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There's no such thing, at least at scale, as sharing your information without also storing it. Not if you want the system to be reliable. So in order to make Google share your location with others, you have to give them permission to store your location. This should be self-evident enough if you take a moment to think about it.

As for lumping web history together with location history, it turns out you can derive the latter if you know the former. There's been a lot of fuss and breathless reporting about that fact. So authorizing them to know the one without the other is a bit of a fiction, especially in those cases that get written up by tech journalists. Best not to pretend that it's possible to keep them separate.

This new thing is an acknowledgement of the fact that the whole point of using Google services is sharing information with them and asking them to hold on to it, at least for a bit, at least until you've gotten the desired use out of the service... but also of the fact that a certain kind of person, the kind you often find on HN, would sleep better if Google deleted that data after it had served it's immediate purpose.

>So in order to make Google share your location with others, you have to give them permission to store your location.

Sure. I have no problem with that. What I have a problem with is, why is google insisting on storing all the locations that I am not sharing?

I only want to share this current location. So yes, that will have to be stored somewhere. But for the love of everything I don't see why sharing my current location requires saving all my future locations.

Because otherwise Waze doesn't work.

You can also imagine the other sub-rosa reasons for this.

As for lumping web history together with location history, it turns out you can derive the latter if you know the former

So, the question remains, why do they need to record your web history if you want to save your location? You can't derive it that way round.

I have all this stuff turned off, there is no good reason for google to store it, it's a privacy nightmare, esp given automated sharing with the state.

Likewise. I don't think it's reasonable to require these permissions in order to use a Google Home device or the Google Assistant, for instance.

I can understand needing to remember the last query, in order to provide context for the next one. Automatic scrubbing would be helpful...but it's missing an "every 10 minutes" option.

(Today, my solution is a completely separate Google account that only gets used for Google Home/Assistant.)

It would surprise me if Google didn't have those accounts linked anyway, thus undermining your policy.

A Google employee once called me on my personal cell phone when I was a few minutes late to a business meeting. I still don't see how that could've happened unless they'd linked my work (g-suite) account with my personal (gmail) account, and then allowed their employees to access personal data in a totally inappropriate fashion.

Maybe there's some other explanation, but I can't fathom what it would have been.

There's probably some other explanation. I wasn't under the impression Google employees can just go read your data like this. And if you want to believe imagine they can -- it'd be dumb of them to do it in this fashion. If you didn't leave your number on your emails/website/resumes/Facebook/etc. or given it out previously then maybe the employee got it from someone else who had your number.

Thank you for sharing your completely uninformed opinion, and asserting it as fact with literally no reason to think it's more correct than mine.

> Thank you for sharing your completely uninformed opinion, and asserting it as fact with literally no reason to think it's more correct than mine.

I in fact do have evidence to believe it's more correct than yours but I have no inclination to discuss it further.

You claim that you have secret proof which you refuse to share, but that sounds more like a troll or a bullshitter than somebody with actual evidence. I wonder why.

> You claim that you have secret proof

Evidence. Not proof. And it's not secret. Just not something I'm inclined to share here.

> which you refuse to share, but that sounds more like a troll or a bullshitter than somebody with actual evidence. I wonder why.

Because of (1) my privacy and (2) the fact that you're attacking me like this. You're welcome to see me as a troll if you'd prefer that.

What's the _nature_ of this evidence that you claim to have?

I have phone calls and e-mails to a personal g-mail account that make literally no sense to receive _unless_ Google had linked my personal and business accounts in a CRM someplace; an d then given access to personal contact info to some of their staff.

> the fact that you're attacking me like this

How is this an attack? I've done nothing to you that you didn't do to me. Except in my case I revealed the nature of my evidence whereas you revealed literally nothing. You just came up with a dumb and obviously false hypothesis and declared it true.

You wrote a bunch of fairly rude words in a post you then deleted...

> I've done nothing to you that you didn't do to me.

You're saying I called you a troll?

(This discussion is over from my end.)

The point isn't to avoid any connection between the accounts. The point is to ensure that my primary account can leave those histories turned off.

Employees don't have any more access to your information than anyone else.

I often get reminded by apps that "This app will not function when play services has no access to: Contacts, calendar, call history (and about 5 more things)". I once turned everything I though to be unnecessary off from the settings. Indeed nothing ever stopped working correctly but many things started nagging me periodically, while functioning perfectly.

I just stopped using Android after shit like this. Privacy is an afterthought at best, despite the great new permissions model.

And it's absolutely not Android's fault as much it is app developers' faults. Want to use an app that tracks your dreams? Most devs will have you sign up for their terrible service so they can store the information in plaintext on a server.

At least with iOS most devs seem to opt for CloudKit with E2E encryption. Privacy seems more wired into the iOS ecosystem than Android.

Not sure why this would be down-voted, unless people are really just that tribalistic about phone/tablet OS choice.

Didn't downvote, but Android has had dynamic permissions (since v6?) whose repeated notifications you can suppress, so I'm confused if the comment is still valid.

Kind of misses the point - I do mention the robust permission system in Android.

The issue is that the developers themselves don't really seem to care as much about privacy etc as iOS developers. This effectively renders the privacy measures mostly meaningless. If I'm writing my dreams into your app and you can read them on your own server, I've already lost all semblance of privacy.

> And it's absolutely not Android's fault as much it is app developers' faults

I do see it as a shortcoming of android that i cannot redirect unwanted capabilities into a harmless sandbox version of those.

Privacy Guard on LineageOS does exactly that. It's not Android, it's Google.

In the light of the recent story on how YouTube and Google Docs put up banners about not working with IE6, I would not put it past them to do something similar any time the user did something that Google did not like.

That IE story was specifically about YouTubers during the transition to Google. A story about how they used a legacy YouTube permissions role to circumvent process and oversight.

It also specifically talked about Google Docs team doing the same thing which people at the time attributed to being first. This is what provided cover for the YT team.

Not sure if you're trying to provide defensive cover to Google with your comment or not, but it clearly goes to show they are not above these kind of dark UI patterns.

A one-time banner is not a dark UI pattern, jeez.

This is my number one annoying dark pattern from Google at the moment.

I would very much like to store my home and work addresses in Google Maps on my phone, but I can't do that without them also storing everywhere I go.

There is no good reason for these two things being tied together other than to make we share my location data. We are talking about storing a few hundred bytes of relatively static data and letting me select them as a shortcut, this is not a complex feature, it's a simple shortcut.

Somewhat related:

I turned off youtube watch history.

I can no longer see my google play music played counts, because somehow the same permission covers both, even though I would like music history but not youtube history.

I wouldn't be surprised if that's a side effect of Google's plan to "replace" Play Music with YouTube Music, even though they're two completely different services.

Maybe they're the same service behind the scenes. Would you store the same music twice, if you had to run both?

They don't seem to be. At least not in terms of content. YouTube music has songs that Google play doesn't, and vice versa.

The YouTube music experience is kind of odd. It seems that you can only listen to full albums if someone has uploaded them to YouTube as separate songs. Which makes sense, but it means that currently a lot of the music I listen to is nowhere to be found on YouTube music.

They're in the process of being merged: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/23/17386752/youtube-music-up...

I'll chime in here (like I do in all these threads until it's fixed) but Google Home and Android Auto require all of these settings to be enabled last time I checked.

The Google Podcast app (!) refuses to do any related to subscriptions without Web and App activity tracking enabled. Seriously reaching here regarding relevance and consent.

Also can't subscribe to podcasts if web activity is disabled, which is bullshit because YouTube subscriptions continue to work just fine

Here is another nudge: how easily can you write a rule to delete from gmail inbox after say X days? (same question for outlook.com, icloud.com etc)

There are ways for technical users, but it nudges users to leave all the juicy data to the company, which can then use it in any way it feels (including monetization)

I dare say that I don't expect automatic deletion of emails from your inbox is not a feature many users are clamoring for, whether they have privacy concerns or not. Hence I don't think the lack of it is for monetization puposes or the lack.

Users should clamor for a feature that automatically delete emails with subject=password after say a week.

In theory the links are only valid for a few hours. In practice I don't trust that.

Even then, it's not about clamoring, but just having a way to create rules. You just can't do that easily in gmail.

Why not just delete the mail right after clicking the link?

If you are a business customer you can set an email retention period for your domain (under the 'Compliance' section) which deletes all emails and chat messages after N days.

There's a new "confidential" toggle on the web Gmail (at least for gapps accounts) that let newly composed email expire after a certain amount of time. Not available on Android Gmail yet. Just saw it yesterday.

The actual email to non-gmail addresses is just a link to fetch the mail body, which can be validated with SMS.

> Why?

you know why. It's profitable. This information makes them money.

Another example, text-to-speech on Gboard requires the "Google" app, unfortunately.

*speech-to-text

whoops