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Google – My Activity
- est 7y agoI've been disabling JS and cookie for *.google.*/search and it worked really well. All this page shows is my youtube activity.
- sajithdilshan 7y agoJesus fucking christ. This is scary. They can build a full profile of me with all this data.
- dewey 7y agoI guess there's a /s missing?
- O_H_E 7y ago> They can build a full profile of me with all this data. They pretty much do
- Bluestrike2 7y agoI think that part is generally out of mind for most users; what's so surprising when you look at the My Activity page is seeing many of the details that make up those profiles laid out in one place. It appears more...real, even without seeing the insights they're pulling from it.
- amelius 7y agoThis would be nice if you were in a discussion about privacy with someone. You could ask if you could borrow their computer for a moment, then visit their myactivity page and show it to them.
- ori_b 7y agoYes, that is the business model.
- glerk 7y agoDo you enjoy your free email account, free maps, free YouTube and free search?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sgjohnson 7y agoOutlook/Proton. OpenStreetMaps. Vimeo/Dailymotion. DuckDuckGo. All free.
- Grazester 7y agoVimeo/Dailymotion not a replacement for youtube when the things you are interested aren't posted there.
- dredmorbius 7y agoinvdio.us at least proxies. Youtube-dl mps-youtube, and mpv allow direct downloading and streaming (and not just from YT). I'm working through 12 or so hours of a podcast from a textfile plalist of mp3 links, in Termux, on Android. For my workflow that beats any podcast app. (Though a good CLI podcast manager would be handy.)
- tracker1 7y agoAlthough, I'd love to see more cross-posting for video content that I follow. I happen to appreciate Tim Pool, Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson... and given the push to the left (away from Liberal views even), and towards more censorship, I don't like where things are now. The best way to combat bad ideas is with more information and facts, not to silence the conversation and push it out.
- asdff 7y agoRSS and youtube-dl for your subs my man. ddg site:youtube.com for new content searches. Full youtube functionality without visiting the site.
- 7y ago
- squarefoot 7y ago"They can build a full profile of me with all this data." What is really scary is that we already have all parts needed to build a "real" online person, except they're scattered around and not in the hands of a single entity. But let's say one day Google or anyone else with enough power and the same data about people buys the technology behind Lyrebird.ai and this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0 What could possibly go wrong?
- abraham 7y agoPrevious discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12896859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12896859
- amelius 7y agoTotally irresponsible. What if another person (colleague, family member, friend, spouse) opens this on your computer? This should be opt-in, not opt-out!
- dewey 7y agoIf you are leaving your account logged in on a computer you are sharing that's kinda expected I'd say? The person could also just read all your emails, reset all your passwords or look at all your pictures.
- tantalor 7y agoShould browser history be opt-in, too?
- lotu 7y agoI actually think that might be a good idea. I feel like a lot of people's privacy concerns would would be muted if browsers defaulted to private browsing.
- jodrellblank 7y agoIncreasingly as I see things used to extract money from people, rather than build a better world, I wonder why not? If a program defaults to writing in a hidden folder, probably what it's writing is not for my benefit. If it's for my benefit, and I approve of it, it can go in /home/name/clear-folder or c:\users\name\documents\folder in an open and documented format with an open API. If it's going in /home/name/.hidden/cache/dont-look or c:\users\name\appdata\company\{GUID} in an undocumented opaque blob without my knowledge, approval or explicit consent, it's much harder to argue that it's "for my benefit" and expect that I'd agree with that claim. Turn everything opt-in and your computer reverts to being a disconnected 1990s less-useful computer. Turn everything opt-out and your computer is increasingly tempting to be someone else's tool, a wringer for your life, a cash-extracting manipulation and abuse tool that does things you don't know about and didn't agree too, for other people's benefit. And we're not talking a defensible social good benefit like herd immunity to vaccines, either. The real shock in these comments is not that "HN is amazed Google gathers this" or "HN is blazé about Google gathering this", it's "HN hasn't been able to log their own plain text search queries locally onto a NAS if they want to"
- jharohit 7y agowhile we are on that subject..https://www.google.com/maps/timeline https://www.google.com/maps/timeline
- echeese 7y agoWell, the upside is that this is still empty after I disabled everything last time this was posted.
- human20190310 7y ago"No activity." It probably does make sense to periodically check.
- bosie 7y agoCan you please share how to disable the tracking of the activities? Just pause everything? Have you noticed a decay in the quality of your search results?
- britch 7y agoI've had everything paused but device info and youtube history for a few months now. I have not noticed any significant change in the quality of search results. Though I primarily use DuckDuckGo I have to fall back on Google every now and again (or use Google to get different results). Google is still better at inferring what I mean in a search than DuckDuckGo. Google seems to take into account current events, my location, and pop culture better than DuckDuckGo. I have not noticed any effect from changing my privacy permissions.
- danShumway 7y agoIs https://myaccount.google.com/purchases https://myaccount.google.com/purchases empty as well for you?
- danShumway 7y agoOn this subject https://myaccount.google.com/purchases https://myaccount.google.com/purchases Turning off all of the controls under myactivity won't stop Google from scanning your emails to track any purchases you make. The only way to stop that is to switch off of Gmail.
- nostalgk 7y agoWow, this is ugly. I don't like seeing all of this in one place. I shudder to think of what is actually stored behind the scenes if this is what they make publicly available.
- stedaniels 7y agoIs this a US only thing? Mine is empty.. UK/Gsuite
- scrollaway 7y agoI think it's a GSuite configuration thing. Mine used to be empty (GSuite). Now I'm checking it again, there's some stuff on it, although it's buggy.
- tnorthcutt 7y agoSame here, gsuite used to be safe from this but mine shows purchases starting this month. Not sure if it only shows the most recent month to everyone, or if that's when they turned it on for gsuite users...
- nawitus 7y agoIt shows purchases in Finland too.
- tooop 7y agoI think for some reason Google parser is very limited - the only thing i see is Steam / Google Play purchases, not even Paypal. I am in Europe and not using GSuite.
- 7y ago
- lawrencevillain 7y agoPulled from the other thread, a way to delete all of your activity. https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity
- ceejayoz 7y agoI don't think you can delete purchases from there. When I hit the "remove purchase" button, it even says "To remove this purchase, delete the email."
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoI'm not sure I fully understand the objection here. The purchase list is a view over your email. They have the email, and they have the code to construct the purchase from the email. What possible additional security would there be in deleting the derived object if they still have the source material and the means to reconstruct the derived object? If you don't trust them to handle the derived object according to your desires, then deleting it should not give you any assurances, since they could just rebuild it from the source material and the code they have on hand. I think what you're really looking for is a mechanism like, "don't use this derived object in ways I find objectionable." I'm not sure exactly what that would look like for you; it would probably be different for every individual. For what it's worth, at least if you believe the news and Google's public statements, it doesn't use the contents of your email for ad targeting.
- jeromegv 7y agoWe should be allowed to keep our past emails without having them build a purchase object of everything we have ever bought.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoWhy does it matter, though? They claim the list is there purely for your own personal consumption. If that's true, and you don't care to use it, it costs you nothing that it exists. If that's false, then it doesn't matter whether you can delete it or not, because if they're willing to lie about its uses, they would also be willing to lie about whether they deleted it.
- dleslie 7y agoI don't like that it is logging what apps that I use on my phone.
- jcwayne 7y agoLooks like they've removed the summary statistics in favor of a timeline. Still, it's nice to have it all searchable in one place. It also provides a nice place to check that I have all of the handy features turned on.
- booleandilemma 7y agoHow easy is it for a Google employee to access my activity?
- lotu 7y agoNormally it is impossible. Normal logs have the user name and IP address removed, they even do stuff to truncate URLs in case a website is hiding usernames or passwords in the URL. If to perform your job it is needed to access a user's data (I'm not actually sure what that job would for consumers), that goes through a separate system which where every access is logged and audited.
- booleandilemma 7y agoJust gonna leave this here: https://duckduckgo.com/ https://duckduckgo.com/
- britch 7y agoI would love Maps and Gmail alternatives if anyone has them.
- fghtr 7y ago> Gmail alternatives https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20005980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20005980 > Maps https://openstreetmap.org https://openstreetmap.org
- GRiMe2D 7y agoNote that OpenStreetMaps isn't about maps. It's about Open Data for Maps. So technically you can use like maps but consider using apps or maps that use OSM. Great example is MapsMe for Android and iOS. Works offline. However, there are ads in app and probably from Google
- 0xffff2 7y agoI used Maps.me for quite a while until they recently added ads. Anyone know of an alternative for iOS that's ad-free? (I'm more than happy to make a one-time purchase for an app that promises no ads now or ever.)
- aylmao 7y agoThis goes deep. I see not only when I have used Instagram, but it knows which instagram profiles and direct messages I opened. I'm using Android at the moment, of course.
- Cd00d 7y agoI don't see that. I see that I opened the Instagram app, but my in-app activity is in no way displayed. What steps did you take to see what profiles you opened?
- aylmao 7y agoOh, never mind. Went back to check, and apparently I visited these profiles through Chrome and not the app.
- okmokmz 7y agoIt shows that in your google activity? Instagram is a facebook product is it not?
- aylmao 7y agoYes, it's owned by Facebook. I went back to check, and noticed I visited these profiles through Chrome and not the app. That's how they ended up here, I was confused there for a second.
- deg4uss3r 7y agoAchievement unlocked: No Activity.
- jwr 7y agoThis is great. Now I can see in a single place how YouTube mixes other people's history with mine. It seems I watched "Funny Dinosaurs in Poop Fight", "Poop Cartoon 04: Fried Sh*t" and "Pirate Pete's Potty: Potty Training Video for Toddlers" yesterday. Fun. (I've been getting some other kid's watched videos in my history, and Google doesn't care about this kind of history mixing, my reports got me nowhere).
- mankyd 7y agoIs it possible you logged into a computer somewhere else? Maybe at a friend's house? That seems odd to me.
- VikingCoder 7y agoHave you verified this? https://myaccount.google.com/device-activity https://myaccount.google.com/device-activity
- jwr 7y agoOf course. All the devices there are right in front of me and none of them accessed these videos. I also tried removing all devices and re-authorizing them again, just to make sure. Doesn't change a thing. These videos are not played on any of my devices.
- VikingCoder 7y agoThat sounds like you're doing everything right. Next up, we get to wonder if you have a virus on your machine which is playing videos for you in the background. If the videos play at a regular interval, you could try turning one machine off during that time, and see if the events disappear from the log.
- jwr 7y agoMy machines are: a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad, all running latest OS versions. I find this bizarre: by now I expect the next suggestions to be that I'm sleepwalking and watching these myself, rather than a more probable explanation that Google isn't doing something right (gasp!).
- clarry 7y agoWhy does oneplus launcher report to google and how do I turn that shit off?
- zebracanevra 7y agoNoticed that on my 5T (using Nova Launcher). If I disable the OnePlus Launcher package the navigation gestures cease to work.
- docker_up 7y agoThe only real solution is to fill your history and your Gmail purchases with fake emails and fake clicks and fake purchases. If you add so much random data then there's no way Google can pick up anything useful. I think the other tactic to defeat Google is to click on EVERY SINGLE AD you see. It will destroy their ad tracking capabilities and it will also destroy their business since they won't be able to tell what is a good click and what isn't. I've started doing this and I don't think there's anything else that can get them to stop actively violating our privacy. Let me pay for my Gmail account. Let me pay for good support instead of automated decisions and getting kicked off the platform with no recourse. Otherwise I will render myself useless to your algorithms by changing my behavior so that algorithms won't be able to make sense of it.
- flattone 7y agoIsn't there a 'not google' solution? Real question. Also I'm thinking/wanting the same for my phone. (hardware and service). Is there a method for public owned cell phone service (not expecting it to exist, but as a feasibility question - regardless of current obstacles)?
- sandworm101 7y agoYes. There have been a few "linux phone" projects, including the ubuntu phone. I too want an open phone onto which I can install a variety of operating systems and would pay serious money for such a device. Sadly, no such product exists atm. If anyone is listening: I could not care less about instagram or reddit's app. Forget the app store ecosystem junk. Just give me a phone that can make calls and runs a basic web browser. I'd like an alarm clock, and a map/navigation service might be nice, but those aren't deal breakers.
- tambre 7y agoLibrem 5? [0] [0]: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
- flattone 7y ago
- malvosenior 7y ago"Visited YouTube Music Served location-based recommendations Temperature: Warm Weather: Overcast" Really? No wonder my recommendations suck so bad, why on earth would where I'm located impact what music I want to listen to? Edit: extremely curious why this is being downvoted. Anyone care to comment?
- UtahDave 7y agoI'm not the most tin foil hat kind of person. I don't mind some of the tracking Google does as long as I know about it. This url shocked me. They apparently track every app I open and use on my Pixel phone. They had individual entries for when I skip a song in Google Music. I feel physically sick. I went through and deleted most of what I could and turned off tracking where I could.
- turshija 7y agoOk, I just noticed something that is even scarier. Under the "Chrome, Google Analytics, and more" I see "Used com.kongregate.mobile.adventurecommunist", which is a game installed on my iPhone. Ok, I also have my Gmail logged in there as well, so they somehow read shared data or whatever. But I also see "Used es.socialpoint.chefparadise" which is a game, installed on my iPad at home which is mostly used by my wife for random games and stuff and I don't have any Google account logged in there.
- IceWreck 7y agoDid you log into that game to save progress?
- turshija 7y agoI haven't logged into my Google account on iPad at all. Game progress on iOS apps is usually saved to your Apple ID (Game Center) account. My Apple ID is registered on my gmail account of course, but I'm not receiving any emails from this game that Google might extract ...
- javagram 7y agoThat game probably uses google analytics or something. Most iOS apps use various embedded trackers, just like websites.
- spidermango 7y agotell me why you feel physically sick that you now have a log of your own activity. which you could look through to find something you had done and forgot about. do you think someone at google is gonna sit there and sift through `your` very personal information and do...what?
- jcims 7y agoNo wonder the recommended stories on the google front page have been on point, lol. Creeps.
- weliketocode 7y agoThe recordings of my voice here from google home are rather scary. There's a good second or two of recording time before I say the words "Hey, Google"... which means it's just always recording?! I know practically speaking I should have known this, but I somehow assumed that nothing was being recorded until after the trigger word.
- kyrra 7y agoI believe the device is always listening for the keyword (all done locally), and likely has a buffer of the last few seconds within the device at all times. Then when the keyword is triggered, it starts to capture and relay the request to Google.
- lftl 7y agoIt's obviously always listening since it has to respond to the trigger word. I assume that it's got a little buffer, and when it detects the trigger word it uploads the spoken text plus a little buffer of time before the trigger word was spoken.
- gzu 7y agoSwitch to Firefox, DDG, and iCloud/Fastmail email
- losvedir 7y agoI guess I'll be the lone voice chiming in that I find this pretty useful. There's been a number of times I've been like "oh, what's that song I asked Google to identify a month ago?" or "what was that page I managed to find last year by searching about [x]?" that I've been able to remember via this tool. Yeah, Google knows everything about me. C'est la vie. At least it's useful. What exactly is the threat model that everyone is operating under which prompts all the comments here?
- Skunkleton 7y agoThis information is actively used to influence your behavior via advertisement, and places you in an echo chamber via personally tailored search results. Further, experience has shown that eventually this type of information will end being used by third party entities (hackers, governments).
- skybrian 7y agoAd settings are on a different page: https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated
- edjrage 7y agoI have to say I'm almost more shocked at the number of "shocked" comments here than at the page itself. Not only because of what you mentioned, but also one would expect an audience like HN to know about this. Google has even nagged me with notifications to take a look at this page several times in the past. Also, for some weird reason (maybe because I'm using browser extensions?) my entries seem to come from the future: https://i.imgur.com/6TSiZIW.png https://i.imgur.com/6TSiZIW.png
- ineedasername 7y agoThen tell yourself now that you will search for stock quotes in the future. If you follow through in the future then that information should show up now. If you don't destroy causality and blow up the universe, you'll be rich.
- spidermango 7y agoWhy do you guys care so much that google is tracking your purchases? They will just that use your own habits to give you more personalized ads or recommendations which is better than random ads not related to your own habits. How does it hurt you as a consumer?
- JohnFen 7y ago> They will just that use your own habits to give you more personalized ads or recommendations That's one reason I care so much right there. I 100% don't want "personalized" ads. But I don't for a minute believe that's the only thing they do with that data. More generally, it's simply none of their business unless I choose to share it with them, and it makes me very angry that they don't have a basic level of human respect about that. (To be clear, I don't single Google out on this -- I have this objection to the entire internet advertising industry.) I don't need to show any kind of imminent harm in order to object to that. I'd also object to someone coming into my house and photographing everything in it without my permission, even if they never did anything with the photographs.
- spidermango 7y agobut why. Everyone just says they don't want personalized ads but why? Also its not the same thing as someone coming into your house and photographing everything at all, false equivalence.
- JohnFen 7y agoI don't like personalized ads for three main reasons. First, because personal ads are a strong indicator that my web usage is being tracked. Second, because nonpersonalized ads provide information to me about the site they're appearing on -- they can act as a sort of quickie indicator about what sort of audience the site is intended for. Peronalized ads eliminate this. Third, because what little usefulness ads supply to me comes from serendipity. Personalized ads eliminate this, too. In exchange for removing what value ads may have brought me, personalized ads give me exactly nothing in return. > its not the same thing as someone coming into your house and photographing everything at all, false equivalence. I think the comparison is apt when it comes to claims that spying on people is OK as long as the spies aren't directly harming you. In both cases, someone is recording your personal data, in both cases, they aren't harming you with it, and in both cases it is extremely objectionable regardless.
- TheTruth1234 7y agoGoogle. This isn't helping.
- abendy 7y agoChrome will track your localhost activity, too. Make sure you don't title your hacker-hacker project with too much detail.
- o10449366 7y agoIt's honestly hilarious and sad to see so many commenters here defending and excusing Google because the services they provide are "free." Somehow Hacker News thinks this argument isn't applicable to Facebook. The truth of the matter is that both companies are committing huge privacy violations, but Google has managed to convince Hacker News and the US media (NYT in particular) that they aren't evil still. Good riddance to all of these companies.
- detaro 7y agoYou see plenty people defending Facebook too. Trying to assign a single opinion to a large group of people doesn't work.
- o10449366 7y agoI see this argument a lot of Hacker News and Reddit. While it's true that both websites are comprised of a large and diverse body of individuals who share differing opinions and various subjects, that doesn't mean you can't discern real trends and biases within them. I think it's quite clear from reading any of the past month's discussions on Facebook: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastMonth&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook&sort=byPopularity&pre...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- skinnymuch 7y agoYeah this is exactly it. And like I stated in sibling comment. People like me who don’t attack FB don’t defend it either. We are more interested in what we perceive as over the top hatred of FB that doesn’t make sense. Like you said, other companies get passes, but FB doesn’t. There was a recent thread with more than one person comparing cigarettes with FB. Possibly even FB being worse than cigarettes. Something that has killed millions of people. But even in that no one defended FB. They just said FB isn’t as bad as people are making it seem.
- 7y ago
- angryasian 7y agoFor a supposedly tech related group, I'm more surprised that you guys are surprised on whats being tracked. Yes Google has the ability to track A LOT because of the severvices most people use, but don't most people have an abundance of tracking and user metrics across their own product. I know every company I've worked at does the same.
- idlewords 7y agoI run a product with no tracking, and it works fine. I suspect I am not the only person to make that choice.
- JohnFen 7y ago> don't most people have an abundance of tracking and user metrics across their own product. No product I've ever worked on does this. But you're right, this is common -- and is why I have to block all outgoing internet traffic by default now. Applications can no longer be trusted to be well-behaved on this score.
- fallenatreus 7y agoThis looks like fb comment page than a hacker news one. So I just downloaded all of my search activity into nice JSON files, and now I am going to apply a bit of data science and magic stuff using Python and Node.JS and I will have a nice profile of myself for the past 11 years: 1) What kind of questions did I ask google? (beginning with how, when, where etc) - how do these questions connect to my personal and career development? 2) Apply some sentiment analysis using sentiment.js on the search terms and find out if the particular search term was positive, negative or neutral (this will give me a nice overview of my mood for each day I searched for the last one decade) 3) do some filtering and data massaging to pick out the exceptions (ok just a cursory look at the file helped me discovered a forgotten website project I did 10 years ago as part of college summer project - a work I am extremely proud of during that time and even now.) - which days, months, the year I searched the most (or what events triggered the searches - a breakup, a job search or a side project) 4) discover interesting patterns of my search profile (what I searched most during college time, after college when searching for a job, before marriage, after marriage etc.) 5) make a video on the lines of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU so many fcking brilliant things I can do with my data. But what? Google has a copy of the same too? baby cry* What am gonna do? In a larger scheme of things, my data profile is just too insignificant. To quote from the front page of Hacker News post, "The second volume of “My Struggle”, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s enormous, maddening, brilliant autobiographical novels, contains some depressing life advice. “If I have learned one thing,” he sighs, “it is the following: don’t believe you are anybody. Don’t bloody believe you are somebody…Do not believe that you’re anything special. Do not believe that you’re worth anything, because you aren’t.” Not worried if Google tracks a skipped song history or an irrelevant app install on the gazillionth device I own. More worried about google's anticompetitive behaviour (blocking youtube on edge chromium and more recently making jobs of ad blockers even difficult) and even more larger questions such as what if Google starts to non exists tomorrow? Life after Google?
- jodrellblank 7y agoSo insightful to call people babies and compare comments to facebook comments to make yourself feel superior. Great content filled putdown. so many fcking brilliant things I can do with my data. But what? All things you could have done, if you had configured your browser to save your searches on your terms. Not worried if Google tracks a skipped song history or an irrelevant app install on the gazillionth device I own. Nobody is worried about this strawman. Google has a copy of the same too? baby cry What am gonna do?* Extrapolate this bit "google's anticompetitive behaviour" in your mind to the point where it affects you personally, then realise that it affects other people who aren't you, then legislate them hard before that happens.
- wenderen 7y agohttps://www.google.com/maps/timeline https://www.google.com/maps/timeline is a similar tool that I've used to recall the name of places I've been to. In particular, one really good taqueria in San Diego.
- HNLurker2 7y agoWow now this is scary. Even though I have my location closed they still track me. The sad thing is most of my time is spent at school according to Google
- duxup 7y agoMy new Pixel tracks songs that I've "listened to". I saw a few odd ones that I had never heard of was sure I didn't listened to. Until I realized ... it identified and logged songs in a movie my kids watched on a rainy day recently.
- j88439h84 7y agoDid they watch the movie on your phone, or was it using the mic?
- duxup 7y agoJust picked it up by the Mic. It was a DVD they watched. Apparently my phone just logs all the music it hears all the time and displays it on the lock screen. There is an option to tell it to not listen all the time.
- kinkora 7y agoArguments & discussions about google tracking you and how some products are crippled if you disable it (looking at you Maps!!) aside, they at least recently introduced a way for you to delete all the information here: https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity Not many people know about this so spread the word!
- HNLurker2 7y agoI use myactivity to be accountable of my schedule.
- saran945 7y agosearch history is useful. google should provide me "query suggestion" based on my social circle. without collecting user data, google,/FB etc can't exist, they can't improve their services. As a user, I don't care much on the data they collect, as long as they follow law system in the country they operate. if these huge companies went beyond the control of the governments, then only the real problem starts.