You" you, but just people. Me as well. I feel we are widening the field of unconscious decisions and I see that as inherently bad - in my fellow humans as well.

You could say that Plato wanted us to make easy things simple (link for distinction: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy).

I believe this to be a move in the opposite direction. We should have a care.

I think for quite a large number of people, allowing AIs to make decisions for them will probably be better for them.

Imagine some day your doctor advises to cut back on burgers and alcohol. Is Google going to incorporate that advice in its bar recommendations?

Is it Google's responsibility to? I would say no. If algorithms detect that an individual is going to a bar every Monday and Thursday night, and then starts providing information about said bar on Monday and Thursday nights I don't see the problem.

But I think it would be a problem if every Monday and Thursday night Google Now started providing information about AA meetings in the area, instead of bar information. It's up to the user to make the choice, Google Now just detects trends and then displays information based on those trends.

I go to the gym every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday morning. And each of those mornings Google Now tells me how many minutes it will take me to get to the gym from my current location. Should Google Now start giving me directions to the nearest breakfast place instead? No, not unless that starts becoming my pattern.

If you're trying to change your lifestyle, it's more difficult when you have a bad friend constantly enabling the behavior you're trying to cease.

Google may not have a responsibility to be a good friend, but personally I'd prefer not to have a bad friend always following me around, thus I'm a little less excited about this feature.

You can just tell it to stop. It's not hard.

I think many would rather tell it when to start instead. What's hard about telling it to stop is when you can't tell it's started because it's something more nuanced than the obvious diet plan.

It may not be their responsibility (although if it had that information it would be the morally correct choice). However, regardless of the responsibility -- the CEO of the company saying "we're going to make your life better!" by an AI pushing products is almost certainly not going to make your life better.

> Should Google Now start giving me directions to the nearest breakfast place instead?

That may depend on how much Waffle House pays for advertising, and that is the problem.

Why not? As long as you're clicking their ads, they'll make money regardless of whether you're buying a burger or a salad.

When the AIs are working in service of corporations this seems incredibly unlikely.

We already see what happens when peoples decision making is coloured by mass media advertising. An obese population trapped by debts taken out to fuel consumption.

It is in other peoples best interests for you to work like a slave, be addicted to unhealthy habits & run up vast debts in order to buy their products.

We keep allowing those with power to distort the markets gaining themselves more money and more power at the expense of the little guy. I don't see any reason why AI in the service of the powerful will do anything but accelerate that.

That rather depends on the objectives of the AI.

If you replace "AI" with "marketing" would you still make that statement?

If you replace "ai" with "your spouse" would that change be as intellectually useless?

don't you think thats a pretty severe statement wrt to free will and agency? if i'm just a consumer wired up to a machine thats deciding whats best for me (even with the best of intentions), doesn't that make me less human?

should I just be a actor playing through a set itinerary of vacations and movies and burgers and relationships? maybe you think its that way already, except less perfect than it might be, but thats a pretty frightening notion to me.

The same argument was historically made to justify slavery.

And to justify the continued existence of the electoral college.

To my mind, leading a simple life is enjoying a burger at a restaurant/bar I frequent already. Simplicity _is_ accepting that Google algorithmically noticed a trend and just helped me do things I already do.

Yes, traps are usually designed so that it is simple to get into them. It is not that cheese is bad, it is that you are trapped.

Are you comparing something designed to kill a rat with something designed to help me go to a burger place I like, or leave on time for work?

Yes. How does Google make money of this service again?

By having burger places pay money to get on the list of places it helpfully gives us when we want to eat a tasty burger. I still get my tasty burger.

Yes, because when one has already decided that feature $FOO is a trap, any further discussion is likely to be limited to describing how "yes, just like a trap is designed to...so is the thing we're talking about" whether the analogy is apt or not. Something something supporting a narrative.

Sorry, who's mind? It sound like you are renting it out.

Presumptuous much? Comments like yours are what makes discussions like this so difficult, and so much less interesting.

Do you never use digital tools to outsource mental effort? Seems like a similar argument could be made for using a calculator.

Calculators provide you a completely fair assistance with your query. There is zero bias in a calculator. If you ask it what two plus two is, you're going to get four.

Google is designed to sell ads, and subtly influence your behavior towards the most profitable results. Please do not confuse a fact-based tool with an ad generator.

> subtly influence your behavior towards the most profitable results

This is the very common theory that a company will (shadily) try to offer you a worse product to make more profit. It fails to account for competing companies that would jump on that opportunity to offer their better product, and get the market share.

But what's funny here is that the suggested alternative is to not get any product at all. As in: "Poor OP, didn't realize that it wasn't really him who was enjoying that burger he was enjoying."

"Worse" is often subjective. And the problem is often just the removal of the possibility of a better product to take hold. For example, Google prioritizes Google services. It gets you on as many Google services as possible. Let's use, say, that it pushes you towards Play Music when you search for songs.

Maybe Play Music is the best thing. Maybe it is not. Neither of us can answer that. But if a definitively better product comes along it will have no way to make a foothold because Google is still pushing everyone to their own product, from their other product (Search), and even when people try your product, if they use Google's other products, they'll tend to stick to other Google products.

Honestly, the worst problem with companies like Google is vertical integration. The ability to provide a wide product line where you integrate best with other products your own company makes has an incredibly chilling effect on competition, and therefore, innovation.

And if your theory that companies prioritizing results for profit would lose to companies that always prefer the best products, why is DuckDuckGo still in what... fourth or fifth place?

> And if your theory that companies prioritizing results for profit would lose to companies that always prefer the best products, why is DuckDuckGo still in what... fourth or fifth place?

You'd need to argue that DuckDuckGo's search results are better; I don't think they are. That's what made Google first among many competing search engines, before there was even a clear business model in it. Today the incentive to outperform is bigger.

If a product Y definitely better than X comes along, and only Google Search fails to rank it higher, people will start thinking "I rather search on Bing too, as it finds better products in this category".

Before replying, you could at least have made an effort to understand what I meant with the distinction between simple and easy.

If you do not care what I say, why even reply?

Almost all decisions are unconscious decisions. whether or not Google is involved. We usually rationalize our reasoning after the decision is made.

Given all the other points in life where, despite my awareness, I don't have much choice, how is an AI just directing me really any different?

My culture, education and skills limit what work I can do.

Our culture places limits on a vast number of experiences. On the road and the only thing is fast food? Welp, eating fast food. Live somewhere that only has one grocery store or cable provider?

I don't really see AI in the form Google is peddling as really all that much different. We're just 'more aware' that the world around us is really guiding us.

I may be somewhere new, and can only see the immediate surroundings without a lot of exploring. And let's be real, in the US, most cities are the same when it comes to restaurants/hotels and such. There are differences in culture but we don't usually see them if we're just visiting. Not in a way that matters.

Google will let me know that the things I prefer back home? there are equivalents nearby.

Fencing ourselves in is what we do. Who knows, perhaps a digital assistant would help us stick to our personal goals and decisions better. Rather than just having to accept what's there.

> I fear you will be unable to recognize when that burger was your choice and when it was a reaction.

Maybe the illusion is that it was a choice . . .

Not far from the mark. People have quite different behaviors when asked "what do you want?" vs a constant stream of "do you want X?" questions.

I'm sorry but that just sounds like blind fear mongering. What you're saying is vague and doesn't really mean much.

It's like saying we shouldn't use prescription glasses, or medication, or cars, because it's not "us".

Humans invent all these tools and systems to improve and optimize our life. Make our vision better. Make our health better. Make us move around faster. In the case of AI, make us do perform certain things more efficiently.

Imagine it wasn't an actually computer. Imagine it was a personal secretary you had that gave you the EXACT same information. Gave you your flight information, turned on the light when you asked, gave you the weather and your schedule. Would you think that was wrong? That this isn't "you"? No, it's just optimizing your life, but now available for a wider population rather than rich people.

Imagine that you were trying to quit smoking and your electronic secretary kept updating you on the cheapest place to find your favorite cigarettes? With no way to tell it not to do that.

So your issue is your secretary doing it's job poorly?

First, there is a way to tell it to not do that. With Google Now, you simply tap the menu and say "No more notification like this". With the assistant, you will probably be able to ask directly.

Second, let's be honest, humans fail pretty often too, so that's just a weak argument.

Lastly, I think it's unfair to dismiss a new technology just because it could maybe fail, without having even tried it.

How about if the system is working exceptionally well, you're a depressed person, and the next ad you see is auctioned off between a therapist, a pharma company, and a noose supply store in the 100ms it takes to render your MyFaceGram profile?

The awful success cases are far more interesting than the awful failure cases.

I have no problem with ads for therapists or pharma companies competing for advertising space in front of me because they have algorithmically determined that I am a qualified lead. That actually sounds great from a mental health perspective.

Your noose example is pretty contrived, however.

Obviously the first two aren't the problematic ones. The issue is that an algorithm wouldn't know what distinguishes those from the third, obviously.

How about sleeping pills? Opiates? Local extortionist cult?

I think that algorithms, and AI specifically, are perfectly able learn what distinguishes those. Maybe even better than someone who might not be in their best state of mind.

The handwaviness is telling. Why would an algorithm or its creators even care about the difference? The highest bidder is the highest bidder.

Because the whole of Google's ad business stands on people wanting to click on the ads shown, and buy the products offered through them. That's why they spend resources on detecting misleading or fraudulent ads, which by your reasoning they wouldn't care about as long as they paid. PR is very important for this business to be sustainable: If the goal was for every user to click through one ad, and then never again, that might not even pay one engineer's salary.

What's misleading or fraudulent about those ads? Maybe you mean "morally reprehensible," in which case I ask where you draw the line between the morally reprehensible (auctioning off the method of suicide to a depressed person) and the morally questionable (say, auctioning off the final bankrupting car purchase to a financially irresponsible person)?

Detecting misleading and fraudulent ads is just an example of things they wouldn't spend resources on, if following your reasoning of "short-term money is the only thing they care about."

There's not only the "morally reprehensible" metric ("Don't be evil"); there's also the "absolute PR catastrophe" metric that printing such an ad for a rope would mean.

> So your issue is your secretary doing it's job poorly?

I think the real issue is the casual deception which you just fell for: It isn't "your" electronic secretary, and the thing it just did might actually be a "good job" from the perspective of those who control it.

>In the case of AI, make us do perform certain things more efficiently.

What does the Google Assistant help me do more efficiently? In all honesty, I can't figure it out. I don't need or want a secretary, and I can do written planning for myself.

I need less paperwork and fewer web forms and identities, but the Google Assistant only promises more of that crap.

I'm never buying one. It's a sacrifice of privacy for zero to marginal gains in convenience.

If you can't come up with uses for it, you weren't its target audience in the first place.

"Imagine it was a personal secretary you had that gave you the EXACT same information. Gave you your flight information, turned on the light when you asked, gave you the weather and your schedule."

In your metaphor, you are implicitly paying the secretary, so the secretary is incentivized to maintain your interests.

How much have you paid Google for its free services?

Your metaphor is inapplicable. You don't have a secretary telling you these things; you have a salesman trying to sell you things, and the salesman is getting smarter every day while you aren't. Not the same thing at all.

Google earns most of their money through ads.

That's why I called them a salesman. They sell things. Their interests are not simply your own.

It seems to be a theme here today... a company can't serve both advertisers and customers. In the end, one of them has to win, and given the monetary flows, it's not even remotely a contest which it will be. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12644507

They don't sell things. They forward you towards people who do sell things which you may be interested with. You're free to ignore it, and if you're not interested in what they're showing you, that means they failed at their job.

It's funny how bad of a stigma ads have gotten, but at the core, if you think of it, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Think of a friend recommending you a restaurant, a new game to play, a movie to go watch. In that case you'll be super interested, but now if this AI who probably knows your taste better than your friend suggests you something, you are instantly turned off and annoyed.

I think the root cause of this is that there is so much mediocre ads out there that ruin it for all. Your mind just blindly blocks all ads now.

Yes. Google is selling you, to advertisers, quite literally.

When you aren't paying anything for something of value, YOU are the product.

> Google is selling you, to advertisers, quite literally.

No, that would be slavery, which is illegal.

Google is selling advertising space on various channels that you provide in exchange for Google services to advertisers.

> When you aren't paying anything for something of value, YOU are the product.

No, when you aren't paying money for something of value, you are probably paying something else of value for it; often, something that the person with which you are trading is then selling for money, making you a supplier of an input to the good or service they are selling for money.

What he's saying is that this is not "humanity inventing something to make life better". It's a company inventing something to make money.

And it's not a simple product like glasses where you pay with money and then they improve your vision. It's a product which goes far beyond your understanding and for which you don't pay money.

Google isn't interested in making your life better. What they are interested in is getting you to believe that they want to make your life better and to then recommend going to that bar, because the bar owner has given Google money to advertise for the bar.

Yes, you might actually like that bar, but Google isn't going to recommend going there in intervals which are beneficial to you. They'd rather have you go there a few too many times. Because that's what makes them money. It's not improving your life, which makes them money. Their AI will always work against you, whenever it can without you noticing.

I think you misunderstand me by a large margin.

I'm not saying we shouldn't use AIs. We should, however, think about how we use them.

To build on your example, what are the dangers of having a personal secretary on the payroll of anyone but you?

What I am expecting from this is a super devious filter bubble - because that's how you make money. Google's old slogan "Don't be evil" is long gone. "For a greater good" might be more on point.

That's the thing though. I reject the notion that you ever actually make a choice. I would posit that 100% of the actions you take are simply the deterministic reactions when the current world state is filtered through your brain. Then, after the fact, your brain gets busy inventing a reason that you took a particular action and calls it a "choice" when really you were just going to do what you were going to do anyway.

"I ordered this burger because I was hungry and it tastes good" vs "I ordered this burger because Google was able to successfully predict that I would be receptive to having burgers, or the idea of burgers, placed in my environment"

Sure, but philosophical musings on the nature of free will aside, there's a practical worry about the amount of power a private company has over your actions. I'd rather be ordering burgers because they taste good than because a company wanted me too--I expect this will lead to greater happiness for me in the long run.

Yes, but only because your happiness metric maximizes when you exercise your freedom of choice.

Other people's happiness metrics work differently, and all popular web services are popular precisely because they satisfy the unconscious desires of the majority of people.

In effect you argument is that we don't have free will, right?

I wonder what is then causing inefficiency when we read restaurant's menu and can't decide what we will have.

I'm with those who think we make choices and decisions far less often than we think, but that we still do make them.

i am no longer intrigued by the privacy discussion but the actual possibility that we are just consciousnesses controlled by the google hivemind.

this is like absolutely full on plugged into the matrix world. and we're living right in it.

these guys are like the ones who've taken the red pill, and gone on to find out how far the rabbit hole is going.

(edit: i'm even more intrigued by the possibility that the future is not just the matrix singularity, but an oligopoly of several large singularities, all fighting to plug us in)

> I feel we are widening the field of unconscious decisions and I see that as inherently bad

I'm curious why you think this is bad. I don't necessarily think it is good but I also don't necessarily think it is actually happening

Which news-sources do you use?

Which news-sources are you going to learn about?

Which news-sources are you for some reason very unlikely to encounter?

Now apply a real-time AI filter-bubble, able to also include government policies in its decision-making, onto those questions.

I believe the most important thing in life is thinking. I believe a key element of thinking is looking at "easy stuff", the stuff we just live with every day and don't think about, and for some reason be forced to think about it and make it simple.

Take the Snowden-leak. We lived a nice life being the good guys and that kind of surveillance was publicly thought of as conspiracy theories. Suddenly we were forced to look at what was going on. How much of it are we okay with? On the grounds of what principles and tradeoffs? This is all very unpleasant, but we're all better off for facing those questions and work towards new principles. We take a chaotic gruel of cons and pros, and try to hammer them into a few simple principles our societies may function by. For instance, the separation of power into 3 has served us well.

I fear that we end up in a world where raising such unpleasant questions becomes almost impossible - and we'll never even notice. Not because of AI (I believe AI to be inevitable and fascinating) but because of the way AI is used.

Living a life assisted by an AI, made and paid for by someone else, seems like the epitome of naivete to me.

What I want mainly from Google is more and easier ways to customize my level of privacy. The article touches on the EFF's stance against incognito modes briefly, but it's an important one; I don't want lack of monitoring to be something I start a separate session for, with a logo of a creepy dude implying I should use this only for spying and pornography. I'd like to get as close as possible to an assistant that remembers relevant data on where I go and how long it takes, but ignores my browsing history to psychologically manipulate me into buying things--of course, that needs a different revenue model.

Does https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols?pli=1 do what you're asking for? It's fairly fine-grained.

I love that this uses 'pause' vs 'stop', 'off', 'disable' 'deactivate'.

Your location history tracking is paused..

There is a difference between 'the user requested to deactivate the service', and 'the user paused the service', he may or may not wish to continue using it, gray area right?

It can probably save them from a legal mess if they 'resume' it in future updates.

As was mentioned below, in Google's case I'm particularly looking for ease of use and a UI that lets me turn things on and off quickly and intuitively. That might sound odd, as if I care deeply enough about my privacy to complain about it, but not enough to quickly switch the settings on my Google account, but I do think it matters.

The more specific work I need to go through to set up my privacy, the less inclined I am to do it. If I didn't think I was able to be manipulated psychologically in this way, well, I wouldn't worry about advertising at all! If I were to ever do something politically dissident/personally embarrassing on the internet (not that I ever have of course) I'd go to the trouble of ensuring encryption and being hard to track, but I think it's important that I'm able to say to Google "Hey, I'm cool with you telling me when I should check off work to hit the bar, but it's super weird that you know what I should get my Mom for Mother's Day."

Of course, the simplest way of making a system that's both fine-grained and intuitive might involve... more AI, so I'm not sure how to crack that issue.

Did you check that link? It looks fairly intuitive to me. Given that I'm having a hard time parsing your response. However if there's some specific setting in there that's not available, that would make sense.

I think each individual action is fine, but I don't understand how it's easy to manage privacy as a whole. Each aspect of privacy is separate, and can be finely customized in one particular way per session. There's no way to set different arrangements of settings for different times, or even just a button on mobile to whack that indicates "Ignore my data for the next few minutes."

Those are good ideas.

The link above is very intuitive. One toggle disables search history in all Google products, another one removes location history, etc. You can also click on "Manage activity" for more fine-grained details in some apps.

My experience is that Google app and system updates have a tendency to force/trick/nag you into giving up privacy.

As example, the old weather widget from Google's "News & Weather" was replaced by Google Now. That provided a similar experience for some time but then stopped working with another update that required search history to be enabled and/or some other setting in privacy control.

Also the launcher integrated Google with a system update(Moto G line of phones). I have since replaced launcher, browser, search app (all with open source replacements), weather app (with a paid service). Convenience has suffered...

Indeed; after a time they required search history to be turned on in order for commuting traffic information to be supplied, which was not initially the case.

At that point I turned it on but deleted* the search history each day, until such point as they changed the delete controls to be more of a nuisance.

I now use DuckDuckGo and an iPhone instead.

* Or so their site claims.

I think eventually they add so many capabilities and so many fine-grained controls and it becomes impossible to manage the UI or to find the right options. Even looking at the settings for Android privacy / settings, it's pretty hard to find anything.

This is by design, so that the majority of users are confused and leave the defaults as is, enabling Google to do whatever they like.

You shouldn't have to spend that much time managing your privacy.

> logo of a creepy dude implying I should use this only for spying

I never thought of that before. But, what a subtle way for Google to dissuade people from using a tool that could impact their revenue.

When it first told me it knew hiw long my commute would take, I realised it was creepy as all hell that the people (in another country with few protections on data) providing my phone software knew enough about me to tell where I worked and when I was going there.

And it annoys me that on maps, when you turn off all the spying capabilities there's no fallback to local history. You either share it with us or you get none.

Failing to provide local history is essentially one of the dark patterns to getting you to turn on their privacy collection. Most things Google requires it for could easily be done outside the cloud, but by making things depend on the cloud, and then telling everyone you can only do it with the cloud, you convince people that they need the cloud. When in reality, they never did.

GPS navigation devices with much less storage than a phone have been more than capable of what Google Maps offers for a long time. There's essentially no reason for it to do anything with the Internet except getting map updates.

And traffic.

I use Google Maps every single day to get to and from work, simply because it knows how to avoid traffic. 10% of the time it saves me half an hour on my commute.

  > ... it was creepy as all hell that the people [...] knew enough about me

No people know. Software metaphorically ‘knows’, but don't anthropomorphize it (it hates that).

But it's accessible to people, that's the issue. Not my tech, but systems far away that belong to others.

Exactly. You're expected to naively trust 'the algorithm', because people are nowhere to be found near your supposedly anonymized data.

Speaking of which, anyone following today's stories about the Yahoo email scandal, the pressure on the folks who own Signal, and recent litigation from Microsoft against government gag orders?

But, let's go back to talking about none of us have free will and talking about how clever Now is.

It may be OK for you but there are at least three real concerns here:

1- There is no way to set your privacy level.

2- Things that Google/Siri/Alexa know about you are not limited with the name of the bar you go frequently. They know much more about you. And you don't know what they know. The sky is the limit here.

3- Things that they know are not limited with you personally. They know about you, your family, your friends and all their interactions. They know very much about the whole society.

1 - Sure there is, Google has fairly fine-grained tracking control. Not perfect, but as another commenter noted, this is a double-edged sword, as _too many_ controls can conversely hinder user control (see Facebook's privacy revamp)

2 - My point is that I personally am OK with Google's AI knowing more about me. I respect that others aren't. I'm not naive in my acceptance.

3 - I don't really have a response here.

Sure there is, Google has fairly fine-grained tracking control.

The privacy control where I disable location tracking and half a year later when I look in Google Dashboard I see months of travel history?

I respect that others aren't. I'm not naive in my acceptance.

So what do you do in a situation where your use of Google's data collection also affects people who do mind it? I would not be comfortable visiting a friend with an always-listening device like Alexa or Google's equivalent.

I nuked my paid Google Apps account a couple of months ago. I had enough of their total disrespect for privacy. E.g. conversations that I had in Google Mail (which is protected by the Google Apps agreement) were used for suggestions, etc. in Google+ (which is not covered by the Google Apps agreement and uses data for targeted advertising).

How do you know the conversations were used for suggestions?

It could have been a visit to a website.

> So what do you do in a situation where your use of Google's data collection also affects people who do mind it? I would not be comfortable visiting a friend with an always-listening device like Alexa or Google's equivalent.

I'd turn it off if/when they ask. I don't think that's unreasonable in the least. I'm not responsible for enforcing everyone's privacy preference, but I also respect them and will accommodate guests in my house.

I don't know about Google, but I know that Siri and Alexa only collect and send data when you ask it to.

You can monitor the traffic of the Alexa and see that it is only sending data when you ask it to do something, and furthermore, Amazon gives you a log of everything you've said to it and it recorded.

Home claims this as well, and I for example have a log of audio clips and transcriptions of all of my google now searches.

And you can also get a log of everything you've ever ordered from Amazon, but there are still loads of other signals which aren't visible to you, as evidenced by the fact that you browse a product on amazon.com today, and now for the next week, you see that product advertised back to you all over the web.

Others may be reviews left, reviews voted on, prime video consumed, audio/video/book samples consumed, kindle activity, how long you spend on a product page, how you scroll on it, the breadcrumb of how you got there, and surely dozens more.

"Hi Ubercore, Google and your health insurance company here. We are worried that you are frequenting a facility that serves too much alcohol and wings. We care."

I really wish this was up top. I can't believe that the top rated comment on HN is a thinly veiled "if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to worry about".

My impression is that (in the main) younger people have lower privacy thresholds than older people. Not for everyone (of course). Just on average.

My impression also is that most early adopters of this kind of technology are younger people. (again: mostly)

So this brings up an interesting question about the future. As the young early adopters age, what will happen?

a) their privacy thresholds will also increase and they will have a "oh holy crap" moment in the future, where as a middle-aged or older person, who has lived a now much richer and problem-laden life, they will realize that google (and/or other co's) have what they consider now, as too much personal information about them,

b) they will keep their young-ish privacy thresholds as older people, and in general, across society, people will have lower thresholds than exist nowadays. In other words the world will change.

My money is on a)

Conversely, there are a fair amount of older folk who are very much okay with government surveillance and a general lack of privacy (particularly our inherent rights) because, e.g., they have "nothing to hide"

My impression (in the main) is that younger and older people have different views on privacy. Older folk might be creeped out by Google knowing their schedule, but okay with the NSA or FBI or whomever reading their emails because "because terrorists" whereas younger folk are more likely to balk at the latter, but very much okay the former.

Do you think my opinion is accurate? I'm curious because to some extent I completely agree with you.

Not OP but I think you're correct. Older people trust the government but the younger crowd trusts corporations.

I don't think A will necessarily happen for most. We are a product of our experiences. If, as we grow up, we get comfortable using always-online technologies and never suffer any consequence from those experiences, I don't see what would motivate us to suddenly doubt these technologies. I am confident B is the most likely situation; that's how societies move forward so quickly with tech.

Devil's advocate says that if you want B to happen, you should start working on more Ashley-Madison-style hacks, to enable more people to have their "oh holy crap" moments.

I met a good friend and current employer because Google Now told me about an event I might be interested in a couple of years ago.

Of course it also once told me how long it would take to get to an ex's house from my current girlfriend's place.

How about an 'OK, funny once' command?

As a possibly humourous thought along those lines, imagine explaining to your future child they were born because of a Google Now reminder. ;)

(eugenics through large scale suggestions anyone? ;>)

Heh, uh, oh shit.

This isn't funny at all. "They" (or Skynet) could totally do this and who would be the wiser?

:-) do you know that getting pregnant isn't that easy and many couples track the cycles to see when their fertility is higher?

There are even apps to that... It wouldn't surprise me if someday this tracking was learnt by Google

  > How about an 'OK, funny once' command?

I hope that's a Heinlein reference.

yep!

My experience has been quite the opposite in terms of convenience and relevance: I commute by car and train (for some parts of the same journey) and google Now, google Maps (etc) have been totally useless there: telling me about traffice jams when I'm in the train, not telling me about train delays, etc... it now somehow thinks my home is at the train station, it tells me the last bus home is leaving soon when I've been home for hours, also Google Now's insistence on bombarding the leftmost pane on my phone with the most click-bait articles ever, often about things I had a passing interest in months ago, is just laughable. I would be glad to give Google some of my very precious privacy, implementing some countermeasures like multiple and burner identities as needed, if I thought they had any chance of actually providing real value. So far they have failed miserably, I am not sure the economics of providing a really useful service there for free just with marketing information as source of income work now, or for a very long time. You'd need strong AI to actually help my day to day life, with solid non obvious guessing based on many very local and specific factors. I guess as long as people kind of believe that this future is coming, they may tolerate the invasion and forget about the promises.

To me it's pretty simple. If you don't like what Google is doing, don't use their services, and don't buy their products.

But as mentioned above, if you don't want Google to potentially track your behaviour and preferences, "don't use their services" encompasses "don't send email to anyone with a gmail address".

Which IMO is a valid thing. If you are sending something to someone, they are free to do what they want with it. You can't force them to treat it differently.

If i'm on gmail, then you need to talk to gmail to talk to me. It's a tradeoff you'll need to make. If you want you can GPG encrypt the email, but there is nothing from stopping me (legally, morally, or otherwise) from just decrypting it and replying with the contents, or saving the decrypted message in my google drive.

I dunno, it's not quite that black and white. If I send someone (say) a poem I wrote, even if unsolicited, I retain the copyright and the moral rights in that poem. The recipient doesn't get carte blanche to reproduce it just because I sent it to them.

So, by the same token, does Google have the rights to profile people even if they haven't consented to that? One answer, as with copyright, is to see what the law says; and it's very possible that the law says no, especially in the EU. (I've not researched it; others will doubtless know much more than I do.)

Or Google could just seek to do the right thing and not profile people unless they've opted in. But my definition of the right thing may well be different to theirs.

At least in Germany, Google definitely does not have the rights to profile people that have not opted in. The interesting part is

1. finding someone who is not using any Google service at all, and

2. finding their data in a Google database.

Which is the digital equivalent of "Don't walk out your front door".

My whole point in posting originally was to bring up the fact that the interesting discussion of different thresholds and having a spectrum of options is being lost in binary "privacy vs complete corporate control". It's not binary, and it does everyone a disservice to act like it can be for everyone.

We live in a world of Privacy Theater. Everyone is always complaining about "their privacy" as if they still have any, and it's kind of amusing.

Your phone's microphone can be turned on remotely and listen to what you say (I know several startups that do this). Security/traffic/drone/satellite cameras are everywhere. You are being watched literally all the time, but to think the watchers actually care about your personal life indicates a pretty inflated view of self-importance. We're starting to complain about it about 20 years too late.

It's also going to encompass "don't enter your friends' homes".

The sad part is that the user turned off Google Now because he didn't want google to know about the bar he visited. Google was tracking and recording his location before Google Now, he just didn't know it. It's still tracking it after he disabled Google Now.

The only difference being that the user now believes that she isn't being tracked now.

I hope that there will be a day when Google and Facebook will combine forces and work on a sequel to "The Lives of Others" [0].

[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/

> I hope that there will be a day when Google and Facebook will combine forces and work on a sequel to "The Lives of Others" [0].

Yeah, that's a great movie.

Yeah, but that is also the equivalent of 24/7 surveillance of all locations you visit. Google will end up figuring out whom you sleep with, etc. from that information.

Pretty much your only privacy is in your head at that point.

I'm not sure that is a "threshold" of privacy but rather a "I am okay with 24/7 surveillance of all of my activity."

hypothetically: you express radical political ideas to your friend with the expectation of your statements remaining in confidence-- but google was listening. now, your feed recommendations steer you further down the path google thinks you were already on. you are ready to attend a protest and perform civil disobedience, as google now knows based off of your interest in what it has been suggesting to you. it suggests (as facebook does now regarding making events for birthday parties etc) that you and some other people form that protest, and, because it said so, you do it. except it's a trap. the police's google feed tells them that some undesirables have planned a protest, and you're imprisoned.

is this story unrealistic, or has it already occurred?

I remember the huge smile I got on my face the first time Google Now picked up on the fact that I went to the same bar every Wednesday evening.

One Wednesday afternoon, at work, I got a notification saying "Travel time to the Lion & Crown". The first thing that ran through my head was "oh my god, I'm living in the future".

I am actually quite uncomfortable that my stock Android is making suggestions on how long it should take for me to get home or work (when I have never explicitly mentioned that it is my home or work).

The problem is that I want to use Google Maps so what choice do I really have?

Sure I use a dedicated gmail for my phone but that really does not help much.

HERE is an excellent maps alternative, I'd highly recommend it.

You should be glad that it doesn't remind you:

"Hey, it's a been a while. Why don't you go to ... today? Traffic conditions are favorable too."

Their business model is to attract and sell your attention to other companies.

Given that, and the existence of pervasive surveillance and data mining, the above is inevitable.

Or as one fellow once said on HN with regard to self driving cars and advertising as a business model:

"Oh you wanted to go to the bank today? Fuck you, we're going over by the mall" doors lock shut

Or maybe:

"I was feeling bored, so I drove down to the mall. Look what all did I get!"

And then prepares to rush the owner to the hospital.

Personally, I wish it did have reminders like that. Offer me a coupon too, while you're at it.

I would not want Google knowing I sometimes drink too much, or that I do so and get behind the wheel of a car. Easy inferences it could make, given the time I spent at the bar, and the purchases on my credit card. That could even have consequences for the cost of my auto insurance. Edit: and health insurance.

But wouldn't that be better for us as a society to know? The outcome sounds positive here.

I actually thought the most interesting point this article raised - for me at least - is the implict branding associated with the "OK Google" command. All privacy concerns aside, if I'm going to have a "personal Google" I want to be able to thoroughly personalize it.

but I think the fact that it's different for everyone is being lost in articles like this.

I think that it is different for everyone is completely and utterly obvious. It's clear the author doesn't think it's OK, but that it's his/her opinion.

This location history is really bad though. I added a test gmail account to my device a few weeks ago, but didn't remember location tracking was a per-account setting - now Google has nice big logs to hand whoever wants them and I can only delete them on a day-by-day basis (from the Android app at least).

Extremely annoying. This sort of thing should not be acceptable, an honest mistake results in every place I've been being logged in such a way that anyone with access to my Google account, access to Google servers or with a subpoena can have my full location history in a matter of seconds.

This needs to be a big red option every time you add an account "we're gonna log everywhere you go and hand it over to whoever we feel like, you cool with that?". It'd be different if the log and analysis were done only on my device, but doing this on Google's servers is completely unacceptable by anyone with even the weakest standards of privacy.

just having a mobile device you're being tracked in Australia now the Government now also has access to this data from the network providers the only way to be free is to not carry these devices

Find Google settings in one of these places (depending on your device):

In your Settings app Settings, scroll down and tap Google. Open a separate app called Google Settings Google Settings.

Tap Location and then Location History.

At the bottom of the screen, tap Delete Location History.

Also https://maps.google.com/locationhistory allows for delete all history.

Yeah, that's what I remembered, but it seems they replaced "Delete Location History" with a "Manage Activities" button which opens Google Maps and shows you location history, allowing you to delete it but only one day at a time.

EDIT: Okay, found it. Follow your instructions then open that "Manage Activities" -> Menu -> Settings -> Scroll down -> Delete All Location History.

You _must_ do this for every account if you have multiple.

  You _must_ do this for every account if you have multiple.

As I would expect? I don't know of any service that has a "And also do this for all my other distinct acounts too".

It depends how you view what you're setting.

Do you think you're setting a behavior of the phone, or a behavior of your account?

I guess it could be both but I view it first as a setting of the account since you can also be location tracked perhaps by a browser, or your Wear device? That would be my first go-to on that setting but I guess it can be seen both ways.

Wear devices have to be paired with a phone and browsers don't really have the constant access they want for this.

A global "turn off and delete all location history on this device" would be best, really.

At least for turning it off I expected it to be phone wide, not account specific. Deletion yeah, I suppose you're right.

What makes you think that deleting location history actually deletes the history? Reminds one of the group of students called Europe v. Facebook [0]:

  Schrems described the file obtained through a legal request as
  a 500MB PDF including data the user thought they had
  deleted. The one sent through a regular Facebook request was a
  150MB HTML file and included video (the PDF did not) but did
  not have the deleted data.

[0] https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2114059/facebook-file

Definitely, and this is why it needs to be a global option to disable location history - just sending it to them in the first place is the problem!

Can't you simply disable the GPS radio?

I still want maps, I just don't want my every move logged or sent to Google.

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