8 ms·
I'm going to be completely honest here: If these things were behind a configuration option and defaulted to off, I'd have gone into my phone and turned that opt
by saulrh 9y ago
I'm going to be completely honest here: If these things were behind a configuration option and defaulted to off, I'd have gone into my phone and turned that option on. I want to leave reviews for restaurants as I'm walking out of them - it serves the common good and doing it immediately is better for memory. I want to remember to download offline maps when I'm about to go somewhere where I won't have coverage. My memory is terrible enough that I can't do those things myself. Google obviously can't provide this service out of the goodness of its heart, of course it's going to have self-serving tweaks added on, but I consider those to be easily worth the value I get out of Google Prosthetic Associative Memory.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoAlso, if they were behind a configuration option and defaulted to on, most people would be fine turning it off and forgetting about it. This seems to be about lack of control. It's good for developers to think carefully before they ship products that do things with no way of being told not to. EDIT: Welp. Apparently these settings exist. I don't understand the point of the blog post then. Why is it so upsetting, if you have the ability to turn it off?
- daodedickinson 9y agoDefault on is outrageous. It's clear the average person doesn't know how to access and manage even some of these settings, much less understand what they do or be able to understand what privacy violations will continue despite turning something off in one place.
- jonathankoren 9y agoAnd that is why they default to on. If they defaulted to off, no one would turn it on, and they wouldn’t be able to hoover up the data.
- izacus 9y agoYou are explicitly asked about that feature when settinng up your phone for the first time.
- DrScump 9y agoMany non-technical types just have the store staffer walk through those steps, and others aren't likely to understand the implications of those settings.
- brokenmachine 9y agoThey can hardly complain to Google when the device doesn't behave as desired then. They should complain to the store staffer or make some effort to find out what those settings the are enabled actually do.
- fixermark 9y agoI believe that is the current state of affairs. Notifications can be suppressed in Android apps, right?
- Siemer 9y agoYeah, but in this case that might also disable the notifications of Google Maps navigation. That's why I simply tolerated the occasional nag until today, when this panicky article prompted me to dig a little deeper. Took all of one minute to get rid of the location spam.
- izacus 9y agoBoth location history and the notifications can be easily turned off on Android and Maps app. What do you mean about lack of control?
- aiiane 9y agoMaps app -> Settings -> Notifications -> Your Contributions (and uncheck boxes as desired). The controls exist.
- crag 9y agoBut does that mean Google stops collecting the data? Sure, no notifications, but will they still know what restaurant I just walked past?
- izacus 9y agoAs mentioned several times, disable Location History under Settings -> Google -> Location (on stock Google Androids you find that setting under Settings -> Location as well).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- aiiane 9y agoDepends on whether you've opted into Location History or not, which is the master setting for most of Google's persistent location-based features. You can check the setting here: https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols
- dlubarov 9y agoYes; you can see the location history Google has been collecting at https://www.google.com/maps/timeline https://www.google.com/maps/timeline But it's easy to stop collecting and/or delete location data; see https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687
- wvenable 9y agoMy guess is that doesn't turn off tracking but now you just won't be notified of it. I admit though, as a user of the data, I find this very helpful. Google is absolutely brilliant at give real time traffic information to roads and businesses. You want to know if Costco is busy right now, they'll tell you. Accident getting there going to cost you 5 minutes, they'll tell you that too.
- millstone 9y agoBecause if you turn it off in one place, it just starts happening in another: Yah. I disabled Google Maps tracking, then Google Search started notifying me about places I was near.
- lern_too_spel 9y agoIt's not Google Maps that's doing the tracking. He turned off notifications in Google Maps, not location history, which does the actual tracking that other apps consume. He agreed to location tracking when he first set up the phone because the first run setup explicitly asks whether he wants that on or off.
- fixermark 9y agoA harder, deeper question, is whether the average user is informed enough about "location history" to know whether they want that on or off, and whose responsibility it should be to inform them. ... as a wise man once observed, people talk a long game about how important their privacy is, but then empirically, researchers continue to discover you can get people to divulge a lot of personal information for a Snickers bar, if not less (survey-takers who just stand around in malls and ask people to fill out clipboards are an example of this---and while they are a dying breed, they're a dying breed because it's cheaper now to collect that information online, not because people have gotten cagier about divulging it).
- jdietrich 9y agoGoogle are miles ahead of the other big players in terms of transparency and user control. They actively prompt users to review their privacy settings. They provide a plain-English guide to what data they collect and a simple process to choose your privacy settings. I do find Google's level of data collection a bit creepy, but I also don't see how they could reduce the amount of data they collect without reducing the quality of their service. https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6227261 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6227261 https://privacy.google.com/your-data.html https://privacy.google.com/your-data.html https://myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup https://myaccount.google.com/privacycheckup
- ucaetano 9y ago> I don't understand the point of the blog post then. Why is it so upsetting, if you have the ability to turn it off? Because people like to complain. Especially when they're getting a free service (as in money).
- rdiddly 9y agoIt's "upsetting" (a strong word not used in the post) to new users because the default is "on" and that's the first impression they get when they turn the device on. Which is the sound of Google blowing it and sending people back to the Apple ecosystem, not necessarily the sound of someone crying.
- fixermark 9y ago> I don't understand the point of the blog post then. Why is it so upsetting, if you have the ability to turn it off? I'm not sure the original author knows that they can be turned off. ... or perhaps (if I'm being less charitable) the original author doesn't care; they don't want to be asked in the first place, ever (and are a touch naive about exactly how it is Google Maps gets the data it can vend to end-users).
- Raphmedia 9y ago> My memory is terrible enough that I can't do those things myself. One could argue that your memory is terrible because you know you can rely on those services.
- bognition 9y agoOr maybe these services provide us augmented cognitive abilities beyond that of a disconnected human.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoThat is indeed the point of technology. Personally, my only gripe is that those technologies tend to heavily depend on cloud and SaaS, which make you a slave of the whims of a third party, that is unreliable and often doesn't have your best interest in mind. Those same tools could be equally empowering without that dependency.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoWell, my memory is good enough to remember that in the pre-Google world I had no way to find out reviews of restaurants in a city I was visiting, let alone 'memorize' them.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- yellow_postit 9y agoTravel guides have been a thing for a very long time
- ralusek 9y agoBut that's just another memory surrogate...
- gargravarr 9y ago
- amelius 9y agoI can similarly say: If I could pay for the services of Google with money instead of with my data (which will be used in ways I cannot imagine or control), then I'd gladly do that. Why? Well, the problem with Google is they have an incentive to do bad things to us, simply because we are not the real customer.
- saulrh 9y agoFair point. If I could get this kind of thing as a paid service I do think that I'd happily pay for it.
- Chaebixi 9y ago> Why? Well, the problem with Google is they have an incentive to do bad things to us, simply because we are not the real customer. I am one of Google's real customers, I bought an expensive phone from them, but, to quote Josh Marshall: > One thing I’ve observed with Google over the years is that it is institutionally so used to its ‘customers’ actually being its products that when it gets into businesses where it actually has customers it really has little sense of how to deal with them. (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm)
- bastijn 9y agoAre you? Or did you just pay them peanuts for a tracking device that helps them make many times your peanuts with their real (real) customers?
- raspasov 9y agoAll those things can be done locally on the phone only and without any server-side data processing. Without investigating into Google/Android terms of use I can bet they are NOT done locally (I might be wrong, this is a guess). Ultimately it’s the consumer’s choice whether you want to buy your personal mobile device from a company that makes+sells phones for a living or from a company the sells ads for a living (no bad feeling against ads) and also makes+sells phones on the side to augment those ads.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoYou can install 3rd party libre roms like Lineage OS which don't have any proprietary Google spyware on Androids.
- cm2187 9y agoI'd be completely fine with all that even if it was turned on by default and if there was a simple off button. The point of the author of the article is that it is a permanent struggle with privacy settings. It's the same on Windows 10. There are like 30 registry entries one needs to change to turn off the spying, and they keep adding more. Like the author, this is a game I just have no appetite playing.
- Siemer 9y agoMeh. Open Google Maps (the app responsible for all of these notifications). Go to settings > notifications > your contributions. Turn off everything. Done. It's just one app being a bit too nosy. Nothing like the OS that tried to silently re-enable the privacy settings I turned off in an update.
- wand3r 9y agoThe article seemed to mention that they took this step and the notifications seemed to migrate to google search. I dont use android and may have misunderstood but that behavior wouldnt surprise me and I suspect either way the information is being logged.
- throwanem 9y ago> it serves the common good No, it serves Google.
- bastijn 9y ago> It serves Google and the common good. There. Fixed it for you. You can’t deny the benefits it brings to the average person having all this information a (google) search away.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoIf phrased that way, we should probably celebrate it - it's increasingly uncommon for business interests to be even tangentially aligned with society's interests, even in small areas of the product/service.
- throwanem 9y agoI can deny that Google doing something that happens to serve its specific interests, and that Google may without gainsay or penalty discontinue doing at any instant it should so please, qualifies as a common good. I can deny that all day!
- bastijn 9y agoOkay I’ll bite. It serves the common good today, but if you intend to say it may turn out to make us live our lives based on something that can disappear any day and that would cause more harm than the benefits up to that point, then yes, this sentence is too long.
- DrScump 9y agoBut I get all those same benefits simply from other people not carrying about their own privacy and security. I still keep location services, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc. off except when I'm using them in the moment and create a separate Google ID for each phone. My individual habits get lost in the noise.
- stinos 9y ago
- 0xWilliam 9y agoWhat a terribly blatant shill response.
- sctb 9y agoCould you please not do this? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ciconia 9y ago> My memory is terrible enough that I can't do those things myself. I get that all those services are helpful to someone who's easily distracted, but I'm afraid using them is the last thing that's going to help your memory. It just makes you more dependent. Personally I prefer not to use Google's auto-complete, I can spell just fine thank you. We're bloody human beings, we're supposed to be like the smartest thing on this planet, don't we?
- photojosh 9y agoI misspell words in Google searches all the time. I can either take the 3-5 seconds to correct it myself, or just hit search knowing that the big G will know exactly what I meant anyway. I would say an aspect of being "smart" is not wasting time on unimportant details?
- emmelaich 9y agoYeah I don't get the problem. I like to see other people's reviews so I like to provide some myself. Quid pro quo. You can of course turn off this feature but then you're missing out on a lot of what Google can give you.
- jonathanyc 9y agoAnd I tried to turn the creepy Google Maps prompts off but could not. Why should these be opt-out —- should others be tricked into sacrificing their privacy for your convenience?
- khedoros1 9y agoI found them buried in some menus that I didn't see last time I tried to opt out. Settings->Notifications->Your Contributions. There were about a dozen things that I decided to turn off, in addition to my previous choices regarding deletion of my location history, home address, etc.
- jonathanyc 9y agoNeat, thanks. Wow, I didn’t think to look in “Notifications”—-was looking for things labeled “Location Settings” or things like that. “Your Contributions” is a very dystopian name :)
- sosilkj 9y agoThis is pure corporate propaganda.
- tripzilch 9y agoAnd I completely understand, if it's opt-in. I might even do the same (or maybe just for a while). But soon as it's opt-out, it becomes creepy as hell and every time I get a message like this I resent Google a little bit more. Similarly, recently I clicked to like a YouTube video while I wasn't logged in (I only ever log in to Google using a private tab since a few years because I'm just so fed up with the incessant nagging me to track and spy me). So I forgot that I wasn't logged in and clicked the like/heart button. You know what it said to me? "Sign in to make your opinion count." Yeea, that wasn't accidentally worded badly. It's just too much of this shit every day all day, I no longer believe they actually meant to say "Sign in so that we can count your opinion". No, this passive-aggressive bullshit permeates every pop-up and nag screen Google ever communicates to me and the message is pretty clear. The subtext of my opinion being worthless unless I allow myself to be tracked. Same passive-aggressive shit goes on in Google Maps. Of course I have Location History turned off. Don't want to be tracked? We won't remember your recent search queries either. Because obviously they can only do that in the cloud or something. I remember back in the day when search fields that would remember recent queries first appeared, we used to call that "intelligent". Yeah it's a bit of a low bar for intelligence, but guess what the world's leading AI company can't do it unless you allow them to track your physical location. Can't? More like "won't". They want to sell me as data, but every step along the way, they try and make me feel like an insignificant little insect. It's not an actual transaction like "I give you data, you give me 'free' service", you can't negotiate really, and if you dare to even try they will basically bully you. If, like some people try to argue, we are really "paying" for Google's services with our attention and/or private tracking data--it's more like emotional extortion / blackmail, than it's a business transaction.