Hacker News Reader

Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

> For those who don’t want Google to create a record of their location history at all, there’s a switch for that. On the My Activity page, click Activity controls and scroll to Location history and turn the switch to the off position.

Yes, that's what I do. But then Google Maps on the phone nags you constantly that it should be on.

Removing the nagging would be an immense improvement and proof of commitment to privacy on Google's part.

View on HN

Be very careful about combining Inactive Account Manager with telling Google not to store activity data. I started getting countdown to deletion warnings telling me I needed to log in to show I wasn't inactive, but no matter how often I did it was ignored completely until I turned on activity tracking. I'm not sure if this is a rare bug or working as intended, but it could go badly. In the end I turned off Inactive account management and activity tracking, but it was a bit disturbing.

This sounds like The Monkey's Paw. They granted you your wish of tracking no personal data, now they can't even verify your account's identity, and their inactive account cleanup job has scheduled you for deletion. Very interesting! The line between necessary data and personal data is a finer one than I thought.

Sounds like a gdpr violation

Or an edge case they didn't consider, and will likely fix.

My bet was on a mix of just a predictable edge case and Google not prioritizing testing when users have stopped activity. I don't think they sat down and decided the kind of people who care about the inactive account manager were especially good targets for manipulation. I'm sort of surprised that they didn't use the info that they have on last logins instead of the web activity tracking, but there's probably some architectural reason it was easier.

Logins can occur without user interaction by a logged-in device, so it's not as meaningful as user activity.

That's true for apps & devices, but generally I think they can assume that a human is doing the logging in for one of their websites. If they can't assure themselves that it's mostly true they have a serious issue.

There are plenty of passwords managers that will do an auto-login. Anyway, the last time I've logged into my Google account is months ago - I only access it on trusted devices with long-lived sessions, and I suspect this is the case for most users.

What counts as logging in? Do you check Gmail or drive weekly? Backup and Sync?

Can you set up an API key app that pings an API weekly?

If I recall correctly their documentation suggests that a single login to the Gmail web app or several other properties should count as well as the official Gmail apps, but no web logins I tested had any effect for me. Sadly I can't retest this without setting a new timer on an account.

If you end up in a position to tet this you'll want to keep an eye on multiple account logins as well since the link they send you in the warning doesn't go to a specific account. If you're logged in to more than one account and the first one isn't the one you got the warning about you'll end up looking at the manager for the wrong one and need to either log out entirely or find it manually. A minor design issue, but it can be confusing for a few minutes.

Lucky! I get some kind of fleeting toast message (sub-quarter of a second) about some kind of permission missing, before the app closes itself entirely.

I have almost all my tracking options turned off (as of 2 years ago) and I still regularly get recommended YouTube videos based on my wife’s google searches

What is "constantly"?

Some amount of advertising is expected in a free app.

If they can't keep a cache of your recent locations, it would be difficult for them to apply optimization of your location, prediction of your car's path, etc. and Google Maps would be a much more jarring experience, akin to a GPS device. I think they do need the client to send recent locations per request if they want to deliver an optimal experience.

For example, what if I wanted to implement loading automatic nearby locations? Naively, I could fetch the results within a radius R of the current received location. However, that's not good if I'm on the highway. The smarter algorithm would take into account the car's position, velocity, and angular velocity to calculate a better spot to query around, or perhaps a different shape to query in other than a circle with radius R.

> if they want to deliver an optimal experience

I should be able to decide what "experience" I want. I don't want "more", I'm happy with "good enough".

Anyway, I'm very fine with how it works now, except for the nagging. I allow the app to know my location, of course, just not to store any history.

>I should be able to decide what "experience" I want.

You can. You can use their 'free' app that you pay for with your location data or you can pay a one time fee for a road atlas with no updates.

Or you can use the Navigator app by someone else, that has a free option, nothing feeds to the Google monster, and behaves pretty much exactly like an old style GPS device with some modern additions.

Good enough indeed.

Nobody wants to use a maps app that feel like it's from 2004. There's a reason people put up with giving their data away -- because data drives machine intelligence, which makes your maps app smoother, more responsive, more useful, and overall a much better experience.

I, too, don't want to give my data away. But when I'm in my car, the most important thing is that I get to my destination safely and on time. That acute need vastly outweighs my own philosophy on who I think should have my data.

I'm just being honest with myself. I can't deny that I make heavy use of products that make heavy use of my personal data. People in this community seem to think of personal data collection as a form of parasitism, but in reality, it is far closer to mutualism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com