Google – My Activity | Hacker News Reader

Google – My Activity

myactivity.google.com

278 pointssergiotapia158 comments

I hate that google products are such crap if you don't let them remember everything about you. I deactivated the maps tracking on the privacy page recently because the wording made it sounds creepy, like they can keep track of where I am whenever they have it, not just the destinations I ask for navigation to. As a result, they don't suggest any places at all and instead make me type it out until the generic autocomplete gets it. No local storage on my phone, not even speeding up the autocomplete for the single place on google maps I have favorited. They seem to be very much all or nothing :( Either we track you everywhere or nowhere at all and gimp our products.

It's not a technical limitation, either. There's plenty of cases where they could use use information locally on your device without sending it back to the mothership, but instead they deliberately cripple their services if you don't allow access.

One example - have you ever noticed how Google Maps has barely any street names any more? And the streets that are named are random tiny side streets, no matter how far you zoom in or out. It's because it's designed to be used in Directions mode with location services enabled, and only in Directions mode with location services enabled. You don't need street names if you're a dot following a blue line. Just coincidentally, this is the mode where they get full information about your journey.

> It's because it's designed to be used in Directions mode with location services enabled, and only in Directions mode with location services enabled.

If you don't provide a source for this, I'm going to call bullshit.

Screenshot of desktop Google Maps without sign-in: http://prnt.sc/d4j744

Screenshot of Android Google Maps without sign-in: http://prnt.sc/d4jwdy

Both look full of street names to me.

Here you go!

https://www.justinobeirne.com/essay/what-happened-to-google-...

it was on HN a few months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11604387

The maps on the right in this article are a pretty good approximation to what I get on my last and current phones. It only touches briefly on street names and other labels but the dramatic reduction is clearly visible.

taneq was saying that Google Maps now shows very few street names, but your link doesn't talk about street names, and is about city names instead.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, on unrelated stuff.)

You should read all the article.

I have Location turned off on my phone and have had Location History by Google turned off for ages. Google Maps on my Galaxy S6 looks like the desktop screenshot.

"...They deliberately cripple" is the wrong wording, they designed it so that they extract maximum value out of you. Because you, are not paying them. Their services are maximally efficient... for them, and just efficient enough for you not to ditch them.

Which is pretty much equivalent. From their point of view, it's some optimum of profit-to-usability space. From my point of view, it's a hodgepodge of subpar features, user-hostile addons and stupid engineering decisions (being on-line when you don't need to), that I nevertheless can't abandon, because everyone else is doing an even worse job.

I see where you're coming from, and I agree that they designed it to extract maximum value from their users. But when, in order to do so, they deliberately make their product punish non-data-yielding users, I think that absolutely deserves to be described as "deliberately crippled."

Your initial point and example are completely unrelated. There are many examples where Google services suck without their online servers, Maps is one of the few that can actually work really well in offline mode.

Google Maps has the whole download area features[0]. If you have an area downloaded, you can see the entire area rendered at (any/most?) zoom levels, see street names, and even get directions.

As for information density, it seems to be a choice of the Google Maps team to show less data at various zoom levels. That has little to do with talking to their online services and more about how the maps team wants to present data to their users.

[0] https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291838?co=GENIE.Plat...

> Maps is one of the few that can actually work really well in offline mode.

Just how long will it take for google to ask you to long it to do all those useful things that it does? Ability to escape googles panopticon is one of the reasons it's important to support OpenStreetMap https://donate.openstreetmap.org/

I think you might need to reinstall Maps or something. Mine displays the names you would expect at every zoom level, with and without location services turned on.

How can they suggest places without sending your location to their servers? I would expect all the "intelligence" (place recommendation etc.) to be implemented server-side.

Very simply. It's as trivial as you can imagine.

You prefetch the list of locations in the area of interest (there won't be that many compared to the humongous amounts of space Google apps consume already), you keep your user's "personality matrix" synchronized, and then when user asks, e.g., for a restaurant nearby, you display them from off-line cache, sorted by distance, characteristics and by how well they match user's personality matrix.

It would be that simple, if it was about actually suggesting places. But it isn't. It's about suggesting places that pay for advertising and successfully billing them, while also collecting as much data about the users as possible. It's a common occurrence on mobile (and also increasingly common in hardware and desktop software) - things that don't need to be on-line are put on the Internet nevertheless, to facilitate a specific business model.

Someone once told me that this is how Apple Maps works so that they can maintain a high privacy standard - though I'd be curious if someone else could verify.

Maybe, for starters, by querying the area of the map that is currently displayed, rather than your current location? Which is more in line with what you'd usually want anyway.

On my Window phone, I have an app that can do navigation while offline... many companies, like Google, want everything to be server side because they want to learn more about you.

I would like to take roughly the "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" approach here and suggest that it's not an intentional crippling, but the fact that the product developers likely do not design for a logged out experience in the least.

I run tech for a few websites, and we could design for the "no JS" user, there are likely MINOR changes needed for much better support, but it's simply not something that we consider at all. I imagine it's similar with Google, they're designing for the logged in user, with maybe automated testing on the logged out user.

One thing I (and many non-technical friends) found creepy recently is how Google Maps monitors your phone camera. An update quietly pushed this on-by-default feature for the purpose of prompting you to add images to their product.

I wrote more on this and how to disable it here: https://unop.uk/on-google-maps-geotagging-and-privacy

Edit: looks like they have pushed out at least two new on-by-default features since I wrote this (not that long ago); 'photo view count opportunities' and 'new and popular places'.

Seems like people actually like this feature judging by the response‽ Or maybe they just work for Google. :)

Well, "monitors your phone camera" is a very misleading way to put it. They "monitor" your photo library, in a way that I think most people would expect. If you take a picture with the GPS on, obviously your phone knows where you are, it's not that weird to ask you something based on your location. I don't think most people expect Google Maps to be completely disconnected from the rest of their Google phone.

OK, I could have been more precise in my wording. I meant that it monitor photos that you take with your phone camera not that it constantly monitors what the camera sees. I didn't intend to mislead and I think that's a reasonable interpretation.

I still think that this is unexpected behaviour. It belongs in the camera app, not the maps app. The expectation is that apps are sand-boxed and separate from each other.

I have anecdotal evidence from friends who don't normally care about issues like this. Yet they felt compelled enough to pro-actively share this with comments similar to "NO GOOGLE!", which suggests it's not just me.

I mean from Google's perspective this sorta makes sense. It's a lot safer to turn literally any tracking/storage off than to get people accusing you of violating your user agreement.

That is a good point, especially when you're dealing with people who are concerned with privacy. Sometimes they can be... uhm.. extremely zealous.. about their privacy. They probably feel they need to default to giving them complete autonomy.

What would happen if a company violated its user agreement? Are those agreements even legally actionable?

Since you don't pay for most Google services, I doubt you could recover any damages.

Legal action is the very large recourse.

They would lose credibility, which would make them lose (a lot of) money indirectly.

The wording is exactly correct. If your devices send your location in any way, they may collect and store that sent location.

It's probably just for their Location History thing. Which I actually really enjoy using, since I can see all of my past days and where I went. It's pretty neat.

This is actually something I use very frequently, and wish had more data/functionality. It's insane to be able to answer the question of "where did I go" for yesterday[1] (we've all had bouts of bad short term memory), two weeks ago[2], or a year ago[3].

I've been using this feature for so long I assume it's opt-in (I don't remember), but I fully recommend it to anyone that has an inkling of a thought that they _might_ want it later, since you can always delete[4] your location history if you decide you don't.

It's also really cool if you go on a lot of trips or take a lot of photos, because it'll map them out in a timeline view of where/when you took them throughout the day[5].

[1] http://i.imgur.com/gWzMgUp.png [2] http://i.imgur.com/Eq7IGnK.png [3] http://i.imgur.com/HEeZupJ.png [4] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en [5] http://i.imgur.com/dF5TI3q.png

You opt in when you connect your Android device to your Google account for the first time, I think.

The government thinks it's really neat too. ;)

The the people downvoting this thinking they're cute: totalitarianism is no joke, and your apathy infringes on my rights. You flat out do not get to be this lame.

Get rid of your toys before your toys get rid of you.

What right(s) of yours does my apathy infringe upon?

Yeah, exactly. This Location History thing could provide me with an alibi if someone was trying to sue me for something I didn't do. It enhances my rights instead of lessening them, in my opinion. And it doesn't touch anyone else's rights.

Reminds me of the quote from The Dark Forest - "make time for civilization, for civilization won't make time."

This is the reason why I am reluctant to dive into the android ecosystem. And i wonder why not more people are?

Your phone becomes basically a giant google-keylogger, with geo capabilities.

I think, generally, people are of the mindset, "Yes, I give all my data to Google, and I don't mind it because they power awesome services with it in return".

F-Droid has OsmAnd~ for free for you, it's really good and worth recommending. No tracking, offline maps, offline searches, compatible with µG location services, save and browse POIs... plenty of options that GM or Apple won't offer.

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=net.osmand.plus

It's a good application, but having used it I found that it was often very difficult or even impossible to locate my destination and when navigating it often had some funny ideas about what route to take; Google offered much better routing and searching. I ended up saving all the locations I wanted to visit before setting out just to make sure that I could get to them easily.

+1 for OSM and OsmAnd. Often much better data than Google and it works offline. Although the UI can lag a bit at times.

Worth donating to OSM if you use it: https://donate.openstreetmap.org

And all of the USA's OSM data in just 5 GB on your SD card if you want.

Are you saying you use Apple's products for privacy reasons?

Not parent, but this is one of the reasons I prefer Apple. They have a better track record. Also, they sell hardware, your data is not the primary product.

> they sell hardware Not always: http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/01/17/massachusetts-laws...

Also, you cant know how much Apple stores about you.

I'm almost annoyed Apple doesn't use more of my data: it would probably make many of their services better.

One of my friends had an interesting remark about the "privacy opt outs". It's that google always tracks you, no matter what checkbox you check or uncheck. Why not use the data they are already collecting about you to improve your daily life then.

Why is your friend saying that? Is there any proof that Google is not taking those privacy options into consideration?

Anonymized data is more comfortable than identified data.

Anonymized how? Even if you don't log in, Google can probably figure out with 99.99% accuracy who you really are.

Out of habit, I tend to always use a not-logged in state for everything, and if I need a particular service (including Google), I do so in an Incognito window.

However, I don't use a VPN or spoof my User Agent. Google 100% knows who I am without using any fancy tricks. I've wondered -- wouldn't I be better off logging in everywhere, with my Google privacy settings flipped to maximum? While it's certainly possible for them to map my fingerprint back to my account(s) and opt-out preferences, I think that's a bit much to expect for them. I might be shooting myself in the foot by always being logged out!

There is no such thing as "anonymized data". There's only "insufficient data to cross-correlate the identities back".

  > the wording made it sounds creepy, like they can keep 
  > track of where I am whenever they have it, not just the 
  > destinations I ask for navigation to

This is actually the case, as far as I can tell. Check it out for yourself by going to Google Maps (doesn't matter if it's the web client or the app), open the hamburger menu from the button in the search box, then click "My Timeline". From there enter any date (in the app, first click the calendar icon) and it'll show you where Google knows your phone was at on that date.

They're doing that with their Speech-to-Text software. I know voice recognition is available offline for phones but it isn't available for download and use without connection to the cloud.

I use Xposed/XPrivacy to restrict my phone's Google app from accessing the internet, which forces voice recognition into local/offline mode. In this mode, it cannot do true dictation style text-to-speech, but it does still recognize and respond to voice commands.

Totally this. I was having to type my full street name (15 chars) just to get directions home.

No local / device only search history is a joke.

I share your pain. At least saved items are there and even synchronised. I'm using the save function more and more.

Exactly. Want to find that place you just searched for? No can do, unless you let us track you 24 hours a day.

You're correct that disabling location tracking disables place suggestion.

But place suggestion is just ads, and unless they've improved it, not even for places that are open. Who needs that?

You get what you pay for.

I love the location timeline feature. For example last summer I did a road trip driving from Finland to Venice, Italy through Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France. Many times after the trip I've checked up exact locations for DSLR photos and actual hiking routes on the mountains. What was the name of the small medieval German town and the cafe that we had the perfect flammkuchen by the town square? Just a sec, I'll check out on the location history! This is only one kind of a example where I have found the location timeline useful.

Edit: Also I've found it useful to check actual driving times for commuting and other trips. "Last tuesday I left home at 08:35 and took the tram and it took me 17 minutes."

I really wish this actually showed my activity. This is a partially honest, very limited version of my real google account activity.

I would love to data mine what Google has on me. I'm sure I'll get a copy someday. Almost everything on the internet eventually is released via acquisitions, subpoenas, hackers, etc...

https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

that doesn't provide everything though. at the very least, it doesn't have all the advertising dossier they have on me.

Perhaps that is because they are unable to join your advertising profile with your account, under various terms of services and agreements.

"We will not combine DoubleClick cookie information with personally identifiable information unless we have your opt-in consent."

So you can't really expect them to be able to cough up the contents of profile 0x3f47d0387acb94857 when asked for the history of your account, if they are forbidden from joining the two domains together.

> Perhaps that is because they are unable to join your advertising profile with your account, under various terms of services and agreements.

You should read this and reconsider. From the article: "The change is enabled by default for new Google accounts. Existing users were prompted to opt-in to the change this summer." https://www.propublica.org/article/google-has-quietly-droppe...

So? "Users were prompted to opt-in" != "Everyone chose to opt-in".

in my past experience google is a master in disguising these opt-in prompts as mandatory, with a tiny tiny X somewhere or a "skip" button only showing up when unticking the correct checkboxes

You mean deeper analytics they infer from your behaviour (queries, time, cursor...) and the kind of ads they end up showing ?

Yes

Like https://www.google.com/settings/ads ?

According to this, google doesn't know if Im male or female. It must not be showing what they really know about me.

Never attribute to malice, what can be easily explained by a lack of technological progress.

Maybe they've just not got enough data on you?

And ML can be a bit of a black box like that. Google knows what kind of ads to likely work, but that doesn't mean they have an explicit binary judgement or cluster figured out on any one of the dimensions.

That's a real good point. It doesn't really matter if I'm male or female as long a they know what to sell me.

Doesn't include cookie tracking and probably thousands or more tracking categories.

It's kinda cool to be able to look back at this stuff, I almost wish this were more integrated into the rest of Google so that I could rely on this (and for better awareness).

Just out of curiosity, how old are you, if you don't mind?

Your comment makes me assume you are very young or you work at Google. I don't mean that snarky, but your comment is a very different response than the rest of this thread.

35 here. DevOps software engineer. Also do not work for Google. I personally find this stuff fascinating and not particularly creepy. I'm far more concerned about credit reporting agencies and their data retention/sharing habits than I am with Google and my search history.

I'm not the one you are asking but I share the same thoughts on general search history.

I'm late 20s and I don't have any affiliation with Google.

It is nice because I can go back to 10 years ago and see what I searched, essentially taking me back to that time and loads of memories come back. "Why was I searching for cheat for this game? Oh yeah because this was the summer when I was playing with person X, Y and Z while doing A, B and C".

It's just kinda.. nice.

That's your interface to the data. Now imagine an NSA-like interface to the data. What is in there that you might not want future employers, dates, or others to know about the corners of your (and everyone's) life? Then imagine if your least preferred political candidate gets elected several times in a row and has access to all that data about potential "undesirables". Think of the journalists, the political volunteers, the victims of stalking or abuse, the LGBTQ, the women who had an abortion after being pressured into sex, and think of that information in the hands of a corrupt regime, or hacked by a hostile foreign power (or radical religious hacker group).

This potential scenario is valid, but it doesn't change my mind.

History features could be implemented in a way that keeps all sensitive data on devices you control. The only way to encourage more privacy-respecting implementations is to consider the downsides, especially for people less fortunate or less mainstream or at greater risk, and demand technology that gives us the features we want without harming the privacy of everyone else in the process.

I love having this info. I do NOT love Google having this info. There is no reason Google needs this info in order for me to have this info.

One reason: Google needs this info in order to give it to you.

Sure, you can acquire this info via some other means, but that would mean someone else having it.

Google could hold the data encrypted against a key you control and they do not. You'd have access to the data, and could control specifically when and to whom it's released.

It would continue to be backed up on Google's servers.

Yes but then why would they ever offer such services without monetisation opportunities?

I was hoping someone might ask.

1. The snooping doesn't buy much ad placement benefit. That from Roberto Bayardo, Google advertising engineer.

2. The idea is not to cram ads down people's throughts all the time, but to not skeeve people off so much that you're not wwhere they go for purchase recommendations. If that means services which are mostly privacy-aware but that this means that you're where maps or shopping or search queries happen, that's a win.

A counter might be that Google's primary aim now isn't ads but AI and training data. I still think that not annoying or alarming people is preferable. Some data are better than no data, or intentionally distorted data, or massive regulatory burden.

Short answer: because privacy-promoting would be the better business choice.

Google got so big because it didn't "cram ads down people's throats all the time", I don't know why you think that.

Are you saying Google should drop Maps, Gmail, Drive and all the rest because they are not valuable from a business perspective? Their business is ads after all (today at least).

I actively avoid Maps and Gmail because of the ads (and surveillance). Similarly Google search itself.

Which means that when I am open to suggestion I am on other services.

By not maximising the short-term ad-impressions (or other short-term) metric, Google increases odds of being there when people are interested in its money-maker: quality suggestions for commercial goods and services.

They've lost me. I suspect they'll lose others.

They've probably lost you but their business model is not shrinking, at all. Far from it.

>>> By not maximising the short-term ad-impressions (or other short-term) metric, Google increases odds of being there when people are interested in its money-maker: quality suggestions for commercial goods and services

Google is already 18 yo, they are clearly not playing the short term game.

And they are offering quality suggestions for commercial goods and services. People are arguing whether or not they collect too much data for said services, but I haven't heard anyone complain that their ads are obtrusive. Including yourself.

You could implement it locally though.

I spend my days maintaining a few years of data at work. Making sure it's backed up, always accessible.

I do not want to do that in my off time.

I know "do it locally" is often repeated here, but do you really expect a local solution to be able to get this kind of information and keep it safe, secure, and constantly working for this long? And how much time, money, and effort should you spend maintaining such a solution?

I have data in my Google account going back 10 years! That's impressive as hell!

I am the same poster who posted above (liking the data being there). I was just pointing out that is "is" possible to do it without google handling it.

Personally I actually do track some "hourly" data, maybe 2-3 hours in total to set it up and it's running for 2-3 years. I suppose you could add some time to run it through some encryption software and put it in Dropbox without too much of a hassle.

Something equivalent to Google's location timeline which could be quickly set up on my own server would be worth paying for.

Well, I'm over forty, and I think this sort of thing is awesome, and very useful. I love being able to see where I was on a business trip, work out where that interesting shop I stopped at but forgot to write down the name of was or see where I was drinking with friends the night before (stayed in one location from 22h00 to 03h30, then looks like I got a taxi home, that must be it!) but was too busy enjoying myself to make a note of the bar's location...

And, as people get older and their biological memory starts to suffer, this sort of external memory jogging feature will only get more and more useful, I suspect.

I use this relatively often. Mostly because it provides history search across devices. So if I ever looked for something before and found just the right answer I can retrace my steps from only a vague recollection.

However the UI is a bit awkward for that usage. It seems to definitely be designed more for the average user who is using it exclusively for history deletion, like the activity log on facebook. The default grouping of entries makes deleting them in chunks easy but scanning through them hard. The UI also makes it easy to spot what site an entry is for at a glance but chooses not to show the url despite having plenty of space to.

I was just thinking the same thing. Very strange that Chrome doesn't provide users cross-device history search, while Google stores that information in my account activity anyway..

It does for me. Doesn't chrome://history/ show you all the devices you're signed into?

No activity. I deactivated all my settings years ago, I'm glad it hasn't magically reset.

I appreciate that Google allows me to turn their data collection off, though I still avoid Google services where possible. I hope that this page tells the truth.

Google allows you to disassociate the data they collect from you from your account. That neither turns off data collection nor guarantees that it's impossible to associate your name with an activity stream.

It appears that their interface does not tell the truth. My YouTube search history is off, but the YouTube history is still displaying on that page, so they are still collecting and storing the info.

I found the same about YT history. None of the videos that I view on the laptop are shown in the history, only videos viewed on mobile.

I think it's because I block ip addresses, that track your data, on the laptop.

Same here, but do I really believe that Google has nothing on me? Not for a microsecond.

If you are concerned you aren't getting all your data from google, if you live in Europe this probably applies: https://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/Accessing-Your-Personal-I...

Accessing Your Personal Information

How can I see what information a body or company holds about me? Under Section 3 of the Data Protection Acts, you have a right to find out, free of charge, if a person (an individual or an organisation) holds information about you. You also have a right to be given a description of the information and to be told the purpose(s) for holding your information.

You must make the request in writing. The person must send you the information within 21 days.

Under Section 4 of the Data Protection Acts, 1988 and 2003, you have a right to obtain a copy, clearly explained, of any information relating to you kept on computer or in a structured manual filing system or intended for such a system by any entity or organisation. All you need to do is write to the organisation or entity concerned and ask for it under the Data Protection Acts. Your request could read as follows:

Dear ... I wish to make an access request under Section 4 of the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003 for a copy of any information you keep about me, on computer or in manual form in relation to.... (Fill in as much information as possible to assist the organisations to locate the data that you are interested in accessing e.g. customer account number, staff number, or PPS number (if you are writing to a public sector organisation such as the Revenue Commissioners or the Department of Social Protection)).

Can you request your information if you don't live in Europe? I'd be really interested in finding out what info Google has on me.

Do you know of anyone that has previously requested access to their info? I'd be extremely curious of what the response looks like (even if it had to be anonimized to protect the requester's privacy).

I imagine it would be a link to that takeout page :) I haven't tried it myself. This can be used with any company in Ireland, anyone who used facebook in Europe for example, linked-in, twitter etc

Same I would love to hear from anyone who has actually done this!

Interesting stream. Another one is Google maps on Android. I just went through my month of commutés, corelated with pictures taken. 'interesting'

>I just went through my month of commutés, corelated with pictures taken. 'interesting'

That's because you used Google Maps to track your location history (which, at least when I first discovered the feature, had to be manually enabled), then took pictures which you uploaded to Google Photos. As a HN user, I'm sure you know that images often have location metadata. Google simply connected the two bits of information you provided to them by using their services.

Honestly, of all things that google does, this is probably the least creepy.

Oh I didn't mean it was a scandal, just that tracked web queries feel one way, tracked location history feel very different. It's an automatic blog of another side of your life and day by day it amounts to a fair bit of data that is easy not to see if not shown.

Appears you can actually search your youtube watch history here, I've always been annoyed that you can't inside the actual youtube website when I'm trying to find things I watched a few months earlier.

It's weird youtube can't even remember what I've watched. I'm constantly having to go into my recommendations and selecting Not Interested -> Tell us why -> I've seen this video before.

I think YouTube recommends those videos to you, because people are actually more likely to rewatch videos they have enjoyed in the past. So YouTube gets more views from old videos -> more revenue.

I'm mildly insulted whenever they play a spanish ad. They've been doing this more and more lately. I don't speak spanish but I'm glad they seem to know I'm hispanic.

Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12042613

Good. It shows no activity. I've disabled every form of data collection and don't use maps (using Here WeGo with offline maps instead).

Looking at the (mostly) devops related stuff I've searched for, it surprised me how naive an automated ad optimization service can be to offer relevant recommendations to me.

I thought it was a carefully formed bit of magic. It looks like I make it easy for them.

If I could do any one useful thing with this data, is recommend people I can connect with who are domain experts in the things I search for. Like if there's a Vagrant/Chef wizard with a fairly prolific web presence, I'd like to know about them.

Funny thing: I had everything already disabled except the Youtube ones, but it didn't show any activity more recent than April. Except I'm using Youtube extensively, and the history (both search and views) in Youtube itself has the most recent stuff from today.

Even more interesting, I now disabled the Youtube activities there, but the new things I've watched and searched after the change are still showing up in Youtube's history (but not on the myactivity page, thankfully).

I have all of my history turned off, including YouTube search history, but it's still showing me my YouTube search history there.

Hangs in Firefox mobile on s7.

Google, you of all can do better.

They used to have another interface for this which was way more powerful, and let you delete all your history for a service at once (ie. delete all of your YouTube search history). This seems like a downgrade designed to make you work harder to erase your history, since you have to do it item by item.

https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity

Does this not work for you? You can delete by any time range, for any service.

Yep. And my trust in an entity goes down every time they make things obviously more difficult. They’re counting on users becoming tired of navigating or just careless, while technically complying with any laws because everything is “possible” by going “somewhere”. I loved the original Google and Facebook, both in terms of interface and behavior. The new versions of those companies/products are so bad that I have used them both less and less each week for years now.

>Sie haben die Kontrolle

>Sie können ganz einfach einzelne Einträge oder ganze Themenbereiche löschen. Außerdem können Sie in den Einstellungen festlegen, welche Daten mit Ihrem Konto verknüpft werden sollen.

In two out of three occurrences I read "Sie" as "They" )) Fun!

Hmm... my searches of my activity don't show up in my activity

I'm not the big privacy advocate, but have this turned off because I can't see any convincing (to/for me) use case for storing all that crap :)

These settings are not turned on

Web & App Activity

Voice & Audio Activity

YouTube Watch History

YouTube Search History

Perfect!

This is super unnerving to me.

Has anyone in this company actual had an encounter with a REAL person not a Google employee in the past few years?

I didn't know google was tracking individual apps that I use! And every voice search is stored too.

A solid reminder why my main browser is Firefox.

I only use Chrome for development.

Best of both worlds.

Firefox uses google's safe browsing web service[0], so Google gets your data anyway (unless you've disabled it).

[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-m...

Disabling safe browsing is bad advice. It uses a local bloom filter and transmits only gashed of prefixes of the URL if the filter says "maybe". It's pretty well thought out and you should not just recommend to people to turn it off, it's a valuable security tool, and certainly preferable to a ransomware infection, wouldn't you say?

I never said to turn it off... I said that google will get your browsing data. That said, I firmly believe that the best antivirus is common sense. Everyday users should keep it turned on but people who read HN (should) know enough to be safe without it.

That's the exact point, though, Google does not get your browsing data.

What Firefox does, is that it downloads a complete list of hashes from Google's Safebrowsing server. Every instance of Firefox does this every 30 minutes. Nothing identifying about this.

Firefox then stores only the first 32 bits of those hashes to save on space (as the list is unsurprisingly gigantic). Then Firefox does a lookup against this locally stored list whenever it loads a webpage. If a webpage's first 32 bits should be on that list, then it obviously has to check if it's actually the complete hash that matches. But for that, it requests all hashes with same first 32 bits from Mozilla's server. They proxy the list for that purpose.

So, it's at best Mozilla which can guess that you browsed to one of the many pages that share the first 32 bits of the hash. Google will have no clue about it.

And in fact, they even throw in a few noise entries when requesting the full hashes from their server, so even Mozilla actually doesn't know for sure which first 32 bits you browsed to.

https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...

Don't use Firefox. They are not trustworthy. Use Opera.

and you make that claim based on what exactly?

"Visited [insert all my untracked searches here] at DuckDuckGo"

Hmmm... Did I ask anyone explicitly to store that information?

Google pretends that it can keep this information behind closed doors without sharing anything with advertisers. But this is not true. Data leaks out, and here is an example of how this might happen.

Let's say you are interested in knowing which people watch a lot of cat videos. And let's pretend these people don't want to publicly share with everybody that they like cat videos. To find these people, you simply start a Google Ad campaign targeted at people who like cat videos. But the ad will be for an unrelated product, for example, coffee pads. Now every time somebody clicks on your ad and perhaps orders your coffee pads, you know that this person likes cat videos.

Ergo, your data is not compeletely safe with Google and it can leak, contrary to what they make us believe.

Except Google let's you control what ads you're targeted for: https://www.google.com/settings/u/1/ads/authenticated

In your hypothetical, Cat lovers who want to keep that information private can remove 'Pets & Animals - Pets - Cats' from their account targeting. Now they won't see the coffee pad ads.

And no, coffee pad advertisers can't target you based on your pornography viewing habits, HSV cream purchases, or any number of slippery slope examples.

Google had a point if their service was opt-in, but it isn't.

Also, the topic "Cat videos" does not appear, so I have to create it myself? How do I know if Google matches e.g. "Cat" with "Cat videos"?

Further, my other interests may correlate with being a cat video fan, so I have to blank them out as well. But how do I know which they are?

Sorry, but this solution is clearly broken.

(Btw, how does Facebook handle this?)

Advertisers can't target display ads to "Cat videos", they can only target audience topics - i.e. the ones you see and set to your account.

If you think a topic is correlated with one you want to keep private, then you can also keep that topic private by removing it as well. It's well within your own judgement and control, so no, it's not broken.

Facebook lets you do exactly the same thing: https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/

Google's ad controls panel says this (after fully disabling targeted advertising):

"Ads you see may still be based on your general location (such as city or county) or recent searches"

Hence, broken.

Also, how about AdWords? As far as I know, you can link any search term (even a competitor's name) to any type of ad you want.

If you purchase something from a location based ad, the advertiser is going to have your billing and shipping information, so that's just splitting hairs at this point.

You're thinking of keyword advertising, not display. AdWords can do both display and keyword advertising, the latter of which is different. Advertisers don't see demographic information about who clicks on their search ads because they can can only target by keywords, so your theory of leaky data doesn't apply there either.

That's also the second time you've moved the goal posts as you've learned more about how online advertising works. Kind of reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

> If you purchase something from a location based ad, the advertiser is going to have your billing and shipping information, so that's just splitting hairs at this point.

Emphasis is on "recent searches", not on the location.

> They can can only target by keywords, so your theory of leaky data doesn't apply there either

Yes, you are more right here (and here only). If ads are only shown when you are actively searching for their keywords, then whether there is a leak is questionable. But an advertiser could still trick one to reveal information, like in a phishing attack, by using keywords unrelated to the ad.

> That's also the second time you've moved the goal posts as you've learned more about how online advertising works.

Thanks for educating me, but my argument still stands. In fact that second time, I placed the goal post back at its original place, since apparently, Google's ad controls do not allow one to turn off ads based on recent searches.

That kind of information leakage would seriously dent Google's business model, which is why I am sceptical of your theory.

Terrible. A minimal attempt at data transparency. A fine grained reverse chronological list of potentially tens of thousands of data points gives you no ability to sort/filter/understand what's there.

Google will also never tell you what they've inferred about you, what ads have been tailored for you, and why. Their real gold is still hidden.

What they've inferred about you: https://www.google.com/settings/ads

that website doesnt show anything they inferred about me, just some settings.

That's very little of what their models have on you to power each product.

What makes you think they have more than that?

I'm pretty sure Google has plenty of users willing to share their data that they wouldn't risk the legal and political shitstorm that would come out of secretly storing data about you...

Open up Google Inbox or Google Now -- all these 'smart' features are extracted and interpreted from your underlying data. Or do a google search logged in vs not logged in.. the results will be different.

The models are very complex and often not something that can be meaningfully represented, especially when you're a data point inside a neural network.

I have no idea why I'm being downvoted... anyone who has done any machine learning can attest to these basic facts, not to mention I've worked at Google.

I never said it wasn't complex or could be meaningfully represented, but you were implying that they have more "data" than they are showing.

If you are worried because they are making "hidden associations" from this data, my question would be how to display that? How would they possibly show you all of the assumptions, associations, interpretations, and calculations they did, do, or will gather from your data?

If you are going to fault them for not displaying that data, shouldn't it be possible to display it in the first place?

A fine grained list of thousands of items can have summaries. These summaries can reflect actual models, or be new ways of visualizing and digging into the data.

Existing models can be depicted in a wide variety of ways. They could either be the results of previous decisions (description through action), they could be expressed as is should the model be more human-readable (e.g. text clusters), they could be visualized somewhat directly [1], or they could visualized indirectly [2].

"My activity" seems like a nice idea, but the execution ends up providing little value to few people. If the idea is transparency over Google's personal data on you (how they framed it in an email to me), it does a poor job. If the idea is a better understanding of yourself (quantified life), it does a poor job. If the idea is finding some youtube video you watched recently, then it's mediocre depending on how long ago it was. In what scenario is it some spectacular & useful product?

[1] http://static.azinman.com/pdfs/dataportraiture.pdf

[2] http://yosinski.com/deepvis

I would be more surprised if they were not asked to store publicly not accessible information about everyone.

It's not about "data transparency", it's just a sort of quantified life thing. Like if you googled that one particular thing and it's not showing up in your history, you can check your activity log and you'll have a good chance at finding it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com