Can any googlers comment on whether "turning off" activity on your user page actually does anything? My understanding has always been that it just hides that data from the end-user.
The Web & App activity is described a help page article [1]. There are different settings for Android, Desktop and iOS. If you follow the dialog for the Desktop version you'll see another dialog that displays:
"Include Chrome history and activity from sites, apps, and devices that use Google services"
It's not clear what's being claimed in the lawsuit, but they mention Firebase, which is an app and web site framework. I would expect those opting in or our of the Web & App activity would cover signals from Android and Chrome, but not server-side components like Firebase and Analytics. I would expect those Android and Chrome signals aren't just hidden from the user and that they actually aren't transmitted or stored. From what I have seen Google tries to be transparent with everything in the My Activity portal [3].
It's not clear what they claim is being collected via Firebase.
[1] https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?co=GENIE.P...
[2] https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols?pli=1&authuse...
> Web & App Activity
> (Paused)
> Used by Assistant, Google Maps, and others
> If you turn this setting on, Google will save your activity on Google sites and apps in your Google Account, including searches and associated info like location. You can also choose to save which apps you use, your Chrome history, and which sites you visit on the web.
(emphasis mine)
To me, that reads like a careful lawyerly declaration that they are already saving all my activity, but if I turn this on, it will also be saved in my Google Account where I can see it.
https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention
See also:
Is there someplace else I can explicitly delete that data?
I uploaded a picture to google maps as part of a review. About a month later I get an actual notification on my phone - hey do you want to share this picture you took in City Park last weekend? It creeped me out beyond belief. Google had been rifling through my personal pictures in the background while I was going about my life. It was an enormous breach of my personal space and it is just one example of many related to google.
>I uploaded a picture to google maps as part of a review
You uploaded a photo to a public service, cool:
>Google had been rifling through my personal pictures
Not sure how that follows. Did google take a different photo from your phone and I'm misunderstanding you?
> About a month later I get an actual notification on my phone - hey do you want to share this picture you took in City Park last weekend?
He took a picture and put it on a public service. A month later that service asks him if he wants to share a picture that he took last weekend. Since last weekend cannot be as far away as a month ago one can not conclude anything else then that we are talking about a different photo.
I'm pretty sure that's the local Google Maps client app rifling through the locally-stored photos (because it has permission to see the metadata for photos on the device). I can see how one could find that creepy, though I think it's relatively harmless. Is the specific issue that one doesn't want Maps to be able to infer you took a photo at location Y just because you once uploaded a photo at location X? Is the issue server-side Maps making the inference or client-side Maps (b/c client-side knows where you are and can see your photo metadata, so it doesn't actually need a server in the loop to ask that question)?
Other people may use it for other things— that’s fine, as long as it behaves itself on my device when I don’t use those features.
A corollary is that the app shouldn’t ask for a permission until the user has asked it to do something that will obviously require that permission.
Whatever, I don't care. I could infer now that my entire photo library has been uploaded to google and is in some database somewhere. Or that every picture has been scraped for location data and recognizable landmarks, and all of that data is somewhere on google.
Whatever it is, I'm freaking disgusted.
Seeking the balance point is an ongoing process.
So if Google runs analysis on your photos, in their cloud, in a manner that doesn't cross information with other users, then we could consider this functionally equivalent to a system that runs it entirely on your device.
In many ways this is similar to search indexing for gmail, and other 'assistant' behaviors such as "you didnt reply to this, do you want to?" prompts.
This is the entire underlying premise and promise of SaaS and "the cloud".
I do think the well has been poisoned here in HN, using conspiracy like thinking, poor reasoning, and generally doubling down on confirmation bias. Some people hold Google to a higher standard of proof than anything else in their life - while a sign of mistrust, it is often based on wild accusations and bad faith arguments, eg: in this case lawsuits from ORACLE of all companies (literally the poster child for bad corporate culture, sexism at the CEO level, and sneaky business practices!).
Arguably the big guys being at war with each other is one of the few saving graces for all of us little fish.
Sometimes the accusations they throw at each other will have merit, and other times not so much. Each accusation therefore deserves separate consideration.
Google doesn't have to rifle through anything; from the application's point of view, that information is as clear as the filename and the color of the top-left pixel.
* what app you used to upload the image to Google
* what Google app / service identified the image
* how you uploaded it (i.e. if you uploaded it via a smartphone with location services on, I imagine Google is allowed to say "Hey, this upload is being done at this lat/lon, which I've determined either from GPS or from cell and wifi triangulation").
I have mixed feelings about sharing my location with Google at all times, but this one feature is actually very useful to me, and provides real value.
The controls do not work.
If you're seeing targeted DLCK ads while visiting some site, it's because the site has semantic information on you and has told Google "This user looks like they like puppies; I know this because they read a lot of puppy articles or I have a social media arm and they joined a puppy message group that I manage accounts for. Get that user a puppy ad."
Now, how individual sites track you and unify their concept of your session with their concept of your ad targeting is up to them, but it's worth noting they're allowed to use basically anything (including first-party cookies, browser thumb-printing, and local store API) to do that. They can also share information with other sites (using mechanisms like image bugs to let an affiliated site know you visited their site and what your userID is on their site, so they can compare notes later and build a comprehensive ad profile for you). None of this requires Google's involvement.