Google – My Activity
myactivity.google.com
myactivity.google.com
Yeah, Google knows everything about me. C'est la vie. At least it's useful. What exactly is the threat model that everyone is operating under which prompts all the comments here?
Also, for some weird reason (maybe because I'm using browser extensions?) my entries seem to come from the future:
1. Ignorance is bliss: People don't WANT to know about this kind of thing. It can be upsetting, anxiety inducing, uncomfortable, dystopian, etc. so it "feels" a lot better not constantly thinking about and analyzing the ways in which your tracked
2. Assumptions: This may be tied to the previous point, but I think a lot of people make assumptions that these massively successful, and in their eyes beneficial, organizations wouldn't be collecting, analyzing, or using data in any kind of malicious or questionable ways if they even think about it at all
3. Dark patterns/misdirection/dishonesty: companies do everything in their power to make sure user aren't able to easily opt out, don't have a clear understanding of what is actually happening, and make it very difficult to find answers about it in a way the average user would understand
4. Technical knowledge: While there are lots of highly technically skilled users here, many of them specialize in something not related to this topic in any meaningful way. Our company has plenty of developers, for example, that can code at a substantially higher level than I am able, but otherwise their computer literacy is completely non existent. I'm no longer surprised when technical users seem to lack basic knowledge about a particular technology, because no one can specialize in everything
100% agreed with this statement: I'm no longer surprised when technical users seem to lack basic knowledge about a particular technology because no one can specialize in everything
I read somewhere that there are lots of hubris & privileged self-ego stoking happening in the IT industry (just look at the tough super technical interview questions you need to answer in every IT job ever). But more than 50% of the software developed or designed in the world is not good enough.
I still have to come across a strong argument that would really make me worried about this kind of tracking done by Google.
Being "shocked" by something doesn't imply that you didn't know it was happening. There's plenty of things that I am perfectly aware are happening every day that shock me nonetheless.
Perhaps Google has factored that risk into their calculations and they have decided that in the current legal environment, the money they earn by storing everything outweighs the money they lose by complying with subpoenas.
And that's fine. If you find being tracked to be useful and good, then I have no problem with you being able to do that.
But those of us who don't want it should be able to avoid it as well.
> What exactly is the threat model that everyone is operating under which prompts all the comments here?
I'm not sure what you mean by threat model here. But, at its core, the issue for me is that companies like Google collect data about me without my consent. That's just straight-up immoral and unethical.
Would I consent to having some data collected about me in exchange for some service? Sure, depending on the data and service. But it has to be my choice -- in other words, it has to be opt-in and I have to be correctly and completely informed of what's going to happen with my data.
There are a couple of examples in history where similar attitude on a societal level ultimately led to the most terrible of outcomes.
I don't go out of my way to acknowledge my employer affiliation but I don't go out of my way to hide it either, e.g. do a search or look for some of my more technical posts.
I put the same amount of effort into my post as the parent did into establishing the evil of this page.
Obviously, never do this. It's illegal and a huge violation of privacy. To anyone tempted to do this, just assume it's time to breakup now, and deal with your issues as adults.
I would add that if you haven't already enabled 2FA, you should.
The solution, as always, is to secure your account.
Turning off all of the controls under myactivity won't stop Google from scanning your emails to track any purchases you make. The only way to stop that is to switch off of Gmail.
Are there any other 'hidden' urls to expose what other data Google is siphoning off our private transactions or conversations for that matter?
I've had all controls under activity disable a long time and periodically check to make sure they stay that way.
This one crosses the line! To the point that the only way I can get rid of the older records is to delete the purchase receipts entirely.
This link needs a thread of its own
https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1
You can then delete your google account under "data & personalization".
I've been on proton mail for a few months now and am pretty happy with it, try it out!
Because you’re attempting a highly sensitive action, we need to be sure it’s really you. At the moment, we can’t. Try again from a device you normally use (like your phone or laptop) or from the location you usually sign in from.
Learn more about verifying it's you."
No other option. Everywhere I try is the same.
Giving an Evil company like Google my data. How could I have been so naive and foolish.
If you have a non-gmail account, why are you using gmail at all?
Convenience, speed, reliability, and (above all else) excellent spam filtering.
Now going through the process of reducing all the places I use Google services. Moved my personal stuff from GCP to Digital Ocean. Gmail to Fastmail. Chrome to Firefox / Safari. Currently seeing if Zoho is a good substitute for Google Sheets and Docs.
Not sure I'll go so far as use DuckDuckGo fulltime, but maybe i'll give it another try.
May switch my browser to Brave, Opera or Edge too... though there are aspects of each of them I'm not fond of. The new Edge is decent.
You should use !s instead of !g. !s sends your search to Startpage, which uses Google search but in a more privacy-protective way.
Edit: apparently they do provide email export to paid users now via a new application that is in beta. I had not realized this
I find this feature insanely useful. Google is doing something useful with my email. I learn about delayed flights way way in advance of anyone else as a result.
So let's just be clear here: - you get an email, to you, privately - gmail used to offer making a calendar for certain keywords in an email - google will now automatically do said calendar entries - on your PRIVATE calendar btw - google will also combine real-time flight info with your flight info, and tell you useful things via PRIVATE push notifications to you only.
This whole thing is the culmination of years of singularity "the computer will expand the mind" rhetoric. It's totally privacy protecting - the calendar entries, push notifications are private.
This is what everyone has been trying to build for years. We are here. And all of a sudden it's creepy? Because they notified you a dozen times, via email they were going to do this, and you ignored it?
Email has been turned into a useful automatically actionable system. My family forwards their itineraries and I don't have do anything else, it's automatically calendared. That's probably the only reason I pick them up from the airport frankly.
This whole thing is the culmination of years of singularity "the computer will expand the mind" rhetoric.
This isn't your mind being expanded, this isn't you thinking new thoughts.
This is what everyone has been trying to build for years. We are here. And all of a sudden it's creepy?
Kurzweil VoicePad and Dragon Naturally Speaking tried to build Voice Recognition on-device for years and it was a bright and techno future. Then Google Now, Siri, Cortana and Alexa got people to send speech samples over the internet to a foreign, perpetual-record, datacenter. The voice recognition part is better, but now it's creepy.
Email has been turned into a useful automatically actionable system. My family forwards their itineraries and I don't have do anything else, it's automatically calendared. That's probably the only reason I pick them up from the airport frankly.
Why doesn't Google forward their itinerary to Uber and have someone else pick them up at the airport, so you don't have to be involved in your life at all?
No, not everyone by a longshot.
Although maybe the problem is they don't know enough about my and my kids' life.
Additionally, I can not even use the "download my data" options because it says "We can't verify it is you" and there is no way no authenticate myself.
So basically, Google really likes my data and holds it hostage.
I saw a few odd ones that I had never heard of was sure I didn't listened to.
Until I realized ... it identified and logged songs in a movie my kids watched on a rainy day recently.
Apparently my phone just logs all the music it hears all the time and displays it on the lock screen.
There is an option to tell it to not listen all the time.
This url shocked me.
They apparently track every app I open and use on my Pixel phone. They had individual entries for when I skip a song in Google Music. I feel physically sick. I went through and deleted most of what I could and turned off tracking where I could.
Understanding how Google Music works and knowing that Google tracks information about you does not necessarily imply the very real understanding that viewing pages like this provide. People generally don't logic that way, us included.
Under the "Chrome, Google Analytics, and more" I see "Used com.kongregate.mobile.adventurecommunist", which is a game installed on my iPhone. Ok, I also have my Gmail logged in there as well, so they somehow read shared data or whatever. But I also see "Used es.socialpoint.chefparadise" which is a game, installed on my iPad at home which is mostly used by my wife for random games and stuff and I don't have any Google account logged in there.
Most iOS apps use various embedded trackers, just like websites.
All free.
I'm working through 12 or so hours of a podcast from a textfile plalist of mp3 links, in Termux, on Android. For my workflow that beats any podcast app.
(Though a good CLI podcast manager would be handy.)
The best way to combat bad ideas is with more information and facts, not to silence the conversation and push it out.
I don't think there is an alternative to google maps which is in the same level as quality and richness in information. I would be totally lost without google maps when I'm traveling to other countries, especially when it comes to public transportation like tram, U-bahn and busses.
The switch isn't as bad as you would think. It was pretty painless.
1. Compile a list of all your online accounts - if you use a password manager, you should already have this
2. Create a new email account on a service you trust, preferably at your own domain. That way, if you decide to switch providers later you can keep your address. I used Fastmail, and I'll cast my vote for them. (I believe Fastmail also has the ability to automatically import all your email from Gmail, although I took advantage of the switch to start fresh. I just downloaded a bulk archive of all my email).
3. Set up a vacation responder on your gmail address explaining your switch.
4. Change your email address on all your online accounts to your new address
5. After a period of time to make sure people are using your new email address, remove Gmail from your Google account. What's really cool about this is you can easily switch your Google ID for your existing Google account to your new email address, so you can continue to use any Google services as you wish without having them in control of your email/online identity.
NOTE: Even after removing Gmail from your Google account, you remain in control of that Gmail address - Google won't reassign it. You can reactivate it at any time (for example, if there was an account you forgot to switch). I've reactivated and re-deactivated mine several times.
It's really not bad, and much more painless that losing access to your Google account.
This is really interesting.
You mean I could change your `google account` email to a non-google domain just like other internet services? Was not sure about what you meant by "Google ID"
If that is true, I probably want to take advantage of this before they remove it.
I've gone from Namecheap's solution to GSuite to ProtonMail to FastMail, all without an outage of any kind. Migrating previous conversations from ProtonMail was sort of difficult, though.
This is the same effort I've undertaken in moving to FastMail (or any other similar service). It's not as bad as you think, just change your e-mail every time you log in to a new service. You don't have to do everything as once, but instead when you actual access the service.
I'm now to the point where I don't receive any important e-mail in Gmail anymore, and most (at least all important) of my online identities are now pointed at my personal email address.
> Do you enjoy your free email account, free maps, free YouTube and free search?
It's not free -- you're just paying with data instead of cash.
In any case, no, I don't. I do use YouTube (only on a device and account that is used exclusively for that), but I actually pay money for my YouTube usage.
What is really scary is that we already have all parts needed to build a "real" online person, except they're scattered around and not in the hands of a single entity. But let's say one day Google or anyone else with enough power and the same data about people buys the technology behind Lyrebird.ai and this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0 What could possibly go wrong?
They pretty much do
No product I've ever worked on does this.
But you're right, this is common -- and is why I have to block all outgoing internet traffic by default now. Applications can no longer be trusted to be well-behaved on this score.
I got a shock when I first saw that link on HN, it motivated me to finally purge my email archives on gmail. The purchases didn't disappear immediately, but they do seem to have finally gone now.
I have not noticed any significant change in the quality of search results. Though I primarily use DuckDuckGo I have to fall back on Google every now and again (or use Google to get different results).
Google is still better at inferring what I mean in a search than DuckDuckGo. Google seems to take into account current events, my location, and pop culture better than DuckDuckGo. I have not noticed any effect from changing my privacy permissions.
It probably does make sense to periodically check.
When I hit the "remove purchase" button, it even says "To remove this purchase, delete the email."
If you don't trust them to handle the derived object according to your desires, then deleting it should not give you any assurances, since they could just rebuild it from the source material and the code they have on hand.
I think what you're really looking for is a mechanism like, "don't use this derived object in ways I find objectionable." I'm not sure exactly what that would look like for you; it would probably be different for every individual. For what it's worth, at least if you believe the news and Google's public statements, it doesn't use the contents of your email for ad targeting.
The problem is that they are constantly thinking along these lines, and building products to enable this. Also, they are an advertising company, so this is something that is of value to them. Fox guarding the hen-house stuff.
In my mind, its kind of like hiring an IP lawyer at a company. Even if your company is not litigious, there is a chance that at some point the lawyer initiates legal action to "prove their worth" or even advance their career inside the company. Same thing with this, why is Google paying developers to build this product if they're never going to use it? What is the business justification? Its certainly not for PR or marketing reasons.
Having an apparatus ready to go is very different than having no apparatus. This is part of the reason why weapon buildups are bad across the board even if people claim "nobody" is going to use them.
Useful features attract users. Users are a good thing. Like I can apply the exact same argument to email labels:
Why does google let you label emails? They're an advertising company, so labels must be valuable to them. What is the business justification? It's certainly not PR or marketing.
And now suddenly labels sound like an ominous feature, anti-user or anti-privacy or something, maybe. Which they aren't. But the implication is there.
I think its a bit of a stretch calling this feature useful but I suppose you can re-define anything to be useful. Ads are useful too, because you can save money by buying the exact thing that you need. Its too bad that people are downloading ad-blockers by the millions.
Google snooping on emails and extracting purchase related information to stick inside a dossier on you, is in no way the same as you voluntarily, creating a label for an email which they have already scanned anyway. An advertising company wants to know what you're buying, how frequently, and how much you spend on things. That is like a goldmine for them. The labels, are almost noise because its data that is an abstraction away from telling advertisers what will get you to open your wallet - which is the end goal.
>Like I can apply the exact same argument to email labels:
I don't think you can, and I could not follow the argument you made.
> I think its a bit of a stretch calling this feature useful but I suppose you can re-define anything to be useful.
It's used to alert you on upcoming packages you may receive or bills you need to pay (if you have an android phone/google assistant). I think that's useful.
> The labels, are almost noise because its data that is an abstraction away from telling advertisers what will get you to open your wallet - which is the end goal.
Statements like this amaze me! You really think that manually curated labels would be less useful than automated inference about an email? Supervised learning is basically always easier than unsupervised, and email labels are, quite literally, labels for the data. It's a model-maker's dream!
> I don't think you can, and I could not follow the argument you made.
That's because you personally find labels useful and non-invasive, but feel that this other feature is not useful and is invasive. That's the only difference. If you felt you got value from the purchase history tools, which again, some people do, or if you didn't have an unfounded belief that everyone was lying to you and this data was being used in ways it isn't, you wouldn't find what is essentially automatic labelling of some emails invasive.
The argument is that labels are useful to some people. Google could misuse the data derived from labels. Similarly, purchase history info is useful to some people. Purchase history data could be misused by Google. If you trust Google to not misused labels, then why don't you trust them to not misuse purchase history? If you do trust them in both cases, this doesn't matter, and if you don't trust them at all, why are you using an email client that you think is completely lying about how they're using your data?
Its not about a line. Advertising functionality is simply not a core function of an email service. It is something that is tolerated in exchange for a free service. That is not the same as ceding control and letting a vendor do anything they wish simply because a vendor claims its useful.
>It's used to alert you on upcoming packages you may receive or bills you need to pay (if you have an android phone/google assistant). I think that's useful.
Well, how does storing the item purchased and the dollar amount and other purchase details help with tracking anything? AFAIK Amazon for e.g. has stopped putting in tracking information in their emails. There could be a useful function as far as bills are concerned, but its weird to take an email about a bill and then generate another wasteful notification about the same bill. Or to take a package has shipped email and generate another notification. But that is a separate discussion.
Also, if Android and google assistant users have chosen to enable such features with informed consent, I don't see why every single gmail user has to have this this enabled. I mean that in a rhetorical way, I do see why an advertising company would do such a thing. Anyway, I'm simply registering a protest and I encourage other users to do the same. Several invasive Google policies were reversed due to privacy push-backs, and so all hope is not lost.
>The argument is that labels are useful to some people. Google could misuse the data derived from labels. Similarly, purchase history info is useful to some people. Purchase history data could be misused by Google. If you trust Google to not misused labels, then why don't you trust them to not misuse purchase history? If you do trust them in both cases, this doesn't matter, and if you don't trust them at all, why are you using an email client that you think is completely lying about how they're using your data?
That to me, is needlessly polarizing a nuanced issue. "Either you trust us completely or you don't" is not really an argument worth having is it?
They want to give users the ability to inspect the source data for various further derived features they provide, like shipping notifications.
> at least if you believe the news and Google's public statements, it doesn't use the contents of your email for ad targeting.
True, but its important to note that it used to do that for many years. They didn't make it clear if they removed information mined from previous scanning of emails.
That is definitely not the problem. Email you send is owned by its recipient. Generally, the recipient can do what they want with it, including delegating to Google and allowing Google to scan it for purchase information.
> They didn't make it clear if they removed information mined from previous scanning of emails.
That information was ephemeral, IIRC. It was scanned when you loaded an email to allow advertisers to make bids for ads relevant to the given email. In any case, bits rot at Google like anywhere else. If a feature or system is no longer being maintained, it quickly stops working. There is approximately zero chance that they retained any data that they theoretically would have generated from emails scanned half a decade ago.
I don't agree that everyone thinks this is the case.
This is precisely why I avoid sending emails to gmail accounts. Fortunately, almost nobody that I personally know uses gmail.
!disconnect -> disconnect search
Sort of. I find direct Google is more comprehensive.
!bangs gives more bang searches:
https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=
Great example is MapsMe for Android and iOS. Works offline. However, there are ads in app and probably from Google
You can compile and install unlimited number of apps to your device. But you won't be able to send them over air (Ad-Hoc) nor send to Apple AppStore. You'll need to locally install compiled app using Xcode (Xcode supports installing and debugging over Wi-Fi, but first time usb connection needed)
Some additional info: - Xcode can be downloaded directly without using Mac App Store. But there's no "Downloads" section for free developer accounts. Search for "Xcode direct link" and there would be stack overflow answer listing all actual versions - You'll need to setup Apple ID to enable developer account. Existing Apple ID can be used as developer too. - There may be a lot of errors indicating provision/bundle id mismatch. You need to use "Automatic Provisioning" from Xcode - iOS Simulators won't count as attached devices
Was on Gmail / G Suite since 2007.
https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity
Not many people know about this so spread the word!
I think the other tactic to defeat Google is to click on EVERY SINGLE AD you see. It will destroy their ad tracking capabilities and it will also destroy their business since they won't be able to tell what is a good click and what isn't. I've started doing this and I don't think there's anything else that can get them to stop actively violating our privacy.
Let me pay for my Gmail account. Let me pay for good support instead of automated decisions and getting kicked off the platform with no recourse. Otherwise I will render myself useless to your algorithms by changing my behavior so that algorithms won't be able to make sense of it.
As for the ad tracking bit, there is an extension called AdNauseam that google has repeatedly banned on the chrome store, but it essentially does what you said - register a click on most ads while simultaneously blocking the ads from rendering.
Also I'm thinking/wanting the same for my phone. (hardware and service). Is there a method for public owned cell phone service (not expecting it to exist, but as a feasibility question - regardless of current obstacles)?
If anyone is listening: I could not care less about instagram or reddit's app. Forget the app store ecosystem junk. Just give me a phone that can make calls and runs a basic web browser. I'd like an alarm clock, and a map/navigation service might be nice, but those aren't deal breakers.
The only real solution is to delete your Google account(s), avoid using Google services entirely, and firewall off any access from your machines to Google servers.
You can't do much about Google's real-world spying, though, such as their use of credit/debit card usage and so forth.
What does it mean if they don't even bother to turn it off?
That's one reason I care so much right there. I 100% don't want "personalized" ads. But I don't for a minute believe that's the only thing they do with that data.
More generally, it's simply none of their business unless I choose to share it with them, and it makes me very angry that they don't have a basic level of human respect about that. (To be clear, I don't single Google out on this -- I have this objection to the entire internet advertising industry.)
I don't need to show any kind of imminent harm in order to object to that. I'd also object to someone coming into my house and photographing everything in it without my permission, even if they never did anything with the photographs.
First, because personal ads are a strong indicator that my web usage is being tracked.
Second, because nonpersonalized ads provide information to me about the site they're appearing on -- they can act as a sort of quickie indicator about what sort of audience the site is intended for. Peronalized ads eliminate this.
Third, because what little usefulness ads supply to me comes from serendipity. Personalized ads eliminate this, too.
In exchange for removing what value ads may have brought me, personalized ads give me exactly nothing in return.
> its not the same thing as someone coming into your house and photographing everything at all, false equivalence.
I think the comparison is apt when it comes to claims that spying on people is OK as long as the spies aren't directly harming you. In both cases, someone is recording your personal data, in both cases, they aren't harming you with it, and in both cases it is extremely objectionable regardless.
(I've been getting some other kid's watched videos in my history, and Google doesn't care about this kind of history mixing, my reports got me nowhere).
It is not my device. I am getting somebody else's history.
I also reported it to Google, providing additional details, late last year I think. No change. And I have done everything I could, short of deleting the Google account. So all I can do now is tell others.
The amusing thing is how whenever I mention it on HN, it gets immediately downvoted. There sure are some hard Google fans here.
I also tried removing all devices and re-authorizing them again, just to make sure. Doesn't change a thing.
These videos are not played on any of my devices.
Next up, we get to wonder if you have a virus on your machine which is playing videos for you in the background.
If the videos play at a regular interval, you could try turning one machine off during that time, and see if the events disappear from the log.
I find this bizarre: by now I expect the next suggestions to be that I'm sleepwalking and watching these myself, rather than a more probable explanation that Google isn't doing something right (gasp!).
I think it's interesting that people seem to find it so hard to believe that Google's software might be buggy.
(I didn't downvote BTW, happens to me all the time. People abuse it as a disagree button like on reddit, but it's even more toxic on this site as its only available to a subset of users)
I'm using Android at the moment, of course.
What steps did you take to see what profiles you opened?
*.google.*/search
There's a good second or two of recording time before I say the words "Hey, Google"... which means it's just always recording?!
I know practically speaking I should have known this, but I somehow assumed that nothing was being recorded until after the trigger word.
without collecting user data, google,/FB etc can't exist, they can't improve their services. As a user, I don't care much on the data they collect, as long as they follow law system in the country they operate. if these huge companies went beyond the control of the governments, then only the real problem starts.
So I just downloaded all of my search activity into nice JSON files, and now I am going to apply a bit of data science and magic stuff using Python and Node.JS and I will have a nice profile of myself for the past 11 years:
1) What kind of questions did I ask google? (beginning with how, when, where etc) - how do these questions connect to my personal and career development? 2) Apply some sentiment analysis using sentiment.js on the search terms and find out if the particular search term was positive, negative or neutral (this will give me a nice overview of my mood for each day I searched for the last one decade) 3) do some filtering and data massaging to pick out the exceptions (ok just a cursory look at the file helped me discovered a forgotten website project I did 10 years ago as part of college summer project - a work I am extremely proud of during that time and even now.) - which days, months, the year I searched the most (or what events triggered the searches - a breakup, a job search or a side project) 4) discover interesting patterns of my search profile (what I searched most during college time, after college when searching for a job, before marriage, after marriage etc.) 5) make a video on the lines of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU
so many fcking brilliant things I can do with my data. But what? Google has a copy of the same too? baby cry* What am gonna do? In a larger scheme of things, my data profile is just too insignificant.
To quote from the front page of Hacker News post, "The second volume of “My Struggle”, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s enormous, maddening, brilliant autobiographical novels, contains some depressing life advice. “If I have learned one thing,” he sighs, “it is the following: don’t believe you are anybody. Don’t bloody believe you are somebody…Do not believe that you’re anything special. Do not believe that you’re worth anything, because you aren’t.”
Not worried if Google tracks a skipped song history or an irrelevant app install on the gazillionth device I own. More worried about google's anticompetitive behaviour (blocking youtube on edge chromium and more recently making jobs of ad blockers even difficult) and even more larger questions such as what if Google starts to non exists tomorrow? Life after Google?
We get it. You don't care about privacy.
That doesn't mean we do not care about privacy.
A lot of people care that they have the data of billions of people, because this gives Google immense power. And certainly not everyone in that data pile is insignificant.
so many fcking brilliant things I can do with my data. But what?
All things you could have done, if you had configured your browser to save your searches on your terms.
Not worried if Google tracks a skipped song history or an irrelevant app install on the gazillionth device I own.
Nobody is worried about this strawman.
Google has a copy of the same too? baby cry What am gonna do?*
Extrapolate this bit "google's anticompetitive behaviour" in your mind to the point where it affects you personally, then realise that it affects other people who aren't you, then legislate them hard before that happens.
Not that I wanted to sound superior and compared comments to baby cry, just wanted to say that people are making a big fuss about something that is completely trivial.
All things you could have done, if you had configured your browser to save your searches on your terms.
No, I couldn't have done that until I discovered this post on hn today, even getting an idea to do that thing would have been chance encounter. Even if I was interested, seriously, are you suggesting I would have implemented a custom solution for all of the devices I ever used (since a decade) not to count different environments and oses they would operate on? My argument was in the spirit of converting a curse into a boon. Making good out of something supposedly bad.
Nobody is worried about this strawman.
If you really go through the arguments against this activity tracking, you would find even more such examples. It's not strawman, it's what actually bothering the people a lot (if you can go through rest of the comments)
Extrapolate this bit "google's anticompetitive behaviour" in your mind to the point where it affects you personally, then realise that it affects other people who aren't you, then legislate them hard before that happens.
Completely I do understand everybody's unique situation, my approach could have been malformed but the intention is not. Just trying to show people something positive out of negative.
And I rest my case.
Completely trivial to you. I say that's fair and I respect your stance. It's also fair that there are people for whom this is not trivial at all. You should be able to respect their stance.
Creeps.
This should be opt-in, not opt-out!
The truth is, people want conforting lies.
If you're not informed, it's your fault. You did legally consent.
That said, could Google do better at explaining these things and giving controls and changing opt-outs to opt-ins? Sure.
But the argument you made is false.
Terms and conditions are written to be very opaque and to obscure what you're "agreeing" to. What you're saying is that you need to effectively be an attorney in order to be able to have informed consent.
> You did legally consent.
I didn't say otherwise. I was talking about actual consent, not legal consent.
> But the argument you made is false.
I disagree, obviously.
Or read commentary about it. Which exists in abundance.
> I was talking about actual consent, not legal consent.
If you could define what you mean by "actual consent," and compare it to "legal consent," that would be great.
Commentary about terms and conditions doesn't really help for a whole bunch of reasons.
What I mean by "actual consent" is that I've been fully informed what the deal is and I've actively said "yes".
Legal consent is a lower bar than that. For example, if a service lays out the deal in a document that can't be clearly understood by a normal person and/or that is ambiguous (meaning that a normal person can reasonably understand it to mean something that it does not mean), agreeing to it is legal consent, but not real consent -- real consent requires that each party fully know what they're consenting to.
I mean, what do you wish were different?
You can argue that, but as I said, that would require everyone to be a lawyer in order to properly analyze and understand those agreements. I think that's an unreasonable expectation.
What I wish were different is three things:
1) That I am clearly and correctly informed what would happen to my data if I agree (and that those terms will not change without me being clearly and correctly informed of the change before it happens and my consent being obtained again).
2) That I have to explicitly consent rather than having consent "implied" by, for instance, just beginning to use a service. And if the data is going to be used or handled by an entity other than the one I'm directly dealing with, that entity also has to get my explicit consent.
3) That no data is collected about me in the absence of my overt consent.
To be honest, it's #3 that angers me the most. My data is constantly being collected without my consent merely by doing things like going to a web site, or playing a game, or that companies like Facebook and Google get data about me when I buy something in a physical store using a credit/debit card.
If a program defaults to writing in a hidden folder, probably what it's writing is not for my benefit.
If it's for my benefit, and I approve of it, it can go in /home/name/clear-folder or c:\users\name\documents\folder in an open and documented format with an open API.
If it's going in /home/name/.hidden/cache/dont-look or c:\users\name\appdata\company\{GUID} in an undocumented opaque blob without my knowledge, approval or explicit consent, it's much harder to argue that it's "for my benefit" and expect that I'd agree with that claim.
Turn everything opt-in and your computer reverts to being a disconnected 1990s less-useful computer.
Turn everything opt-out and your computer is increasingly tempting to be someone else's tool, a wringer for your life, a cash-extracting manipulation and abuse tool that does things you don't know about and didn't agree too, for other people's benefit. And we're not talking a defensible social good benefit like herd immunity to vaccines, either.
The real shock in these comments is not that "HN is amazed Google gathers this" or "HN is blazé about Google gathering this", it's "HN hasn't been able to log their own plain text search queries locally onto a NAS if they want to"
I've see comments on HN by users from incredibly diverse fields, expertise, ages, countries, etc.
If you think a specific comment in this thread reflects your blanket statement then address it directly, but overall it makes me dismiss anything you've written.
And it doesn't contribute much to the discussion
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook&sort=byPopularity&pre...
There was a recent thread with more than one person comparing cigarettes with FB. Possibly even FB being worse than cigarettes. Something that has killed millions of people. But even in that no one defended FB. They just said FB isn’t as bad as people are making it seem.
Like the OP responded, even if 100% of people aren’t the same, you can discern clear trends, behaviors, and feelings of the general commenting populace. Like we can for HN being abnormally anti-FB.
Really? No wonder my recommendations suck so bad, why on earth would where I'm located impact what music I want to listen to?
Edit: extremely curious why this is being downvoted. Anyone care to comment?