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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

While I appreciate the concept of learning things like "common next steps" to make a device more usable, going by the history of devices like Google Home or the Google Assistant, I also wonder how much of this is going to depend on "give us all your usage history" settings and simply stop working with those settings disabled. The Google Assistant is already unusable without a pile of search history settings enabled; what will "smart" next actions and similar require?

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I don't appreciate it, and hope it can be optionally disabled. I don't find it makes the device more usable.

One example, YouTube suggestions. I watched a "Family Guy" clip, didn't upvote it or comment or anything and suddenly I have 10 channels of Family Guy content "recommended" as if I'm suddenly YouTube's biggest Family Guy addict because I watched one two-minute video.

I don't want my phone anticipating what I want to do, I want to tell it what I want to do. Because when it tries to anticipate, it's usually wrong, and that's annoying.

Perhaps this is nonsense and anecdotal but what's concerning for me is not that they're simply wrong and are showing me irrelevant material, but it's that they can become a feedback loop of dissonance and can be reflection of a shift in viewing habits or pollution by what YouTube thinks is a similar demographic to you, but are quite different. When these recommendations are combined with a pseudo-trusted body (in most people's mind) that can be manipulated, it becomes quite a fruitful environment for propaganda.

Google already has all your usage history.

You can view it yourself by dialing ##INFO## aka ##4636## and then selecting "Usage data".

You’ll see all apps you’ve used, for how long you’ve used them overall, how many times, and when the last time was.

EDIT:

    *#*#4636#*#*

This goddamn markup on HN is utterly broken, I wish it would someday get fixed. But no, of course not.

I get "Connection problem or invalid MMI code" on an AndroidOne device when I dial that. Edit oh hidden asterisks.

  *#*#INFO#*#*

That's local information; the question is, how much of this functionality depends on local information and how much gets offloaded to Google servers?

You can disable google play's access to it by turning off "usage access" in app permissions.

Or I can wait 16 days for the GDPR, and hope they fix it by then.

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