Google is watching
not-a-tech-bro.ghost.io
not-a-tech-bro.ghost.io
Obviously, this is technically feasible: I was on my home internet (both computer & phone), and presumably there are <5 accounts that share this IP address. So when I search, they ~know who I am, and so therefore could serve me ads when I'm logged in. But I was still surprised that Google would do it — I guess I would've thought that Google would drop incognito mode requests and not use them for ad targeting. (Since, well... it is quite trust destructive.)
Does anybody know if Google is doing this intentionally? It seems like this is pretty value destructive for them long-term? Or... am I just being paranoid and this is just a frequency illusion?
But sure, sending that extra tidbit of information specifically to servers that they can verify won't track you would be a good tradeoff.
Even worse is that they probably do try to detect if you're in an incognito session, but only for their benefit.
Edit: Here's an easy thing they could do. Even if we accept or pretend to desire cross-browser correlation at all, new-seeming browser profiles could have their information siloed for a few days and if they disappear in that time it all gets treated as an incognito session.
the common narrative is that they're gathering as much ad-targeting data as possible. No-one seems to care. What do they have to lose?
For example, if I start a Mullvad VPN, and open up an incognito window, but am still signed into Google (on my non-incognito window), Google now knows who I am (in both windows). Then if I browse a website that has GA (within incognito), theoretically Google could figure out who I am. This would be avoided if I shared nothing (not IP address, not browser fingerprinting) between my two windows. Is there any way to do that at scale besides just... closing everything before I go into incognito?
Isn't this essentially Tor? Per-connection almost-random IP addresses.
Google has actively fought against this, and many people haven't noticed. Things like requiring 2FA for new Google account activation are ridiculously destructive to the ability to maintain any privacy or security. My workplace started demanding 2FA phone/email activation and their response to "So give us a workplace email account then, I'm not using my personal phone" was literally "Just go create a free GMail", which isn't a thing any more without a personal phone.
And it goes beyond new accounts.
I have a 2006-vintage, realname, first.last@gmail.com forwarding account for formal uses that I can't access any more DESPITE HAVING THE PASSWORD AND CONTROL OF THE RECOVERY EMAIL because I refused to hook up 2FA, and moved from the old PC to the new PC which Google doesn't recognize session cookies on. Give Google the keys to the castle or fuck you, we're walling up the doors.
These are dark patterns that, if Google is going to fight us on, demand regulation. Consistent access to specific email & phone numbers were never supposed to be this important to a functioning life, and not supposed to provide a shady for-profit private entity with a permanent panopticon dossier on your activities either. We would flip the table and replace governments if they tried to do this to us. We have, in some cases.
Burn it all down and create some kind of nonprofit NGO to run email or to run the Google Empire, which needs to be simultaneously secure and feasibly pseudonymous in order for people to continue having the basic human rights they enjoyed in the 2010's and 2000's when Google was still in the "Be Less Evil" phase.
something to think about…
Incognito does not hide your activity from Google. Especially when you googled in incognito and they likely use IP addresses as part of their targeting. I am also assuming it's different for different kinds of ads given you wont see ads if you look at something personal. They infact allow IP address targeting somehow. [1] Their privacy stance is more about 3rd party not having access to the data google has collected.
[1]: https://www.shopifreaks.com/google-to-allow-the-use-of-ip-ad...
Personally I wouldn't put it past them to absolutely do it on purpose/by design.
I don't think there is consensus on HN regarding privacy issues.
I'm with the author. I view Google as a mass surveillance operation that has grown so large and invasive that I no longer want anything to do with them. I avoid their services as much as I can, and try to minimize and isolate cases where I can't.
They would google for things and suddenly my ads would show nightclubs near them (thousands of miles from me) and google’s default language would even change to the country they currently reside in. Just because the outgoing ip is shared across both users.
It’s actually gotten “better” but one could argue maybe they’re able to perform more precise targeting instead of throwing away signal.
How would that work without unmasking the use of incognito mode? All the backend[1] knows is that it got a request for a search. There's (by design!) no way to know that that came from an incognito window in a browser that is otherwise logged in to a Google account.
[1] I know I know, this is a(nother) anti-Google rant. But Facebook and Microsoft and TikTok and everyone else does this too. If you flag your interest in $THING on the internet to $SITE, then $SITE will try to show ads for $THING to your roomates, kids, grandparents, etc...
> And a final response is for the engineers who work for these big tech companies simply to refuse to build systems that work this way. If you're at Google, you have agency – you decide what code you write. Yeah, I know: "No" might get you fired. But there are other jobs.
Am I to understand that it’s too much of a hassle to move domains but not to change jobs (after being fired, no less)?
A tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements.
> As part of [a Nest update], Google demanded that I allow the app to track her location at all times, whether the app was active or not. The stated rationale was that it would allow Google to manage devices in her home
The app requests the permission via the normal mechanisms any app uses; it doesn't "demand" it. And you don't have to allow it (and of course can turn it off at any time by going to the app's permissions settings). If you don't, it will indeed pop up a warning that it can't enable the home-occupancy-detection feature, and direct you where you need to go to disable that in settings.
Contra the confused language in the article, Nest hardware works just fine if you disable that feature, though obviously it's a pretty useful feature to enable.
(And yes, I work there, but nowhere near Nest stuff. I do own one though.)
Yes I believed it too back then, and I reckon Larry and Sergey did too.
Whenever I am reminded of this failed motto I can't help but wonder if Larry and Sergey are disturbed by nightmares.
I wouldn't say /never/ attribute to malice anywhere we're in the vicinity of an an enormous data actor with a not-great track record, but probably at least /even/ are the number of cases of privacy violation attributable to maliciousness vs. terrible design that is either excessively encumbered or insufficiently granular.
I'm perfectly happy for Acme Random App to scan for `pps-setup-wifi-**` at one time, but not all wifi networks forever.
Regarding the Nest thing: I don't think those devices stop working completely if you don't enable location sharing for the "home and away" feature. It might be bad UI that made the user think that this is the case?
Regarding photo sharing: I think that permission is necessary to show a "photo picker" inside the app that allows the user to pick and choose which photos to upload. I'm not quite sure what the alternative would look like: "he can identify specific pictures in his library and grant access to just those" --> How exactly would that work without the app having access to the pictures? Also, does the author believe the app would then secretly analyze all pictures and send content back to the mothership without the user's consent? Again, this might be a communication/UX issue...
As for how to make photo library access selective, iOS does this just fine. The app thinks it’s seeing everything, but it can only see what you selected. Plus Apple has made it easy to edit those choices. And if you do grant an app unlimited access, it checks in every once in a while to be sure you still want it (particularly if you don’t use the feature very often).
Android recently added an option that lets apps pop up a picker and only get access to the picked pictures. They probably just didn't realize that some users might want to only share some photos with Google Photos or didn't think the slice was big enough to justify implementing.
Extremely simple: the photo picker is part of the OS and not the app, so the app can open it and wait for return file handles without knowing a thing about what the file browser will display
The web has this because it has to. Obviously you can't just give a web site permission to see your whole hard drive just to open one file.
But this kind of "privileged picker" approach does not seem to be the norm for mobile apps. I'm actually not even sure if iOS and Android even offer such a UI, or if apps simply have no choice but to request full access and implement their own picker.
If they do offer a picker, I would guess the reason the Google Photos app doesn't use it is not because Google's trying to invade your privacy, but rather because a product manager did not like the fact that they couldn't control the look and feel of the UI. It probably is significantly uglier and clunkier than what the Photos app itself can provide. And unfortunately, most users don't care about granting permissions. So the sleeker UX wins out. (I hate this.)
GrapheneOS has storage scopes that get between app and OS to be able to do what the author wants: only let the app know of the existence of specific files, not entire libraries.
I don't believe that Google would upload your photos remotely that haven't been backed up through Google Photos. Technically it sounds like their privacy policy would allow photos uploaded to Google to be used for training a model within Photos (e.g., I suspect their Ask Photos AI was probably trained on Google Photos data?) but it states that it won't be used for Ads or for training models outside of Photos.
For the uninitiated, data lakes are used to centralize vast quantities of data - often consumer data - usually by large organizations and governments to provide insights and inform decisions within the organization. Some call this surveillance capitalism.
Cloudera IPO'd somewhere around $2B and was taken private in a deal led by KKR for around $5B.
Twitter pull that shit very early on iOS before they had the permissions, all my contacts were uploaded to their server. Never ever trust that company again.
Switch to Apple, a.k.a Not an Ad Company.
That's only true if you define "free" differently than it has always been defined in the whole history of using it as a label for man-made things.