14 ms·

There was a lot of uproar about this internally but nothing changed. They told us that this was the only "practical" option. The company has rotted.

lvs 8y ago
From the outside, it seems to have reached a tipping point in the past year that is now getting quite dramatic. A whole string of heavy-handed, anti-user, and privacy-hostile decisions. What just happened to the culture that would allow all this evil behavior? Or did we misunderstand it all along?
- woranl 8y ago
  Sundar Pichai is now CEO. What else do you expect?
  - lvs 8y ago
    I guess that may be right. This is what you get when you put an MBA in charge of anything you care about.
  - hammerdahl 8y ago
    I feel like this is bigger than just Google. It seems like all of Alphabet is tending in that direction.
    - maybebad 8y ago
      Isn't Alphabet the clear "parent" of Google... I'm biased, but we are witnessing the beginning of a monopoly that wasn't imaginable pre-internet. Old rich white men are trembling in their shoes... The take-over game but played better, sexier, and immune. My G-ma loves the Google, so easy even the 90 year olds get it
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- belltaco 8y ago
  The bean counters have been taking over slowly at first, but now it's pretty fast.
- computerfriend 8y ago
  > Or did we misunderstand it all along? I think yes. Google has been considered "evil" by the tinfoil hat crowd for quite some time, and once again it has become apparent to the mainstream that they were right.
  - singularity2001 8y ago
    Google died when Smith said you have no privacy now[0]. Well I have no Google now. Fallback almost never used. [0] can't find actual quote, did I dream? Quoth: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about”
    - rhizome 8y ago
      The quote I know along those lines is from Scott McNealy.
    - anvandare 8y ago
      I think you were dreaming of this, perhaps? https://www.eff.org/nl/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-privacy https://www.eff.org/nl/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-sch... I'm surprised that people keep being surprised about Google being just another company. Money first, money last.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      You didn't dream: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/04/google_ericisms/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/04/google_ericisms/
  - cryoshon 8y ago
    >Google has been considered "evil" by the tinfoil hat crowd for quite some time, and once again it has become apparent to the mainstream that they were right it's almost as though the people with money benefit from marginalizing the people cynical enough to understand what they are doing.
  - arminiusreturns 8y ago
- jlawson 8y ago
  Maybe it's human nature to only be able to focus on one moral conflict at a time. Now that Google's culture is focused on collective racial/gender justice, there's no oxygen left to put towards individual rights like privacy.
- 2muchcoffeeman 8y ago
  Or did we misunderstand it all along? I’m really curious, what did you think their business model was going to be given they have free services? Surely the path they are on is the obvious one?
- izacus 8y ago
  > From the outside, it seems to have reached a tipping point in the past year that is now getting quite dramatic. There was no real tipping point - the media just noticed it's easy to get clicks if they repeatedly write about Google. Google was always Google and they had similar ethics for years now. It's pretty much why you also see all the Google articles on this page (just like you saw all the FB bashing a few months ago which now disappeared). I believe Reddit community calls this group behaviour a "circlejerk". People posting same content to reinforce their opinion.
- maybebad 8y ago
  I believe we are witnessing the result of a company offering not just a series of products but a whole lifestyle, and it is too hard for consumers to live without it. Best game plan you could ever imagine... Internet becomes connectivity, offer free search among connectivity, build products that promote connectivity, step 4: profit.
- bb101 8y ago
  From a mobile perspective, I used to be heavily invested in the Android ecosystem. Now I use an iPhone and and willingly hand over my Apple tax every few years and will continue to do so whilst I can afford it. Google's direction is a pity really, as Apple needs a strong competitor in the mobile market to maintain innovation momentum.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
hellbanner 8y ago
Their UX continues to g et worse. Google Voice on iOS has had 10-20 second lag (no joke) on older versions of iOS (used to be jus fine!) for 1-2 years now. One previous version of GV in particular froze for 10 seconds on your first key press, now I can't rely on it to open properly, or send messages. It seems intentionally sabotaged. I heard employees quit when G merged the YT with "real name" accounts. Personally I've had a real pain getting support for android development. Wrong and misleading documentation, rude forum moderators, no way to report a bug (they have a bug where Payments page will show errors -- in Incognito Chrome) -- on the admob site. Solution was to sign up for Adwords (how could I tell?) and check the page in Safari or sign into Adwords on Chrome. Shit documentation. Help your developers earn you money better, Google. And stop changing your UI. It looks like they have low-tier coders who get hired with not enough power to rock the boat so they roll out a UI re-vamp no one wants without bothering to fix systemic problems that repeatedly kill products, break products and have a completely INSULTING policy towards their developers. Admob: "You can't even complain to us without earning enough money.. here's a phone number.. it literally never connects." Why even bother? I interpret that they hate me. The feeling is mutual.
- steve19 8y ago
  I know I am flogging a dead horse here, but the constant retiring of Google apps makes me reluctant to adopt anything beyond Gmail and Youtube. I am a heavy Google Keep user, but I worry I am going to be kicked off that eventually. > And stop changing your UI. It The Youtube UI just gets worse and worse. I can only imagine what it must be like for non-Youtube Red subscribers. The add playlist button now defaults to your last playlist, which for me 75% of the time is not the playlist I want. Then I have to wait a few seconds for a popup, click a button, then unselect the last playlist and tick a new playlist. Just to add a f'ing video to a playlist.
  - kough 8y ago
    Im surprised you manage to be a heavy Keep user — i had a few thousand notes, and then they rolled out some update that meant they would all be re-downloaded every time i opened the web client, which made it unusable for me. Switched to apple notes because why not and havent had any problems since.
jorblumesea 8y ago
Most large companies have a "jump the shark" moment where business needs and biz dev take over the engineering/product side and starts running the show unilaterally. It becomes less of an equal affair and more dictating terms. Microsoft's was in the 90s in the os/browser wars.
- rjzzleep 8y ago
  Same thing happened to Sun Solaris
  - isolli 8y ago
    Do you have more information on this? I would be interested.
  - nasredin 8y ago
    I call them "how do they stay in bussiness if they don't do anything?". Basically all those shops that never have any customers, yet pay thousands in rent. (They are fronts for money laundering is the answer!)
jchw 8y ago
Was there internal uproar? Did they say this was the only "practical" option? I have missed all of this if so, I thought this is how Maps worked since this feature first popped up.
- maybebad 8y ago
  There is only uproar for war contracts... turns out "Do No Evil" isn't as important as "get a paycheck that allows you to live in the most expensive real estate in the known universe"
  - maybebad 8y ago
    edit: full disclosure, ex-Googler. I am biased. Met a lot of people who look the other way until even the other way is salty. "I build Google Forms, I do not wrong" ... It is easy to believe you are doing good for the world when you forget your product helps the company take over the world. Again, biased and salty myself
  - wutbrodo 8y ago
    Lol you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Googlers get into an uproar over _everything_. The flipside of which is that all of the issues that you're incensed about (like this one), you can pretty much guarantee that they're more incensed about. Not that leadership listens always or even often...
- nrook 8y ago
  Google is a fascinating test case for Elizabeth Warren's plan to create board representation for workers. Googlers have a very distinct culture that would advocate for very different positions from the ones Google is making right now. If Google employees had 40% of the board, they'd be able to do a lot more to stop decisions like this one.
  - jchw 8y ago
    Disclaimer: I myself am an employee of Google, but my opinions and views do not represent those of Google in any way. Just to be completely fair, there's a balance to be had. I think Googlers are a very passionate group about many issues. That doesn't mean they know what's best for the company or the world. If Googlers lead Google's business decisions, I think it would be a worse place. Firstly, developers are often very blind to privacy issues left on their own. Well-intentioned developers can cause a lot of trouble, as you can see from countless startups. Secondly, I think the realities of running a business are much more difficult than people want to believe, and sometimes you make tough decisions nobody wants but are truly in the best interest of the company. To be fair I still do not agree with everything I've heard Google doing in the news, but those are outliers. The narrative given by blogs and media sometimes (maybe even unintentionally) makes everything feel like a giant scheme, but I'd advise you to apply Occam's razor as much as possible. The people making the decision you don't like could legitimately just not understand what the "big deal" is. We don't always have the necessary context to really judge something, and our inclination when filling in gaps rarely likes to be kind. The Chrome login fiasco is a great example of good intentions that went over poorly with people. I try to stay neutral as much as possible when looking at issues, be they from Google or other entities. People make mistakes and misjudgements all the time, and people assume malice far too often it feels.
WalterSear 8y ago
In a recent interaction with the Pixel support personel via the built-in chat, I was unabashedly lied to three times in a row, including direct contradictions of the previous support persons instructions. When the support person didn't have a handy solution, they just started making up reasons why my issue wasn't supported, going so far as to tell me I was required to purchase non-existent, google-branded hardware in order to accomplish what the previous support person had already walked me through.
- hamandcheese 8y ago
  This would be much more compelling if you went into the actual details of what they said to you vs what the truth actually was.
  - WalterSear 8y ago
    Unlock and commnd the google assistant via a bluetooth device. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes it would unlock but then be unable to respond to subsequent commands. Then every few days, the feature would disable itself and stop working entirely (via voice or bluetooth) and have to be set up again. The first support person showed me how to clear the application cache, and then walked me through the process off testing the bluetooth. I was very impressed. I hadn't actually intended to request support - I was just using the device's help system. Except - it happens again, two days later, and clearing the cache and setting up the voice assistant every couple of days isn't much of a solution. I didn't expect a fix - mainly wanted them to let them know the solution wasn't working. The second support person had me walk through the basic diagnostics and then tried to give me reasons why what I was trying to do wasn't possible. First, it wasn't possible at all, then it became impossible to do with all my specific bluetooth devices and finally, it became impossible without using google bluetooth gear. (I misspoke previously - these actually do exist). Pushy, inexperienced, untrained and unsupported. And very clearly miserable and under the gun.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
      It was discussed on HN a few days ago: the size of the company is inversely proportional to the quality of their support. After the company reaches a certain size, they can simply afford not to care. Also, in this case it makes more business sense for them. Therefore I prefer to deal with smaller companies.
mtrycz2 8y ago
> The company has rotted. It has always been the plan, it's literally their business model.
- oblio 8y ago
  Yeah, I read some posts from a former employee. The ad model was there from day 1 and people can't just act like Page and Brin are brilliant yet failed to see the potential for harm in their business model.
  - taneq 8y ago
    There's a difference between "serve ads next to web search results" and "harvest literally every data point we can befuddle or coerce people into giving up."
    - oblio 8y ago
      This is from back in 2006: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/01/can-your-programming-language-do-this/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/01/can-your-programmi... And the sentiment was present even before the date of that article. More precisely: > The very fact that Google invented MapReduce, and Microsoft didn’t, says something about why Microsoft is still playing catch up trying to get basic search features to work, while Google has moved on to the next problem: building Skynet^H^H^H^H^H^H the world’s largest massively parallel supercomputer. I don’t think Microsoft completely understands just how far behind they are on that wave. People were joking about Google ingesting all the data they could to build an AI, 12+ years ago.
Tor3 8y ago
Tracking for everything.. with Android 6 and upwards you now have to turn on location in order to (get this!) find your Chromecast dongle when you set it up. Positioning, to find a wi-fi source inside your own place? Fortunately I still have an old screen-broken Android 5 tablet to use for such things. After that everything works.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  FWIW, at least the official story is that that is because doing a scan on Bluetooth or Wi-Fi is in fact enough to locate you regardless, so it now requires the permission to do so.
  - Tor3 8y ago
    A scan on Bluetooth (although N/A for this situation) can't possibly give away any position. A scan of wifi might, if the device happens to pick up a wi-fi source that Google has already collected (by some means). Still not very relevant though - it would mean that location permission would be needed in order to use wi-fi at all, because how would it otherwise find the hotspot or access point you want to connect to.. other than having to enter the SSID manually every time. But we don't have to enable location tracking to do that. To configure Chromecast though, 'google home' (which replaced the 'chromecast' application or whatever it was), takes you to Settings and unless you turn on location tracking it refuses to look for the dongle.
    - vorpalhex 8y ago
      You now have to have that location tracking permission to scan wifi SSIDs, and it came about because spammy data stealing apps were using SSID maps to get rough location. Not to say Google isn't evil because they certainly seem to be headed to hell while holding us in a hand basket, but this one is legit.
      - Tor3 8y ago
        Yeah, I get that.. it's not unreasonable. However, why does Google Home force you to turn on location tracking in general, that's what I don't get. It sounds like apps scanning for SSIDs could easily be handled by a specific permission for that. No need to enable location tracking (turning 'Location' "on" in Settings) for this. It doesn't make any sense (except for what it looks like: Google wants to get your location, by any means).
wittyusername 8y ago
This reminds me so much of working at another, much stodgier big tech company and the feeling of slow malaise I developed over years. I read some essays by Paul Graham, started my own business, and never listened to some faceless entity above me making bad decisions again. I hope you don't put up with this nonsense.
clubm8 8y ago
>There was a lot of uproar about this internally but nothing changed. Are you able to elaborate more? Google' internal culture (specifically the whole internal mailing list argument culture) fascinates me.
cryoshon 8y ago
funny, from the outside we've been telling you that for a long time. yet nothing has changed due to all of the "internal uproar" we are constantly told about. nothing at all.

lvs 8y ago

From the outside, it seems to have reached a tipping point in the past year that is now getting quite dramatic. A whole string of heavy-handed, anti-user, and privacy-hostile decisions. What just happened to the culture that would allow all this evil behavior? Or did we misunderstand it all along?

woranl 8y ago
Sundar Pichai is now CEO. What else do you expect?
- lvs 8y ago
  I guess that may be right. This is what you get when you put an MBA in charge of anything you care about.
- hammerdahl 8y ago
  I feel like this is bigger than just Google. It seems like all of Alphabet is tending in that direction.
  - maybebad 8y ago
    Isn't Alphabet the clear "parent" of Google... I'm biased, but we are witnessing the beginning of a monopoly that wasn't imaginable pre-internet. Old rich white men are trembling in their shoes... The take-over game but played better, sexier, and immune. My G-ma loves the Google, so easy even the 90 year olds get it
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
belltaco 8y ago
The bean counters have been taking over slowly at first, but now it's pretty fast.
computerfriend 8y ago
> Or did we misunderstand it all along? I think yes. Google has been considered "evil" by the tinfoil hat crowd for quite some time, and once again it has become apparent to the mainstream that they were right.
- singularity2001 8y ago
  Google died when Smith said you have no privacy now[0]. Well I have no Google now. Fallback almost never used. [0] can't find actual quote, did I dream? Quoth: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about”
  - rhizome 8y ago
    The quote I know along those lines is from Scott McNealy.
  - anvandare 8y ago
    I think you were dreaming of this, perhaps? https://www.eff.org/nl/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-dismisses-privacy https://www.eff.org/nl/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-sch... I'm surprised that people keep being surprised about Google being just another company. Money first, money last.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    You didn't dream: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/04/google_ericisms/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/04/google_ericisms/
- cryoshon 8y ago
  >Google has been considered "evil" by the tinfoil hat crowd for quite some time, and once again it has become apparent to the mainstream that they were right it's almost as though the people with money benefit from marginalizing the people cynical enough to understand what they are doing.
- arminiusreturns 8y ago
jlawson 8y ago
Maybe it's human nature to only be able to focus on one moral conflict at a time. Now that Google's culture is focused on collective racial/gender justice, there's no oxygen left to put towards individual rights like privacy.
2muchcoffeeman 8y ago
Or did we misunderstand it all along? I’m really curious, what did you think their business model was going to be given they have free services? Surely the path they are on is the obvious one?
izacus 8y ago
> From the outside, it seems to have reached a tipping point in the past year that is now getting quite dramatic. There was no real tipping point - the media just noticed it's easy to get clicks if they repeatedly write about Google. Google was always Google and they had similar ethics for years now. It's pretty much why you also see all the Google articles on this page (just like you saw all the FB bashing a few months ago which now disappeared). I believe Reddit community calls this group behaviour a "circlejerk". People posting same content to reinforce their opinion.
maybebad 8y ago
I believe we are witnessing the result of a company offering not just a series of products but a whole lifestyle, and it is too hard for consumers to live without it. Best game plan you could ever imagine... Internet becomes connectivity, offer free search among connectivity, build products that promote connectivity, step 4: profit.
bb101 8y ago
From a mobile perspective, I used to be heavily invested in the Android ecosystem. Now I use an iPhone and and willingly hand over my Apple tax every few years and will continue to do so whilst I can afford it. Google's direction is a pity really, as Apple needs a strong competitor in the mobile market to maintain innovation momentum.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

hellbanner 8y ago

Their UX continues to g et worse. Google Voice on iOS has had 10-20 second lag (no joke) on older versions of iOS (used to be jus fine!) for 1-2 years now. One previous version of GV in particular froze for 10 seconds on your first key press, now I can't rely on it to open properly, or send messages. It seems intentionally sabotaged. I heard employees quit when G merged the YT with "real name" accounts. Personally I've had a real pain getting support for android development. Wrong and misleading documentation, rude forum moderators, no way to report a bug (they have a bug where Payments page will show errors -- in Incognito Chrome) -- on the admob site. Solution was to sign up for Adwords (how could I tell?) and check the page in Safari or sign into Adwords on Chrome. Shit documentation. Help your developers earn you money better, Google. And stop changing your UI. It looks like they have low-tier coders who get hired with not enough power to rock the boat so they roll out a UI re-vamp no one wants without bothering to fix systemic problems that repeatedly kill products, break products and have a completely INSULTING policy towards their developers. Admob: "You can't even complain to us without earning enough money.. here's a phone number.. it literally never connects." Why even bother? I interpret that they hate me. The feeling is mutual.

steve19 8y ago
I know I am flogging a dead horse here, but the constant retiring of Google apps makes me reluctant to adopt anything beyond Gmail and Youtube. I am a heavy Google Keep user, but I worry I am going to be kicked off that eventually. > And stop changing your UI. It The Youtube UI just gets worse and worse. I can only imagine what it must be like for non-Youtube Red subscribers. The add playlist button now defaults to your last playlist, which for me 75% of the time is not the playlist I want. Then I have to wait a few seconds for a popup, click a button, then unselect the last playlist and tick a new playlist. Just to add a f'ing video to a playlist.
- kough 8y ago
  Im surprised you manage to be a heavy Keep user — i had a few thousand notes, and then they rolled out some update that meant they would all be re-downloaded every time i opened the web client, which made it unusable for me. Switched to apple notes because why not and havent had any problems since.

jorblumesea 8y ago

Most large companies have a "jump the shark" moment where business needs and biz dev take over the engineering/product side and starts running the show unilaterally. It becomes less of an equal affair and more dictating terms. Microsoft's was in the 90s in the os/browser wars.

rjzzleep 8y ago
Same thing happened to Sun Solaris
- isolli 8y ago
  Do you have more information on this? I would be interested.
- nasredin 8y ago
  I call them "how do they stay in bussiness if they don't do anything?". Basically all those shops that never have any customers, yet pay thousands in rent. (They are fronts for money laundering is the answer!)

jchw 8y ago

Was there internal uproar? Did they say this was the only "practical" option? I have missed all of this if so, I thought this is how Maps worked since this feature first popped up.

maybebad 8y ago
There is only uproar for war contracts... turns out "Do No Evil" isn't as important as "get a paycheck that allows you to live in the most expensive real estate in the known universe"
- maybebad 8y ago
  edit: full disclosure, ex-Googler. I am biased. Met a lot of people who look the other way until even the other way is salty. "I build Google Forms, I do not wrong" ... It is easy to believe you are doing good for the world when you forget your product helps the company take over the world. Again, biased and salty myself
- wutbrodo 8y ago
  Lol you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Googlers get into an uproar over _everything_. The flipside of which is that all of the issues that you're incensed about (like this one), you can pretty much guarantee that they're more incensed about. Not that leadership listens always or even often...
nrook 8y ago
Google is a fascinating test case for Elizabeth Warren's plan to create board representation for workers. Googlers have a very distinct culture that would advocate for very different positions from the ones Google is making right now. If Google employees had 40% of the board, they'd be able to do a lot more to stop decisions like this one.
- jchw 8y ago
  Disclaimer: I myself am an employee of Google, but my opinions and views do not represent those of Google in any way. Just to be completely fair, there's a balance to be had. I think Googlers are a very passionate group about many issues. That doesn't mean they know what's best for the company or the world. If Googlers lead Google's business decisions, I think it would be a worse place. Firstly, developers are often very blind to privacy issues left on their own. Well-intentioned developers can cause a lot of trouble, as you can see from countless startups. Secondly, I think the realities of running a business are much more difficult than people want to believe, and sometimes you make tough decisions nobody wants but are truly in the best interest of the company. To be fair I still do not agree with everything I've heard Google doing in the news, but those are outliers. The narrative given by blogs and media sometimes (maybe even unintentionally) makes everything feel like a giant scheme, but I'd advise you to apply Occam's razor as much as possible. The people making the decision you don't like could legitimately just not understand what the "big deal" is. We don't always have the necessary context to really judge something, and our inclination when filling in gaps rarely likes to be kind. The Chrome login fiasco is a great example of good intentions that went over poorly with people. I try to stay neutral as much as possible when looking at issues, be they from Google or other entities. People make mistakes and misjudgements all the time, and people assume malice far too often it feels.

WalterSear 8y ago

In a recent interaction with the Pixel support personel via the built-in chat, I was unabashedly lied to three times in a row, including direct contradictions of the previous support persons instructions. When the support person didn't have a handy solution, they just started making up reasons why my issue wasn't supported, going so far as to tell me I was required to purchase non-existent, google-branded hardware in order to accomplish what the previous support person had already walked me through.

hamandcheese 8y ago
This would be much more compelling if you went into the actual details of what they said to you vs what the truth actually was.
- WalterSear 8y ago
  Unlock and commnd the google assistant via a bluetooth device. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes it would unlock but then be unable to respond to subsequent commands. Then every few days, the feature would disable itself and stop working entirely (via voice or bluetooth) and have to be set up again. The first support person showed me how to clear the application cache, and then walked me through the process off testing the bluetooth. I was very impressed. I hadn't actually intended to request support - I was just using the device's help system. Except - it happens again, two days later, and clearing the cache and setting up the voice assistant every couple of days isn't much of a solution. I didn't expect a fix - mainly wanted them to let them know the solution wasn't working. The second support person had me walk through the basic diagnostics and then tried to give me reasons why what I was trying to do wasn't possible. First, it wasn't possible at all, then it became impossible to do with all my specific bluetooth devices and finally, it became impossible without using google bluetooth gear. (I misspoke previously - these actually do exist). Pushy, inexperienced, untrained and unsupported. And very clearly miserable and under the gun.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    It was discussed on HN a few days ago: the size of the company is inversely proportional to the quality of their support. After the company reaches a certain size, they can simply afford not to care. Also, in this case it makes more business sense for them. Therefore I prefer to deal with smaller companies.

mtrycz2 8y ago

> The company has rotted. It has always been the plan, it's literally their business model.

oblio 8y ago
Yeah, I read some posts from a former employee. The ad model was there from day 1 and people can't just act like Page and Brin are brilliant yet failed to see the potential for harm in their business model.
- taneq 8y ago
  There's a difference between "serve ads next to web search results" and "harvest literally every data point we can befuddle or coerce people into giving up."
  - oblio 8y ago
    This is from back in 2006: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/01/can-your-programming-language-do-this/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/01/can-your-programmi... And the sentiment was present even before the date of that article. More precisely: > The very fact that Google invented MapReduce, and Microsoft didn’t, says something about why Microsoft is still playing catch up trying to get basic search features to work, while Google has moved on to the next problem: building Skynet^H^H^H^H^H^H the world’s largest massively parallel supercomputer. I don’t think Microsoft completely understands just how far behind they are on that wave. People were joking about Google ingesting all the data they could to build an AI, 12+ years ago.

Tor3 8y ago

Tracking for everything.. with Android 6 and upwards you now have to turn on location in order to (get this!) find your Chromecast dongle when you set it up. Positioning, to find a wi-fi source inside your own place? Fortunately I still have an old screen-broken Android 5 tablet to use for such things. After that everything works.

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
FWIW, at least the official story is that that is because doing a scan on Bluetooth or Wi-Fi is in fact enough to locate you regardless, so it now requires the permission to do so.
- Tor3 8y ago
  A scan on Bluetooth (although N/A for this situation) can't possibly give away any position. A scan of wifi might, if the device happens to pick up a wi-fi source that Google has already collected (by some means). Still not very relevant though - it would mean that location permission would be needed in order to use wi-fi at all, because how would it otherwise find the hotspot or access point you want to connect to.. other than having to enter the SSID manually every time. But we don't have to enable location tracking to do that. To configure Chromecast though, 'google home' (which replaced the 'chromecast' application or whatever it was), takes you to Settings and unless you turn on location tracking it refuses to look for the dongle.
  - vorpalhex 8y ago
    You now have to have that location tracking permission to scan wifi SSIDs, and it came about because spammy data stealing apps were using SSID maps to get rough location. Not to say Google isn't evil because they certainly seem to be headed to hell while holding us in a hand basket, but this one is legit.
    - Tor3 8y ago
      Yeah, I get that.. it's not unreasonable. However, why does Google Home force you to turn on location tracking in general, that's what I don't get. It sounds like apps scanning for SSIDs could easily be handled by a specific permission for that. No need to enable location tracking (turning 'Location' "on" in Settings) for this. It doesn't make any sense (except for what it looks like: Google wants to get your location, by any means).

wittyusername 8y ago

This reminds me so much of working at another, much stodgier big tech company and the feeling of slow malaise I developed over years. I read some essays by Paul Graham, started my own business, and never listened to some faceless entity above me making bad decisions again. I hope you don't put up with this nonsense.

clubm8 8y ago

>There was a lot of uproar about this internally but nothing changed. Are you able to elaborate more? Google' internal culture (specifically the whole internal mailing list argument culture) fascinates me.

cryoshon 8y ago

funny, from the outside we've been telling you that for a long time. yet nothing has changed due to all of the "internal uproar" we are constantly told about. nothing at all.