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Comment by saulrh | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to be completely honest here: If these things were behind a configuration option and defaulted to off, I'd have gone into my phone and turned that option on. I want to leave reviews for restaurants as I'm walking out of them - it serves the common good and doing it immediately is better for memory. I want to remember to download offline maps when I'm about to go somewhere where I won't have coverage. My memory is terrible enough that I can't do those things myself. Google obviously can't provide this service out of the goodness of its heart, of course it's going to have self-serving tweaks added on, but I consider those to be easily worth the value I get out of Google Prosthetic Associative Memory.

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I can similarly say: If I could pay for the services of Google with money instead of with my data (which will be used in ways I cannot imagine or control), then I'd gladly do that.

Why? Well, the problem with Google is they have an incentive to do bad things to us, simply because we are not the real customer.

> Why? Well, the problem with Google is they have an incentive to do bad things to us, simply because we are not the real customer.

I am one of Google's real customers, I bought an expensive phone from them, but, to quote Josh Marshall:

> One thing I’ve observed with Google over the years is that it is institutionally so used to its ‘customers’ actually being its products that when it gets into businesses where it actually has customers it really has little sense of how to deal with them. (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm)

Are you? Or did you just pay them peanuts for a tracking device that helps them make many times your peanuts with their real (real) customers?

I think that attitude is exactly what I was talking about.

I paid Google directly; I am their customer. But they don't know what to do with user-customers, so they treat me like the kind of user-product that they're more familiar with.

You are probably right, they are unfamiliar with retail trade (goods) which is why they make mistakes. I wanted to point out that you shouldn’t underestimate the amount of value you bring with your data. They need to keep the majority on board of their platform but not every person individually, and not on their devices, as they might not be in it for the device sales. Pixel can be a nice platform marketing tool and a data mining tool before being a device sales profit tool. That turns their users in second class citizens while they expect to be first class citizens.

Take with a grain of salt though. Pure speculations at best. Maybe they do just want device sales.

The Google Pixel 2 starts at $649. Pixel prices are comparable with iPhones.

I think the point being made is that a once-off amount for the hardware might be way less than what they get to make over those 2 years that you use the device (at least in aggregate as not everyone will buy a Pixel)

That may be true, but it's also forgetting the fact that the Pixel-owner is a customer, whose needs and wants the product should be catered to.

It's sort of like if Google sold a robot that happened to also steal money from your wallet. If they could get away with it, it'd be profitable for them, but there would still be something wrong with their behavior.

Exactly. But only in the case that the vendor already has the channels to turn user data into profit at the scale of Google. Very few other vendors could probably.

Mining your input and serving it to millions scales really well. As long as they can do enough to keep the majority of their users happy enough to continue using the product it is most likely more profitable to get the data than sell the devices given the market for android phones and the position they are in.

iPhones and Apple have demonstrated that privacy is a top concern for their users.

Google and their Pixel devices, not so much.

Google has much more to gain with mining your data as they have the channels to turn it into profit. Apple has a better chance making profit from their devices than their users data.

But is that a chicken or the egg? Apple never developed the channels because of their focus on privacy when they could have easily done so.

That was all under Jobs. How much longer will they keep that position?

> That was all under Jobs.

https://www.apple.com/privacy/ wasn't a URL until around 2010. Jobs died in 2011 and back then the page was just a Privacy Policy. Around 2014, they moved their privacy policy page and replaced it with a letter from Tim Cook which puts in writing that they don't monetize user data (if I remember correctly, this was in response to iCloud data breaches). In late 2017 they replaced it again with kind of a product page highlighting privacy.

Since Jobs has passed, they've move away from defaulting to a 4-digit code, encrypted phone backups in the cloud, moved from 2-step to 2-factor id, added a secure co-processor (with touch-id), made numerous moves to disable tracking cookies in their browser. From my observations about Apple, if they don't care about something it stagnates or goes away. All of those requires research, put more onus on the user, or cost Apple more per device.

Trust is a funny thing and I think it's much easier to lose than to gain. So they could move in another direction in the future, but so far it seems like they're continuing with a focus on user privacy.

Yes, but the comment you responded to was probably in reference to saying that Pixel devices don't cost much, not about the relative benefits of Apple phones.

You're equating different things

You paid real money for the hardware..

You have paid 0 for the use of Google's servers and their software. E.g. you enjoy their Maps app, you enjoy seeing real time traffic. You enjoy using Keep and let them host all your memos on it. You enjoy Photos and like that all your pics are in the 'cloud'. You enjoy......

You paid real money for the hardware yes, and it works with ur without your data. But another cost is your usage of their software...

Everyone does some type of calculus on this cost. I bought their hardware as well, and i don't sell my data to them.. at all.. However, I'm looked at by most of my friends and family as the eccentric privacy guy that runs tech stuff for them.

I run services mainly for myself, but many of my friends/family use them.. NextCloud for backups to a FreeNas and for sharing, ejabberd for chat, Piwigo for sharing photos &blog, davical for contacts and calendar, phabricator to share some of my programs, the all important email, and I've occasionally been conned into running a quake server.

I pay in time and convenience. I use and contribute to apps on Fdroid. I contribute when i can to the OSM project for mapping. I still have to use waze for traffic. And instead of having apps that siphon off my data, i simply go to their websites and check stuff (yelp and occasionally facebook), and yes, it's as painful as it sounds..

I know everyone can't do a lot of these, but a few services have popped up that do some of these for you for cheap, proton mail being the biggest (imo).. Running a mail server is the most challenging, in part because more and more people rely on the big providers for email, and in turn, those big providers are flagging lots if self hosted smaller email providers as spam. Outlook is really hard, i can even send email to an outlook account from a Comcast account and it gets flagged as spam..

So yes, unfortunately you aren't the customer, although you might feel differently and they've definitely marketed things in a misleading way. The truth of the matter is i highly doubt anyone reading this site wouldn't be able to do any of the above, and making it sound otherwise is folly. We all choose who and what to pay and what we pay with.

It's not even as much about privacy, as it is freedom. I was an avid google talk and google reader user, they walled off talk to hangouts and eliminated reader. Once you realize that it's better to have some self reliance rather than convenience, your world will change.

> You have paid 0 for the use of Google's servers and their software.

> unfortunately you aren't the customer, although you might feel differently and they've definitely marketed things in a misleading way.

That's a false distinction. I paid for the product, which includes the hardware and the software they decided to integrate. I'm their customer. However, Google will still try to trick me into shadow-working for them and give me no help when their system misbehaves, because they don't know how to deal with human user-customers.

Basically, not that "I'm not a customer" it's that Google treats its customers badly.

Actually, you didn't pay for the software. The open source parts of Android do not cost you anything, and the commercial components are free to use as long as you have a Google account.

With many of their services (Search in particular), the data is precisely what makes the service so good.

Fair point. If I could get this kind of thing as a paid service I do think that I'd happily pay for it.

There's an option to pay for GSuite, which gets you access to most Google products, but I'm not sure about it's privacy policies.

> My memory is terrible enough that I can't do those things myself.

One could argue that your memory is terrible because you know you can rely on those services.

Well, my memory is good enough to remember that in the pre-Google world I had no way to find out reviews of restaurants in a city I was visiting, let alone 'memorize' them.

Travel guides have been a thing for a very long time

But that's just another memory surrogate...

It's commonly quoted (probably inaccurately) that Einstein never bothered remembering his home phone number because it could easily be looked up in a phone book. The brain very regularly expands outside itself to think or remember, almost like subcontracting.

Smartphones have just made them a one-stop shop for all our external thinking now.

This reminds me uncomfortably of someone I saw yesterday arguing that you shouldn't get a flu shot because it makes your immune system lazy.

Memory is complicated and difficult. It can be trained, but we only have so much bandwidth for it. It's very nice to have automation to "remember" for us, so we can stop wasting that limited bandwidth on things that don't much matter, like details of our dinner experience, and save medium-term memory for more important stuff.

I can't get in the details because I'm no neurologist but there are a lot of news stories out there about how taxi drivers end up with a great memories from having to remember all the routes. There are also stories about how taxi drivers using GPS don't have all those memory improvements. I agree that news stories are not the best source of accurate scientific information so take it with a grain of salt.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memor...

http://www.thedrive.com/news/8686/study-using-gps-navigation...

> there are a lot of news stories out there about how taxi drivers end up with a great memories from having to remember all the routes

The question is, does that do them any good? It might help them in the rare case there's a problem with navigation data, but 99% of the time it's a wasted effort, and personally, I purposefully prefer taxis/transport services that use navigation.

My own opinion is that we should treat brain-memory as cache memory: store the things that are directly relevant to the important parts of our lives, to make ourselves better in those areas; otherwise, don't bother memorizing.

>The question is, does that do them any good? It might help them in the rare case there's a problem with navigation data, but 99% of the time it's a wasted effort

Yes, very much so. The road layout in London is absolutely insane, because the city was established in AD 43. Finding efficient routes requires a great deal of local knowledge and contextual understanding.

Black cab drivers are extremely good at minimaxing journey time. If they have a choice between a route that always takes 30 minutes or a route that sometimes takes 25 minutes and sometimes takes an hour, they'll usually choose the former.

They're required to memorise both routes and landmarks, so they're phenomenally good at fuzzy matching for destinations. If you ask to go to "that place where all the goths and weirdos hang out", they'll take you straight to Camden Lock. They have an uncanny knack for getting confused tourists back to their hotel, based on the scantest of descriptions in the most broken of English.

Uber has a role to play in London, but it's undoubtedly an inferior option. Black cab drivers are a part of the fabric of London and it'd be a tragedy if they were pushed out of business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws-eyqWHNPs

When I lived in London I once read a text from my wife to a black cab driver with instructions of where I was supposed to meet her for dinner.

Even though I didn't have the correct name of the street (and didn't have the name of the restaurant at all!), the driver got the right street and the right restaurant. (The street had probably 10+ restaurants on it.) I was astonished, and have never forgotten it.

Here in Sydney, Australia, the taxi drivers are generally hopeless and in many cases can hardly manage basic English, let alone navigate properly.

That's why I understand Uber has become popular but not all of my experiences with Uber have been so crash hot either.

> The question is, does that do them any good?

Anecdotally, I used to have a phone with a really bad battery that I couldn’t be bothered to replace, so I was constantly running out of charge. I started training myself to look up directions on google maps, then memorize the next 5-10 direction steps and compete with myself to make it to my destination with the fewest number of map checks.

I continue to do that, because it’s done a few things for me:

- it’s fun and I get personal gratification out of my improved sense of direction and orientation - driving/riding is much more engaging because I’m paying attention to my surroundings (looking for visual queues for my location) instead of just putting on music and turning on mental cruise control - I travel a lot and feel a lot safer when I have a mental backup of where I am, in case I run out of data or if I lose signal, which happens from time to time - I feel less attached to and reliant on my phone

To your point, it’s something I decided is worth my time and effort, if even just for the entertainment.

Depends on what you're memorizing, too. You can be good at remembering some things, but not others. Lots of fields have specialized training exercises for memorization - consider how you learn vocabulary in a new language, for example.

This can get tied to "muscle memory" as well. I'm currently going through a lot of this on guitar - two note per string pull-off exercises, in the interest of learning Eric Johnson style picking techniques. Much of the core of his playing is based on two notes per string, first the high note and then the low note. So deep muscle memory of that particular move helps me do other, larger things.

> things that don't much matter, like details of our dinner experience

Really???

Can you remember details of what you ate for dinner two weeks ago? Probably not. That's because it's not very important.

On the other hand, I can remember one meal I ate several years ago in great detail, because it had three of the best dishes of their type I've ever had (sashimi, pasta, and ice cream in one meal!). That meal mattered. But I'd have a hard time telling you what I ate last thursday.

Or maybe these services provide us augmented cognitive abilities beyond that of a disconnected human.

That is indeed the point of technology.

Personally, my only gripe is that those technologies tend to heavily depend on cloud and SaaS, which make you a slave of the whims of a third party, that is unreliable and often doesn't have your best interest in mind. Those same tools could be equally empowering without that dependency.

Sure. I'm all for the transhumanist aspect of this, letting the machines take care of everything they can so I can focus my intellect on the things that machines can't do, and I'll admit that (for example) I lean hard on Google when choosing whether to memorize a particular piece of information or to simply know that it exists and how it can be found. In this case, though, my parents figured out that I had an issue around the time I learned to read but I myself only recently realized I could talk to my doctor about it. There's a reason I choose to describe these systems as prostheses. And even if I do have a ton of practice exercising conscious control over my memory, I'd still really prefer to be spending those cognitive resources on things that aren't basic everyday tasks.

> There's a reason I choose to describe these systems as prostheses.

I choose to describe them as "external brain" ("exobrain" is the term of the art now?) - "prosthesis" feels like it implies there's something wrong with it, and that you use it only because you have no other choice.

On the one hand, that's how I feel about literally everything about myself. There is something wrong with my entire body. I do only use it because I have no better choice. To quote Eliezer Yudkowsky, "I'm sure Einstein was very smart for a human. I'm sure a General Systems Vehicle would think that was very cute of him." Like I said, I'm all aboard the transhumanism train.

On the other hand, you're right that most people don't have that intuition and that "prosthesis" may not be effective communication. This particular issue disadvantages me compared to other humans and solutions to it help me recover basic functionality, but you're right that this technology is good enough that a run-of-the-mill human can benefit from it too. They just don't benefit as much as I do. So, hm, maybe I should switch to augmentative language over assistive. I'll think about it.

I'm sorry, I didn't notice until you clarified that you suffer from actual memory issues; I assumed you were just using hyperbole as a rhetorical device. With the context clear, I see why you would want to refer to those tools as prostheses, given that they lift you to (and hopefully above) the "normal" values. And as you say, they indeed perform both augmentative and assistive functions.

Not a problem. You didn't dismiss it as "easily distracted" or try to condemn me for some kind of moral failure, which puts you ahead of quite a few of the users in this thread.

I'd be completely fine with all that even if it was turned on by default and if there was a simple off button. The point of the author of the article is that it is a permanent struggle with privacy settings. It's the same on Windows 10. There are like 30 registry entries one needs to change to turn off the spying, and they keep adding more. Like the author, this is a game I just have no appetite playing.

Meh. Open Google Maps (the app responsible for all of these notifications). Go to settings > notifications > your contributions. Turn off everything. Done. It's just one app being a bit too nosy. Nothing like the OS that tried to silently re-enable the privacy settings I turned off in an update.

The article seemed to mention that they took this step and the notifications seemed to migrate to google search. I dont use android and may have misunderstood but that behavior wouldnt surprise me and I suspect either way the information is being logged.

> it serves the common good

No, it serves Google.

> It serves Google and the common good.

There. Fixed it for you. You can’t deny the benefits it brings to the average person having all this information a (google) search away.

If phrased that way, we should probably celebrate it - it's increasingly uncommon for business interests to be even tangentially aligned with society's interests, even in small areas of the product/service.

I can deny that Google doing something that happens to serve its specific interests, and that Google may without gainsay or penalty discontinue doing at any instant it should so please, qualifies as a common good. I can deny that all day!

Okay I’ll bite. It serves the common good today, but if you intend to say it may turn out to make us live our lives based on something that can disappear any day and that would cause more harm than the benefits up to that point, then yes, this sentence is too long.

But I get all those same benefits simply from other people not carrying about their own privacy and security. I still keep location services, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc. off except when I'm using them in the moment and create a separate Google ID for each phone. My individual habits get lost in the noise.

First I was like "no, it does serve the common good". But on second thought: replay to 30 years ago, and there weren't really problems. Word-of-mouth combined with places closing because they were just too bad too survive worked fine. So maybe the common good doesn't need serving the Google way.. Possible real benefit is you can get super-detailed reviews from many different people. But I'm not sure there really is a need or market for that (well, except Google).

these days, i wonder if the dynamics of 'word of mouth' is still operationally the same. the internet is isolating and alienating in it's own way, so i'm uncertain how well the 'old ways' (circa all of ~20 years ago) still function.

If I'm visiting somewhere, I usually ask for recommendations from someone I trust (family, or whoever I'm staying with). Yelp reviews and such are good if I don't have any other source of information about the place, though.

And I completely understand, if it's opt-in. I might even do the same (or maybe just for a while). But soon as it's opt-out, it becomes creepy as hell and every time I get a message like this I resent Google a little bit more.

Similarly, recently I clicked to like a YouTube video while I wasn't logged in (I only ever log in to Google using a private tab since a few years because I'm just so fed up with the incessant nagging me to track and spy me).

So I forgot that I wasn't logged in and clicked the like/heart button. You know what it said to me?

"Sign in to make your opinion count."

Yeea, that wasn't accidentally worded badly. It's just too much of this shit every day all day, I no longer believe they actually meant to say "Sign in so that we can count your opinion". No, this passive-aggressive bullshit permeates every pop-up and nag screen Google ever communicates to me and the message is pretty clear. The subtext of my opinion being worthless unless I allow myself to be tracked.

Same passive-aggressive shit goes on in Google Maps. Of course I have Location History turned off. Don't want to be tracked? We won't remember your recent search queries either. Because obviously they can only do that in the cloud or something. I remember back in the day when search fields that would remember recent queries first appeared, we used to call that "intelligent". Yeah it's a bit of a low bar for intelligence, but guess what the world's leading AI company can't do it unless you allow them to track your physical location. Can't? More like "won't".

They want to sell me as data, but every step along the way, they try and make me feel like an insignificant little insect. It's not an actual transaction like "I give you data, you give me 'free' service", you can't negotiate really, and if you dare to even try they will basically bully you.

If, like some people try to argue, we are really "paying" for Google's services with our attention and/or private tracking data--it's more like emotional extortion / blackmail, than it's a business transaction.

And I tried to turn the creepy Google Maps prompts off but could not. Why should these be opt-out —- should others be tricked into sacrificing their privacy for your convenience?

I found them buried in some menus that I didn't see last time I tried to opt out. Settings->Notifications->Your Contributions. There were about a dozen things that I decided to turn off, in addition to my previous choices regarding deletion of my location history, home address, etc.

Neat, thanks. Wow, I didn’t think to look in “Notifications”—-was looking for things labeled “Location Settings” or things like that. “Your Contributions” is a very dystopian name :)

All those things can be done locally on the phone only and without any server-side data processing. Without investigating into Google/Android terms of use I can bet they are NOT done locally (I might be wrong, this is a guess).

Ultimately it’s the consumer’s choice whether you want to buy your personal mobile device from a company that makes+sells phones for a living or from a company the sells ads for a living (no bad feeling against ads) and also makes+sells phones on the side to augment those ads.

You can install 3rd party libre roms like Lineage OS which don't have any proprietary Google spyware on Androids.

> My memory is terrible enough that I can't do those things myself.

I get that all those services are helpful to someone who's easily distracted, but I'm afraid using them is the last thing that's going to help your memory. It just makes you more dependent.

Personally I prefer not to use Google's auto-complete, I can spell just fine thank you. We're bloody human beings, we're supposed to be like the smartest thing on this planet, don't we?

I misspell words in Google searches all the time. I can either take the 3-5 seconds to correct it myself, or just hit search knowing that the big G will know exactly what I meant anyway. I would say an aspect of being "smart" is not wasting time on unimportant details?

Yeah I don't get the problem.

I like to see other people's reviews so I like to provide some myself. Quid pro quo.

You can of course turn off this feature but then you're missing out on a lot of what Google can give you.

This is pure corporate propaganda.

Also, if they were behind a configuration option and defaulted to on, most people would be fine turning it off and forgetting about it.

This seems to be about lack of control. It's good for developers to think carefully before they ship products that do things with no way of being told not to.

EDIT: Welp. Apparently these settings exist.

I don't understand the point of the blog post then. Why is it so upsetting, if you have the ability to turn it off?

Maps app -> Settings -> Notifications -> Your Contributions (and uncheck boxes as desired).

The controls exist.

My guess is that doesn't turn off tracking but now you just won't be notified of it.

I admit though, as a user of the data, I find this very helpful. Google is absolutely brilliant at give real time traffic information to roads and businesses. You want to know if Costco is busy right now, they'll tell you. Accident getting there going to cost you 5 minutes, they'll tell you that too.

That's a separate option called location history. Alternatively you can turn off location in Android.

But does that mean Google stops collecting the data? Sure, no notifications, but will they still know what restaurant I just walked past?

As mentioned several times, disable Location History under Settings -> Google -> Location (on stock Google Androids you find that setting under Settings -> Location as well).

Yes; you can see the location history Google has been collecting at https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

But it's easy to stop collecting and/or delete location data; see https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687

Depends on whether you've opted into Location History or not, which is the master setting for most of Google's persistent location-based features. You can check the setting here: https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols

When you know you will need directions, you can also look them up on desktop using generic origin/destination cities and emailing them to yourself on a non-Gmail email account.

Both location history and the notifications can be easily turned off on Android and Maps app. What do you mean about lack of control?

It's "upsetting" (a strong word not used in the post) to new users because the default is "on" and that's the first impression they get when they turn the device on. Which is the sound of Google blowing it and sending people back to the Apple ecosystem, not necessarily the sound of someone crying.

> I don't understand the point of the blog post then. Why is it so upsetting, if you have the ability to turn it off?

I'm not sure the original author knows that they can be turned off.

... or perhaps (if I'm being less charitable) the original author doesn't care; they don't want to be asked in the first place, ever (and are a touch naive about exactly how it is Google Maps gets the data it can vend to end-users).

Default on is outrageous. It's clear the average person doesn't know how to access and manage even some of these settings, much less understand what they do or be able to understand what privacy violations will continue despite turning something off in one place.

You are explicitly asked about that feature when settinng up your phone for the first time.

Many non-technical types just have the store staffer walk through those steps, and others aren't likely to understand the implications of those settings.

They can hardly complain to Google when the device doesn't behave as desired then.

They should complain to the store staffer or make some effort to find out what those settings the are enabled actually do.

And that is why they default to on. If they defaulted to off, no one would turn it on, and they wouldn’t be able to hoover up the data.

Because if you turn it off in one place, it just starts happening in another:

Yah. I disabled Google Maps tracking, then Google Search started notifying me about places I was near.

It's not Google Maps that's doing the tracking. He turned off notifications in Google Maps, not location history, which does the actual tracking that other apps consume.

He agreed to location tracking when he first set up the phone because the first run setup explicitly asks whether he wants that on or off.

A harder, deeper question, is whether the average user is informed enough about "location history" to know whether they want that on or off, and whose responsibility it should be to inform them.

... as a wise man once observed, people talk a long game about how important their privacy is, but then empirically, researchers continue to discover you can get people to divulge a lot of personal information for a Snickers bar, if not less (survey-takers who just stand around in malls and ask people to fill out clipboards are an example of this---and while they are a dying breed, they're a dying breed because it's cheaper now to collect that information online, not because people have gotten cagier about divulging it).

Google are miles ahead of the other big players in terms of transparency and user control. They actively prompt users to review their privacy settings. They provide a plain-English guide to what data they collect and a simple process to choose your privacy settings.

I do find Google's level of data collection a bit creepy, but I also don't see how they could reduce the amount of data they collect without reducing the quality of their service.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6227261

https://privacy.google.com/your-data.html

https://myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup

  They actively prompt users to review their privacy settings.

And yet I've found with multiple Android updates on multiple devices, they can reset things like Location Services back to "On/Fine" and othere things like enable NFC without telling you that it's happened.

I believe that is the current state of affairs. Notifications can be suppressed in Android apps, right?

Yeah, but in this case that might also disable the notifications of Google Maps navigation. That's why I simply tolerated the occasional nag until today, when this panicky article prompted me to dig a little deeper. Took all of one minute to get rid of the location spam.

> I don't understand the point of the blog post then. Why is it so upsetting, if you have the ability to turn it off?

Because people like to complain. Especially when they're getting a free service (as in money).

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