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Thank goodness this only works when you're logged-in; I had an unsettling fear that this was going to be based on shadow profiling. "Hello Aaron Smith. Do you

Thank goodness this only works when you're logged-in; I had an unsettling fear that this was going to be based on shadow profiling. "Hello Aaron Smith. Do you want to learn what we know about you? By the way your wife already knows about Sarah."

jacobush 10y ago
Actually, it would have been better and more honest. Then people would understand there is a dossier on them.
- derefr 10y ago
  Well, hell, they show you that dossier right on google.com/account: recent logins (with IP address, browser UA fingerprint, etc.), paired devices, search history, etc. They even offer to export it for you (Google Takeout is one of those "makes handing out information in response to subpoenas dead-simple" codebases; I wouldn't be surprised if they built it for law enforcement, and then just thought of it as a free win to expose it to the user in question as well.) They don't include the really interesting stuff, like what Adwords CPM campaigns you've been counted as an impression or conversion for—but that's more for technical reasons than honesty ones (ads run on massive realtime OLTP pipelines that just increment counters in memory to record you; the system just doesn't have time to record a whole {campaign ID, your ID} tuple.) But all that being said, the stated idea above—showing the account-privacy offer to anyone Googling the name of X on a computer X has logged into, even if they are not presently logged into it—would be a privacy leak. (And don't get me wrong, Google cooperates with authoritarian top-down privacy violation, but that doesn't mean they don't do everything they can to prevent peer privacy violation.) Someone could go up to a computer you've used, type your name, and thereby discover what your email address is. Imagine if there was a guaranteed way to "sniff" someone's contact information off a public computer they just used, where even clearing the browser's data completely wouldn't help—that's a big target for both stalkers and social engineers.
  - Jordrok 10y ago
    I've always wondered about the extent of the info which DOESN'T make it into these kind of data dump features. Once you start thinking about it, it's incredibly obvious that the data made available to the user for export is only a tiny fraction of what actually exists internally. There are various justifications along a whole spectrum of legitimacy for not disclosing everything. Does disclosing the way your data is analyzed reveal trade secrets? What to do about data involving two or more parties (how many times x has viewed y's facebook profile, etc)? I get that there are reasons why they can't show us the content of that data, but the fact that we will never know the true extent of what is even being collected or how it will be used...that still makes me uneasy.
    - derefr 10y ago
      There are few† things you do that Google observes, that they don't observe directly, with your device/browser sending Google a request. You can get a pretty good sense of what Google's dossier on you would look like, just by setting up a proxy with an access log for every request to Google's servers. † I'm not sure what they learn about people that doesn't come from those people making requests to Google. Like, even Google Analytics makes requests to Google—and they don't have any equivalent functionality that will take server logs in place of client beacons. This almost seems like a secret/implicit principle of Google, that's somehow persisted since the "Don't Be Evil" days: only attempt to find out things about people by asking those people directly, rather than by learning it from someone else.
  - Sir_Substance 10y ago
    >Well, hell, they show you that dossier right on google.com/account You missed his point: Google assembles that dossier even if you don't have an account, but without an account you can't go to google.com/accont and see it. Of course, you can't influence it either way since google won't let you request a deletion, so it's kind of moot either way.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    I meant the dossier they keep on people without accounts. And show you that they can reliably detect who you are without you doing anything but open google.com

jacobush 10y ago

Actually, it would have been better and more honest. Then people would understand there is a dossier on them.

derefr 10y ago
Well, hell, they show you that dossier right on google.com/account: recent logins (with IP address, browser UA fingerprint, etc.), paired devices, search history, etc. They even offer to export it for you (Google Takeout is one of those "makes handing out information in response to subpoenas dead-simple" codebases; I wouldn't be surprised if they built it for law enforcement, and then just thought of it as a free win to expose it to the user in question as well.) They don't include the really interesting stuff, like what Adwords CPM campaigns you've been counted as an impression or conversion for—but that's more for technical reasons than honesty ones (ads run on massive realtime OLTP pipelines that just increment counters in memory to record you; the system just doesn't have time to record a whole {campaign ID, your ID} tuple.) But all that being said, the stated idea above—showing the account-privacy offer to anyone Googling the name of X on a computer X has logged into, even if they are not presently logged into it—would be a privacy leak. (And don't get me wrong, Google cooperates with authoritarian top-down privacy violation, but that doesn't mean they don't do everything they can to prevent peer privacy violation.) Someone could go up to a computer you've used, type your name, and thereby discover what your email address is. Imagine if there was a guaranteed way to "sniff" someone's contact information off a public computer they just used, where even clearing the browser's data completely wouldn't help—that's a big target for both stalkers and social engineers.
- Jordrok 10y ago
  I've always wondered about the extent of the info which DOESN'T make it into these kind of data dump features. Once you start thinking about it, it's incredibly obvious that the data made available to the user for export is only a tiny fraction of what actually exists internally. There are various justifications along a whole spectrum of legitimacy for not disclosing everything. Does disclosing the way your data is analyzed reveal trade secrets? What to do about data involving two or more parties (how many times x has viewed y's facebook profile, etc)? I get that there are reasons why they can't show us the content of that data, but the fact that we will never know the true extent of what is even being collected or how it will be used...that still makes me uneasy.
  - derefr 10y ago
    There are few† things you do that Google observes, that they don't observe directly, with your device/browser sending Google a request. You can get a pretty good sense of what Google's dossier on you would look like, just by setting up a proxy with an access log for every request to Google's servers. † I'm not sure what they learn about people that doesn't come from those people making requests to Google. Like, even Google Analytics makes requests to Google—and they don't have any equivalent functionality that will take server logs in place of client beacons. This almost seems like a secret/implicit principle of Google, that's somehow persisted since the "Don't Be Evil" days: only attempt to find out things about people by asking those people directly, rather than by learning it from someone else.
- Sir_Substance 10y ago
  >Well, hell, they show you that dossier right on google.com/account You missed his point: Google assembles that dossier even if you don't have an account, but without an account you can't go to google.com/accont and see it. Of course, you can't influence it either way since google won't let you request a deletion, so it's kind of moot either way.
- jacobush 10y ago
  I meant the dossier they keep on people without accounts. And show you that they can reliably detect who you are without you doing anything but open google.com