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Comment by laurent123456 | Hacker News Reader

What are these "Google" notifications? Is that a "Google" app generating them? If so, can't it be disabled or uninstalled? I don't have this on my Android phone but I've uninstalled or disabled everything Google related. And if you don't want to be tracked, you can also switch off Location History.

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If you try to disable many Google-provided apps on Android, you're presented with a scary-looking screen warning you about system instability, and it's legit. If I attempt to disable Chrome on my phone, for instance, it causes every single app on my phone to crash upon any interaction whatsoever, including third-party apps like Signal. Funny how Chrome is more inseparable from Android than Internet Explorer was from Windows.

I have Google Chrome turned off, and it works fine. I have Fennec, loaded via F-Droid as my browser. You have to have some browser, but it doesn't have to be Google Chrome.

One thing that seems to help is that, when I get a new phone, I turn all this stuff off before connecting to anything or even putting in a SIM card. So Google never gets a chance to control the phone's connections to the outside world.

Eh? I have Chrome disabled on several devices (Pixel, ASUS Zenpad, Nexus 7) and the OS works just fine. You need to have some default browser set to avoid apps crashing when they attempt to open links, but Firefox (or any other browser) will do.

To be fair I can't imagine anything more inseparable than IE and earlier versions of Windows (not sure about the latest ones, haven't used Windows in more than a decade). The HTML engine was literally part of the system in the form of various DLLs shared across pretty much all of Microsoft apps. You could theoretically remove the the browser app which was just a thin GUI, but all the security holes of the engine would still be there.

I have Location History on (it's complicated to justify it in my own head, but I find the feature useful, and it's not like my phone company and Google don't know my location - at least this way I get some benefit from it). I have basically every other "history" item disabled on my Google account. I constantly encounter new features that I'm interested in using, but for whatever reason they require me to enable App and Web Usage History (or something like that) for my Google account, so I decline, as I don't want to open that can of worms.

The specific feature in question here is part of Google Maps and can be disabled in the preferences pane of that app. For one of various reasons I could speculate this particular setting doesn't persist across devices, so if I get a new device (or, sometimes after an OS update) I will have to go back and disable it again. It makes me angry every time.

> but for whatever reason they require me to enable App and Web Usage History (or something like that) for my Google account, so I decline, as I don't want to open that can of worms.

Such as dictating new text messages in Android auto. Boggles my mind how they could legitimately need by web history for that, especially since replying to text messages works.

On newer Android versions, "essential" Google apps can not be disabled or uninstalled anymore.

As this was downvoted last time I made this statement, and claimed to be a lie, this time I took screenshots on a Nexus 5X running Android Oreo 8.1 official build, showing that this is the case: https://imgur.com/a/AVmLN

Google Maps can be disabled just fine, on 5X or new Pixel XLs running 8.1.

I don't get any of this on Android either, because I have almost all Google stuff turned off and replaced with F-Droid and open source. No Google Play Store, no Google Location Services, no Google Maps (ZaNavi instead), no Keep, no Photos, no Registration, no YouTube app. No Gmail (I use a Sonic.net IMAP server shared by all my computers, and K-9 mail), no Google account. Some of those apps bitch when you disable them that something will break, but all that breaks is Google intrusiveness.

Android without Google works quite well. Better than with Google.

Would question if works better. I am a pretty big fan of Google services but get people concerned about privacy but question if there is something that works better and has privacy.

I also look at it that rather my data be at just one company as much as possible and have chosen that company to be Google.

I just trust Google a lot more then say my cable provider to not sell my data to a third party. Fully aware Google is going to use to Target ads.

They're generated by the Maps app which is where you can then also see the result of that crowdsourcing.

You can disable them in Maps settings (or disable Maps app altogether).

This is Google Maps. The option to turn these notification types is under the Notification settings for Google Maps.

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