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Comment by o10449366 | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing is that Google will still let you store your home address and they'll display it on the map, but if you have Location History turned off they'll refuse to list it as an autocomplete option when you search for addresses or directions. They know what it is, but they won't let you actually use it unless you expose everything else. It's extremely user hostile and there's no good reason to do it.

Edit: To clearly demonstrate what I'm talking about: https://imgur.com/a/QW9OxAS

They pin your saved locations to the top of the UI. If I click "Home" it will take me to my exact address. However, if I attempt to search "Home" in the search bar I get

"Turn on your Web & App Activity setting to search for 'home' and other personal places"

No thanks, Google. You don't need to know my entire location history 24/7 to take me to a static address you already have saved.

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Yep, Google Maps still shows my home and work locations on the Commute tab from before I disabled almost everything in my Google account, but won't let me change the work address since we moved locations. So I guess when I change houses (the only one I really care about, since I use it to send an ETA to my wife) I can just turn everything on, change the address, then turn it all off again. It's illogical dark patterns like this that made me start detaching from Google, and will probably drive me to buy a non-Android phone next time, although I detest Apple UI even if their quality is usually great.

Is this on desktop or mobile? It could match the theory in the grandparent post that they preferred sticking to one backend. That also allows handling conflicts in one place, with one protocol. E.g. what would the behaviour be if you edited the home address with a ZIP code on your phone, while offline? What if you try to make the same change from your laptop and e.g. you set a ZIP+4 code? And then what happens when your phone is online again?

It's on mobile. I haven't tested it much, but I'm really not interested in doing so. I only keep Google Maps because my wife and I like to share locations, which I am trying to do via some direct method between our phones eventually anyways.

> I can just turn everything on, change the address, then turn it all off again

You can't - or, rather, I can't. It may be a problem that only affects me, I haven't talked to other people about it, but that was exactly my thinking a few months ago. So I activated location services, changed my home address to my new address, checked that it was set right, and disabled it again. And whoops, it's my old address again.

They might've fixed that in the mean time, I haven't checked it recently, I've just given up on using maps.

This is hilarious. Every single Google conspiracy is basically because some Google Engineer tried to DRY up functionality in an insanely complicated system.

So, I think that's probably quite right in general, and it's no "conspiracy". But it can still be a barrier to privacy. Rather than a conspiracy, it's evidence of priorities. You don't eliminate a development affordance when DRYing something up for something you know is a priority -- or if you do, it'll get refactored to fix it soon enough, if it is a priority.

Which is perhaps generally applicable to "conspiracies" in fact. There are some instances of powerful people making plans; but there are even more instances of results from systemic rewards and punishments, people acting independently with certain interests, from just how the system works. It doesn't make em always great. Systems can be changed.

Unless they demonstrate a conscious, consistent effort to be privacy aware and let you control you data, the way Apple does, for example, those conspiracies will keep coming.

The only way out for Google is to actually start paying attention to that issue and make a conscious effort. And it'll take time before they'll regain the trust.

It's funny, though, how every single "conspiracy" just randomly ends up falling in the "fine if you give them full access, fails if you turn off location services" quadrant. Like, I've not once seen a mistake in the direction of "eh just turn off that data collection point and it'll fix it."

Imagine you have ~billions of users and 99.9% of them use the default. Do you put your eng effort towards power-user flexibility for the tinfoil hat crowd or do you improve popular features?

In the case mentioned, searching "your locations" appears to be just all on or all off (I have no insider knowledge of Maps). That greatly reduces the surface area for heisenbugs in a high QPS system.

The reason for that is pretty obvious isn't it? Very few systems depend on an absence of data to work. However, many systems can be designed which depend on the presence of data. If a setting affects the presence of data in some Google-internal databases, turning that setting off will disable any features that depend on the presence of that data in that database.

How can you explain this: in Android 5.1, every time you enable GPS, a popup appears asking you to share location with Google. There is a checkbox titled "Don't show again", but if you tick it, the button "Decline" gets disabled [1].

I don't have the exact screenshot, but the popup looks approximately like this [2].

They intentionally wrote the code to make sure that the user doesn't make the wrong choice. And this popup is not really necessary for the user, mostly for Google.

Also, this reminds me of Google's "Amateur Hour" story with Firefox. Every time they make a mistake, it's in the favour of Google, what a coincidence.

[1] https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/115944/how-to-pr...

[2] https://i.stack.imgur.com/9VGfbm.png

I've found that with it disabled, on Android, I can't even click the "Home" or "Work" buttons in maps without a prompt to turn on "Web & App Activity".

Why do I need to turn on "Web & App Activity" to store my home or work address?

Because Google wants to inconvenience us into turning it back on, plain and simple.

I have just discovered that long pressing the Google Maps app icon on Android let you choose "Home" without asking for "Web & App Activity".

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