Hacker News Reader

Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

How misinformation spreads on the internet 101. In future, it might be best to word this as a question. "Why does Google think I live in the UK?" Less click-baity and more faithful to the level of investigation you had conducted. Phrasing it as a question rather than an accusation might have even led you to the answer, something along the lines of, "well, have I explicitly told them I live in the UK? Let me check."

View on HN

I wouldn't classify this as misinformation.

Facts:

1) I don't live in UK 2) They threated me at UK resident 3) It's not possible to change the country directly from Google account, you have to go to Play Store (which I don't use it anymore) 4) It was impossible to contact them

You accused them of illegal behavior when they acted correctly on information you explicitly gave them. You seem to expect them to divine your implicit intent from non-payments related product usage data. But for all we know you have search history turned off, and anyway most privacy advocates would consider a join like that suspect at best. Then you publicized this false information about illegal behavior as broadly as you could. If that's not misinformation I don't know what is.

To be clear, I'm not saying you did so maliciously. Seems like an honest mistake on your part. Well, it did until you started digging in.

What do you mean "search history turned off"? I'm not sure I understand. Also, I'm not a UI/UX expert, but Google suite has "Account Settings" where I would have expected to be able to see/change my address, but the option is not there. I use a limited subset of Google products (GMail, Calendar, Youtube, Google Docs, Maps etc...) but the possibility of changing the address was in the only product I haven't used since 2014 (I checked it because someone else, on a forum, pointed me to it). Now the address is updated, but I have no idea to check if my Data Controller will remain the same or it will be Google LLC. They should give us an explicit option to check/set what Data Controller we have, not infer it from a single product (which in my case wasn't used anymore).

There is a toggle to control whether Google keeps track of your search history. I suppose there's a separate toggle for location history. If you have those turned off, Google does not record that data, and there would be no way for them to derive your location even in theory.

Even if you keep track of location history, Google can get it wrong anyway (I know, because I gave up the idea of having my home address in Google Maps a year ago - it doesn't seem to learn that I've moved out, even after updating my address in Google Pay).

There is a separate setting for your home address in Google Maps. You have to update it there.

I did, but it keeps reverting back to what it thinks it learned from my driving habits. Somehow, it doesn't seem to realize that I leave every morning from the same address and get back to it every evening.

Using the fact that someone once entered a UK address as a proxy for living in the UK is inviting legal disaster in my opinion.

Are you a lawyer? I mean I have all kinds of legal opinions but it's not really my expertise so I don't know how grounded they are in reality. I'm not even sure whether the gdpr specifies penalties for using the wrong data processor for an account provided the same controls are obeyed. I.e. if Google uses the same protections for UK residents as they had under GDPR, I'm not certain that there would be any penalties for accidentally misclassifying some users. Actually it would surprise me if there were.

What does the GDPR say google should use in preference to the last known mailing address?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com