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Google – My Activity
- badloginagain 10y agoLooking at the (mostly) devops related stuff I've searched for, it surprised me how naive an automated ad optimization service can be to offer relevant recommendations to me. I thought it was a carefully formed bit of magic. It looks like I make it easy for them. If I could do any one useful thing with this data, is recommend people I can connect with who are domain experts in the things I search for. Like if there's a Vagrant/Chef wizard with a fairly prolific web presence, I'd like to know about them.
- personjerry 10y agoNo activity. I deactivated all my settings years ago, I'm glad it hasn't magically reset.
- LeoPanthera 10y agoI appreciate that Google allows me to turn their data collection off, though I still avoid Google services where possible. I hope that this page tells the truth.
- greglindahl 10y agoGoogle allows you to disassociate the data they collect from you from your account. That neither turns off data collection nor guarantees that it's impossible to associate your name with an activity stream.
- JoshMnem 10y agoIt appears that their interface does not tell the truth. My YouTube search history is off, but the YouTube history is still displaying on that page, so they are still collecting and storing the info.
- ruipgil 10y agoI found the same about YT history. None of the videos that I view on the laptop are shown in the history, only videos viewed on mobile. I think it's because I block ip addresses, that track your data, on the laptop.
- ryandrake 10y agoSame here, but do I really believe that Google has nothing on me? Not for a microsecond.
- Xeoncross 10y agoI really wish this actually showed my activity. This is a partially honest, very limited version of my real google account activity. I would love to data mine what Google has on me. I'm sure I'll get a copy someday. Almost everything on the internet eventually is released via acquisitions, subpoenas, hackers, etc...
- tantalor 10y agohttps://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
- gruez 10y agothat doesn't provide everything though. at the very least, it doesn't have all the advertising dossier they have on me.
- agumonkey 10y agoYou mean deeper analytics they infer from your behaviour (queries, time, cursor...) and the kind of ads they end up showing ?
- gruez 10y agoYes
- allenlavoie 10y agoLike https://www.google.com/settings/ads https://www.google.com/settings/ads ?
- mattnumbe 10y agoAccording to this, google doesn't know if Im male or female. It must not be showing what they really know about me.
- rtpg 10y agoIt's kinda cool to be able to look back at this stuff, I almost wish this were more integrated into the rest of Google so that I could rely on this (and for better awareness).
- adamrt 10y agoJust out of curiosity, how old are you, if you don't mind? Your comment makes me assume you are very young or you work at Google. I don't mean that snarky, but your comment is a very different response than the rest of this thread.
- wingerlang 10y agoI'm not the one you are asking but I share the same thoughts on general search history. I'm late 20s and I don't have any affiliation with Google. It is nice because I can go back to 10 years ago and see what I searched, essentially taking me back to that time and loads of memories come back. "Why was I searching for cheat for this game? Oh yeah because this was the summer when I was playing with person X, Y and Z while doing A, B and C". It's just kinda.. nice.
- nitrogen 10y agoThat's your interface to the data. Now imagine an NSA-like interface to the data. What is in there that you might not want future employers, dates, or others to know about the corners of your (and everyone's) life? Then imagine if your least preferred political candidate gets elected several times in a row and has access to all that data about potential "undesirables". Think of the journalists, the political volunteers, the victims of stalking or abuse, the LGBTQ, the women who had an abortion after being pressured into sex, and think of that information in the hands of a corrupt regime, or hacked by a hostile foreign power (or radical religious hacker group).
- wingerlang 10y agoThis potential scenario is valid, but it doesn't change my mind.
- mef 10y agoHmm... my searches of my activity don't show up in my activity
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- agumonkey 10y agoInteresting stream. Another one is Google maps on Android. I just went through my month of commutés, corelated with pictures taken. 'interesting'
- chipperyman573 10y ago>I just went through my month of commutés, corelated with pictures taken. 'interesting' That's because you used Google Maps to track your location history (which, at least when I first discovered the feature, had to be manually enabled), then took pictures which you uploaded to Google Photos. As a HN user, I'm sure you know that images often have location metadata. Google simply connected the two bits of information you provided to them by using their services. Honestly, of all things that google does, this is probably the least creepy.
- agumonkey 10y agoOh I didn't mean it was a scandal, just that tracked web queries feel one way, tracked location history feel very different. It's an automatic blog of another side of your life and day by day it amounts to a fair bit of data that is easy not to see if not shown.
- azinman2 10y agoTerrible. A minimal attempt at data transparency. A fine grained reverse chronological list of potentially tens of thousands of data points gives you no ability to sort/filter/understand what's there. Google will also never tell you what they've inferred about you, what ads have been tailored for you, and why. Their real gold is still hidden.
- wmf 10y agoWhat they've inferred about you: https://www.google.com/settings/ads https://www.google.com/settings/ads
- azinman2 10y agoThat's very little of what their models have on you to power each product.
- Klathmon 10y agoWhat makes you think they have more than that? I'm pretty sure Google has plenty of users willing to share their data that they wouldn't risk the legal and political shitstorm that would come out of secretly storing data about you...
- a_imho 10y agoI would be more surprised if they were not asked to store publicly not accessible information about everyone.
- azinman2 10y agoOpen up Google Inbox or Google Now -- all these 'smart' features are extracted and interpreted from your underlying data. Or do a google search logged in vs not logged in.. the results will be different. The models are very complex and often not something that can be meaningfully represented, especially when you're a data point inside a neural network. I have no idea why I'm being downvoted... anyone who has done any machine learning can attest to these basic facts, not to mention I've worked at Google.
- imh 10y agoI hate that google products are such crap if you don't let them remember everything about you. I deactivated the maps tracking on the privacy page recently because the wording made it sounds creepy, like they can keep track of where I am whenever they have it, not just the destinations I ask for navigation to. As a result, they don't suggest any places at all and instead make me type it out until the generic autocomplete gets it. No local storage on my phone, not even speeding up the autocomplete for the single place on google maps I have favorited. They seem to be very much all or nothing :( Either we track you everywhere or nowhere at all and gimp our products.
- striking 10y agoThe wording is exactly correct. If your devices send your location in any way, they may collect and store that sent location. It's probably just for their Location History thing. Which I actually really enjoy using, since I can see all of my past days and where I went. It's pretty neat.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoThe government thinks it's really neat too. ;)
- twwl 10y agoThe the people downvoting this thinking they're cute: totalitarianism is no joke, and your apathy infringes on my rights. You flat out do not get to be this lame. Get rid of your toys before your toys get rid of you.
- jk563 10y agoWhat right(s) of yours does my apathy infringe upon?
- striking 10y agoYeah, exactly. This Location History thing could provide me with an alibi if someone was trying to sue me for something I didn't do. It enhances my rights instead of lessening them, in my opinion. And it doesn't touch anyone else's rights.
- runesoerensen 10y agoRecent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12042613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12042613
- ArtDev 10y agoA solid reminder why my main browser is Firefox. I only use Chrome for development. Best of both worlds.
- chipperyman573 10y agoFirefox uses google's safe browsing web service[0], so Google gets your data anyway (unless you've disabled it). [0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-malware-protection-work https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-m...
- lorenzhs 10y agoDisabling safe browsing is bad advice. It uses a local bloom filter and transmits only gashed of prefixes of the URL if the filter says "maybe". It's pretty well thought out and you should not just recommend to people to turn it off, it's a valuable security tool, and certainly preferable to a ransomware infection, wouldn't you say?
- chipperyman573 10y agoI never said to turn it off... I said that google will get your browsing data. That said, I firmly believe that the best antivirus is common sense. Everyday users should keep it turned on but people who read HN (should) know enough to be safe without it.
- Sylos 10y agoThat's the exact point, though, Google does not get your browsing data. What Firefox does, is that it downloads a complete list of hashes from Google's Safebrowsing server. Every instance of Firefox does this every 30 minutes. Nothing identifying about this. Firefox then stores only the first 32 bits of those hashes to save on space (as the list is unsurprisingly gigantic). Then Firefox does a lookup against this locally stored list whenever it loads a webpage. If a webpage's first 32 bits should be on that list, then it obviously has to check if it's actually the complete hash that matches. But for that, it requests all hashes with same first 32 bits from Mozilla's server. They proxy the list for that purpose. So, it's at best Mozilla which can guess that you browsed to one of the many pages that share the first 32 bits of the hash. Google will have no clue about it. And in fact, they even throw in a few noise entries when requesting the full hashes from their server, so even Mozilla actually doesn't know for sure which first 32 bits you browsed to. https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-in-firefox/ https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...
- c-smile 10y agoHmmm... Did I ask anyone explicitly to store that information?
- JoshMnem 10y agoI have all of my history turned off, including YouTube search history, but it's still showing me my YouTube search history there.
- dingo_bat 10y agoI didn't know google was tracking individual apps that I use! And every voice search is stored too.
- kngspook 10y agoThey used to have another interface for this which was way more powerful, and let you delete all your history for a service at once (ie. delete all of your YouTube search history). This seems like a downgrade designed to make you work harder to erase your history, since you have to do it item by item.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- SquareWheel 10y agohttps://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity Does this not work for you? You can delete by any time range, for any service.
- makecheck 10y agoYep. And my trust in an entity goes down every time they make things obviously more difficult. They’re counting on users becoming tired of navigating or just careless, while technically complying with any laws because everything is “possible” by going “somewhere”. I loved the original Google and Facebook, both in terms of interface and behavior. The new versions of those companies/products are so bad that I have used them both less and less each week for years now.
- TJTorola 10y ago"Visited [insert all my untracked searches here] at DuckDuckGo"
- fuqted 10y agoI'm mildly insulted whenever they play a spanish ad. They've been doing this more and more lately. I don't speak spanish but I'm glad they seem to know I'm hispanic.
- reitanqild 10y agoHangs in Firefox mobile on s7. Google, you of all can do better.
- ashitlerferad 10y agoThese settings are not turned on Web & App Activity Voice & Audio Activity YouTube Watch History YouTube Search History Perfect!
- c3RlcGhlbnI_ 10y agoI use this relatively often. Mostly because it provides history search across devices. So if I ever looked for something before and found just the right answer I can retrace my steps from only a vague recollection. However the UI is a bit awkward for that usage. It seems to definitely be designed more for the average user who is using it exclusively for history deletion, like the activity log on facebook. The default grouping of entries makes deleting them in chunks easy but scanning through them hard. The UI also makes it easy to spot what site an entry is for at a glance but chooses not to show the url despite having plenty of space to.
- rorosaurus 10y agoI was just thinking the same thing. Very strange that Chrome doesn't provide users cross-device history search, while Google stores that information in my account activity anyway..
- lexicality 10y agoIt does for me. Doesn't chrome://history/ show you all the devices you're signed into?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- petre 10y agoGood. It shows no activity. I've disabled every form of data collection and don't use maps (using Here WeGo with offline maps instead).
- hr4 10y agoso, you have an account and you care they log your activity ... interesting point of view
- glandium 10y agoFunny thing: I had everything already disabled except the Youtube ones, but it didn't show any activity more recent than April. Except I'm using Youtube extensively, and the history (both search and views) in Youtube itself has the most recent stuff from today. Even more interesting, I now disabled the Youtube activities there, but the new things I've watched and searched after the change are still showing up in Youtube's history (but not on the myactivity page, thankfully).
- gerhardi 10y agoI love the location timeline feature. For example last summer I did a road trip driving from Finland to Venice, Italy through Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and France. Many times after the trip I've checked up exact locations for DSLR photos and actual hiking routes on the mountains. What was the name of the small medieval German town and the cafe that we had the perfect flammkuchen by the town square? Just a sec, I'll check out on the location history! This is only one kind of a example where I have found the location timeline useful. Edit: Also I've found it useful to check actual driving times for commuting and other trips. "Last tuesday I left home at 08:35 and took the tram and it took me 17 minutes."
- roomey 10y agoIf you are concerned you aren't getting all your data from google, if you live in Europe this probably applies: https://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/Accessing-Your-Personal-Information/r/14.htm https://www.dataprotection.ie/docs/Accessing-Your-Personal-I... Accessing Your Personal Information How can I see what information a body or company holds about me? Under Section 3 of the Data Protection Acts, you have a right to find out, free of charge, if a person (an individual or an organisation) holds information about you. You also have a right to be given a description of the information and to be told the purpose(s) for holding your information. You must make the request in writing. The person must send you the information within 21 days. Under Section 4 of the Data Protection Acts, 1988 and 2003, you have a right to obtain a copy, clearly explained, of any information relating to you kept on computer or in a structured manual filing system or intended for such a system by any entity or organisation. All you need to do is write to the organisation or entity concerned and ask for it under the Data Protection Acts. Your request could read as follows: Dear ... I wish to make an access request under Section 4 of the Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003 for a copy of any information you keep about me, on computer or in manual form in relation to.... (Fill in as much information as possible to assist the organisations to locate the data that you are interested in accessing e.g. customer account number, staff number, or PPS number (if you are writing to a public sector organisation such as the Revenue Commissioners or the Department of Social Protection)).
- TheAceOfHearts 10y agoCan you request your information if you don't live in Europe? I'd be really interested in finding out what info Google has on me. Do you know of anyone that has previously requested access to their info? I'd be extremely curious of what the response looks like (even if it had to be anonimized to protect the requester's privacy).
- roomey 10y agoI imagine it would be a link to that takeout page :) I haven't tried it myself. This can be used with any company in Ireland, anyone who used facebook in Europe for example, linked-in, twitter etc
- dolzenko 10y agoI'm not the big privacy advocate, but have this turned off because I can't see any convincing (to/for me) use case for storing all that crap :)
- Robadob 10y agoAppears you can actually search your youtube watch history here, I've always been annoyed that you can't inside the actual youtube website when I'm trying to find things I watched a few months earlier.
- shalmanese 10y agoIt's weird youtube can't even remember what I've watched. I'm constantly having to go into my recommendations and selecting Not Interested -> Tell us why -> I've seen this video before.
- hmate9 10y agoI think YouTube recommends those videos to you, because people are actually more likely to rewatch videos they have enjoyed in the past. So YouTube gets more views from old videos -> more revenue.
- intoverflow2 10y agoThis is super unnerving to me. Has anyone in this company actual had an encounter with a REAL person not a Google employee in the past few years?
- amelius 10y agoGoogle pretends that it can keep this information behind closed doors without sharing anything with advertisers. But this is not true. Data leaks out, and here is an example of how this might happen. Let's say you are interested in knowing which people watch a lot of cat videos. And let's pretend these people don't want to publicly share with everybody that they like cat videos. To find these people, you simply start a Google Ad campaign targeted at people who like cat videos. But the ad will be for an unrelated product, for example, coffee pads. Now every time somebody clicks on your ad and perhaps orders your coffee pads, you know that this person likes cat videos. Ergo, your data is not compeletely safe with Google and it can leak, contrary to what they make us believe.
- bduerst 10y agoExcept Google let's you control what ads you're targeted for: https://www.google.com/settings/u/1/ads/authenticated https://www.google.com/settings/u/1/ads/authenticated In your hypothetical, Cat lovers who want to keep that information private can remove 'Pets & Animals - Pets - Cats' from their account targeting. Now they won't see the coffee pad ads. And no, coffee pad advertisers can't target you based on your pornography viewing habits, HSV cream purchases, or any number of slippery slope examples.
- amelius 10y agoGoogle had a point if their service was opt-in, but it isn't. Also, the topic "Cat videos" does not appear, so I have to create it myself? How do I know if Google matches e.g. "Cat" with "Cat videos"? Further, my other interests may correlate with being a cat video fan, so I have to blank them out as well. But how do I know which they are? Sorry, but this solution is clearly broken. (Btw, how does Facebook handle this?)
- bduerst 10y agoAdvertisers can't target display ads to "Cat videos", they can only target audience topics - i.e. the ones you see and set to your account. If you think a topic is correlated with one you want to keep private, then you can also keep that topic private by removing it as well. It's well within your own judgement and control, so no, it's not broken. Facebook lets you do exactly the same thing: https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/
- shawnzvinis 10y agoI disabled all* tracking a few months ago. When I go to this link today I see "no activity". Aside from a few nagging messages here and there, my Google experience across all their products continued to work without a hitch. If you're thinking of turning all these settings off there's real effect on your end user experience (in my opinion). *I do wonder if they store soft copies anyway.
- koshak 10y ago>Sie haben die Kontrolle >Sie können ganz einfach einzelne Einträge oder ganze Themenbereiche löschen. Außerdem können Sie in den Einstellungen festlegen, welche Daten mit Ihrem Konto verknüpft werden sollen. In two out of three occurrences I read "Sie" as "They" )) Fun!