It's great to hear that Google is making such a big move. Google is not known for respecting user privacy.
As a Googler, I’m always confused by this sentiment. We live in times where car manufacturers reserve the right to collect and sell any data the car can sense, up to and including your sex life. But somehow Google does not sell or share any of your data with anyone, makes it public how it fights a lot of law enforcement overreach, even outright exits markets and sunsets features and products due to privacy concerns… And is everyone’s top focus when it comes to privacy.
1. More people have phones than cars
2. Cars take someone to a general location (i.e a shopping mall carpark) but phones are precise enough to say which section of a store (or hospital) you are in
3. Car manufacturers can't inherently link the passengers of the car to the driver, or to each other
4. Manufacturers of cars don't have ads as a core business model
That's not to say what car manufacturers are doing isn't scummy -- it deserves more light. But what Google does affects more people in a much more complex way. Google doing this essentially takes attention away from these smaller cases of privacy violations -- if the Google issue is solved (and I'm using Google here as a supplement for "phone tracking") then the world would turn their focus to the smaller issues like car tracking.
3. No, but based on driving patterns and sensor data, police can infer certain things.
4. Very soon. Very very soon.
This is not an image/PR issue, Google really is doing Evil™ things.
How so?
You can reference numerous previous discussions on HN regarding WEI for more information.
I used to work at Google, I got over the initial 'gee we're pretty nice and concerned' thing, but would like to gently point out the tendency of people to be slightly histrionic and misinformed about it. The gap between what it was, briefly, and the confidence you have in its intent and current state are quite wide. Certainly well-intentioned and appreciated, but ultimately alarmist and inaccurate.
These types of ideas with significant potential for abuse should be introduced with extreme caution and with at least majority agreement of everyone affected. Instead Google tried to pull a fast one and refused to engage criticisms in good faith. My response might seem alarmist at first glance, but I don't think that's a fair accusation given Google's behavior. I expect this proposal to return under a different name once everyone's forgotten about it and I hope the backlash then will be as severe as it was against WEI.
> No, this client isn't using an ad blocker
Sure, but I still fail to see how it would "obliterate any remaining semblance of privacy on the web".
WEI is following Apple’s lead isn’t it? But unlike Apple, Google got pushback and abandoned it.
When it comes to GDPR, that’s even funnier. Most companies woke up in 2018 and looked for a way to brush this off. My org in Google was investing serious development (we’re talking engineer-years, don’t know how many) into GDPR compliance in 2015. And that’s not some superficial fronted tweak. I’m talking about adding data removal to analytical storage, something where first design assumption was that it has immutable append-only history.
Manifest v3… I don’t understand what are they trying to achieve.
Google is hostage from ad selling.
Well, except we know about PRISM, so it's not even a theory anymore. And all their ad system tapping into the user data is pretty creepy as well.
I don't want to share any data to Google because of their poor track record and Google makes it as hard as humanely possible to not do that.
Several features in maps that would be super useful are unavailable if you have location history disabled. I'll be glad to turn it back on.