7 ms·

This is welcomed, but they might do better to remove the requirement to have the Web/Location/App history enabled for apparently unrelated features. E.g. I can

• sf_rob 8y ago
  I'll chime in here (like I do in all these threads until it's fixed) but Google Home and Android Auto require all of these settings to be enabled last time I checked.
• Sahhaese 8y ago
  Somewhat related: I turned off youtube watch history. I can no longer see my google play music played counts, because somehow the same permission covers both, even though I would like music history but not youtube history.
  • o10449366 8y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if that's a side effect of Google's plan to "replace" Play Music with YouTube Music, even though they're two completely different services.
    • puzzle 8y ago
      Maybe they're the same service behind the scenes. Would you store the same music twice, if you had to run both?
      • dvlsg 8y ago
        They don't seem to be. At least not in terms of content. YouTube music has songs that Google play doesn't, and vice versa. The YouTube music experience is kind of odd. It seems that you can only listen to full albums if someone has uploaded them to YouTube as separate songs. Which makes sense, but it means that currently a lot of the music I listen to is nowhere to be found on YouTube music.
        • jefftk 8y ago
          They're in the process of being merged: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/23/17386752/youtube-music-uploads-feature-google-play-music https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/23/17386752/youtube-music-up...
• teekert 8y ago
  I often get reminded by apps that "This app will not function when play services has no access to: Contacts, calendar, call history (and about 5 more things)". I once turned everything I though to be unnecessary off from the settings. Indeed nothing ever stopped working correctly but many things started nagging me periodically, while functioning perfectly.
  • xvector 8y ago
    I just stopped using Android after shit like this. Privacy is an afterthought at best, despite the great new permissions model. And it's absolutely not Android's fault as much it is app developers' faults. Want to use an app that tracks your dreams? Most devs will have you sign up for their terrible service so they can store the information in plaintext on a server. At least with iOS most devs seem to opt for CloudKit with E2E encryption. Privacy seems more wired into the iOS ecosystem than Android.
    • chefandy 8y ago
      Not sure why this would be down-voted, unless people are really just that tribalistic about phone/tablet OS choice.
      • mehrdadn 8y ago
        Didn't downvote, but Android has had dynamic permissions (since v6?) whose repeated notifications you can suppress, so I'm confused if the comment is still valid.
        • xvector 8y ago
          Kind of misses the point - I do mention the robust permission system in Android. The issue is that the developers themselves don't really seem to care as much about privacy etc as iOS developers. This effectively renders the privacy measures mostly meaningless. If I'm writing my dreams into your app and you can read them on your own server, I've already lost all semblance of privacy.
• ProAm 8y ago
  > Why? you know why. It's profitable. This information makes them money.
• JoshTriplett 8y ago
  Likewise. I don't think it's reasonable to require these permissions in order to use a Google Home device or the Google Assistant, for instance. I can understand needing to remember the last query, in order to provide context for the next one. Automatic scrubbing would be helpful...but it's missing an "every 10 minutes" option. (Today, my solution is a completely separate Google account that only gets used for Google Home/Assistant.)
  • riverbender 8y ago
    It would surprise me if Google didn't have those accounts linked anyway, thus undermining your policy. A Google employee once called me on my personal cell phone when I was a few minutes late to a business meeting. I still don't see how that could've happened unless they'd linked my work (g-suite) account with my personal (gmail) account, and then allowed their employees to access personal data in a totally inappropriate fashion. Maybe there's some other explanation, but I can't fathom what it would have been.
    • mehrdadn 8y ago
      There's probably some other explanation. I wasn't under the impression Google employees can just go read your data like this. And if you want to believe imagine they can -- it'd be dumb of them to do it in this fashion. If you didn't leave your number on your emails/website/resumes/Facebook/etc. or given it out previously then maybe the employee got it from someone else who had your number.
      • riverbender 8y ago
        Thank you for sharing your completely uninformed opinion, and asserting it as fact with literally no reason to think it's more correct than mine.
        • mehrdadn 8y ago
          > Thank you for sharing your completely uninformed opinion, and asserting it as fact with literally no reason to think it's more correct than mine. I in fact do have evidence to believe it's more correct than yours but I have no inclination to discuss it further.
• rahuldottech 8y ago
  Also can't subscribe to podcasts if web activity is disabled, which is bullshit because YouTube subscriptions continue to work just fine
• devereaux 8y ago
  Here is another nudge: how easily can you write a rule to delete from gmail inbox after say X days? (same question for outlook.com, icloud.com etc) There are ways for technical users, but it nudges users to leave all the juicy data to the company, which can then use it in any way it feels (including monetization)
  • mehrdadn 8y ago
    I dare say that I don't expect automatic deletion of emails from your inbox is not a feature many users are clamoring for, whether they have privacy concerns or not. Hence I don't think the lack of it is for monetization puposes or the lack.
    • devereaux 8y ago
      Users should clamor for a feature that automatically delete emails with subject=password after say a week. In theory the links are only valid for a few hours. In practice I don't trust that. Even then, it's not about clamoring, but just having a way to create rules. You just can't do that easily in gmail.
      • icebraining 8y ago
        Why not just delete the mail right after clicking the link?
    • saalweachter 8y ago
      If you are a business customer you can set an email retention period for your domain (under the 'Compliance' section) which deletes all emails and chat messages after N days.
  • mceachen 8y ago
    There's a new "confidential" toggle on the web Gmail (at least for gapps accounts) that let newly composed email expire after a certain amount of time. Not available on Android Gmail yet. Just saw it yesterday. The actual email to non-gmail addresses is just a link to fetch the mail body, which can be validated with SMS.
• noneeeed 8y ago
  This is my number one annoying dark pattern from Google at the moment. I would very much like to store my home and work addresses in Google Maps on my phone, but I can't do that without them also storing everywhere I go. There is no good reason for these two things being tied together other than to make we share my location data. We are talking about storing a few hundred bytes of relatively static data and letting me select them as a shortcut, this is not a complex feature, it's a simple shortcut.
• verytrivial 8y ago
  The Google Podcast app (!) refuses to do any related to subscriptions without Web and App activity tracking enabled. Seriously reaching here regarding relevance and consent.
• bryanbuckley 8y ago
  Another example, text-to-speech on Gboard requires the "Google" app, unfortunately.
  • bryanbuckley 8y ago
    *speech-to-text whoops
• tylerl 8y ago
  Here's your answer: There's no such thing, at least at scale, as sharing your information without also storing it. Not if you want the system to be reliable. So in order to make Google share your location with others, you have to give them permission to store your location. This should be self-evident enough if you take a moment to think about it. As for lumping web history together with location history, it turns out you can derive the latter if you know the former. There's been a lot of fuss and breathless reporting about that fact. So authorizing them to know the one without the other is a bit of a fiction, especially in those cases that get written up by tech journalists. Best not to pretend that it's possible to keep them separate. This new thing is an acknowledgement of the fact that the whole point of using Google services is sharing information with them and asking them to hold on to it, at least for a bit, at least until you've gotten the desired use out of the service... but also of the fact that a certain kind of person, the kind you often find on HN, would sleep better if Google deleted that data after it had served it's immediate purpose.
  • callmeal 8y ago
    >So in order to make Google share your location with others, you have to give them permission to store your location. Sure. I have no problem with that. What I have a problem with is, why is google insisting on storing all the locations that I am not sharing? I only want to share this current location. So yes, that will have to be stored somewhere. But for the love of everything I don't see why sharing my current location requires saving all my future locations.
    • JetSpiegel 8y ago
      Because otherwise Waze doesn't work. You can also imagine the other sub-rosa reasons for this.
  • grey-area 8y ago
    As for lumping web history together with location history, it turns out you can derive the latter if you know the former So, the question remains, why do they need to record your web history if you want to save your location? You can't derive it that way round. I have all this stuff turned off, there is no good reason for google to store it, it's a privacy nightmare, esp given automated sharing with the state.