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Even Google engineers are confused about Google’s privacy settings
- robin_reala 6y agoI used to be pretty much in favour of opt-out for stuff like this, but I think at this point the industry itself has managed to prove that it can’t be trusted with anything but legislation guaranteeing opt-in.
- the_snooze 6y agoAbsent legislation, I'm all for a "nuke it all" approach when it comes to ad-blocking and tracker-blocking. It won't catch everything, especially platform-level privacy concerns like this, but it does move good usable defaults over to the user's control. No need to rely on companies who continue to fail to act in good faith.
- sukilot 6y agoYou can't block an app or site from accessing your geolocatable IP workout extreme measures.
- ForHackernews 6y agoIs that true even for IPv6?
- betterunix2 6y agoYes, because most users will want low latency more than they want a hard-to-geolocate IPv6 address; IOW they will just use the IPv6 addresses their ISP assigns them, which will be easy to geolocate even without the ISP's explicit cooperation. Worse still, because IPv6 promises to eliminate NAT, geolocation will likely become even more precise as user devices will have global addresses that they are not sharing with anyone else.
- freeAgent 6y agoHow can per-device IPv6 addresses alone enable better tracking if they’re long-lived and the device moves physical locations during that time? How would a tracker with only IP address know that the device moved?
- betterunix2 6y agoA number of ISPs have started using NAT for IPv4 due to the address space crunch, which means that at best those IPv4 addresses can only be used for coarse geolocation. The fact that IPv6 addresses are per-device means that at a minimum you can get household level geolocation for each device (based on the prefix). The fact that addresses are long-lived is not really relevant, since addresses are only long lived with respect to a prefix and prefixes will change when a device moves to a different network (almost always the case with residential service).
- zajio1am 6y agoBut IP geolocation has pretty bad resolution. Generally, it can reliably locate country, but rest is a wild guess. E.g. my IP is geolocated to city 300km away (as that is where my ISP has business address).
- sukilot 6y agoThat's not relevant to the article. The complaint is about data collection and handling that is constant regardless of opts.
- angio 6y agoI always wonder what would happen if governments legislate that advertisers (or everyone really) have to respect the Do Not Track header.
- solidasparagus 6y agoI hope said legislation is better thought out than the opt-in cookie laws.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoThis quote basically disproves the phrase Sundar repeatedly parroted to Congressional members about making it easy for people to configure their privacy settings. You can bet this quote is going to be read to his face if there's another hearing. The author of the statement was redacted in the public version, but my bet is if that is still a current employee, they won't be for much longer. Because this quote is going to hang over Google for the rest of this process. And as many Google people are probably being reminded this week: Assume all of your work emails may some day be public, and used against you or your employer in a court of law.
- jedmeyers 6y ago> if there's another hearing. Oh, no, another hearing. I am sure he is very afraid of another strongly worded letter after that one. We constantly see executives and officials lie at those hearings, yet they face no repercussions whatsoever.
- Barrin92 6y ago>And as many Google people are probably being reminded this week: Assume all of your work emails may some day be public, and used against you or your employer in a court of law. They don't need to be reminded because Google has been coaching staff to basically adopt some sort of Google newspeak: "One part of the presentation, subtitled “Communicating Safely,” advises employees on which terms are “Bad” and “Good.” Instead of “market,” employees may say “industry,” “space,” “area,” or simply cite the region, according to the presentation. Instead of “network effects,” the presentation suggests “valuable to users.” https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-documents-show-taboo-words-antitrust https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc...
- sukilot 6y agoThat's regular legal speak.
- Barrin92 6y agoif you're required to engage in legal speak in normal workplace conversations what's the difference exactly. The only other place I know of where you need to talk in code between two coworkers to not draw the attention of authorities is the mafia
- Spooky23 6y agoThere's a usability aspect to this. If you disable location services for Yelp, it's pretty unfriendly -- it chooses to make it as difficult as possible for you to use the app to get you to turn location back on. The Google approach for Maps is more pragmatic IMO -- lower resolution location data makes sure I don't get a McDonald's in Finland when I'm in Kentucky. The hard thing is that I don't want Yelp, Google, etc tracking my movements in a 10-meter radius forever, but I want location from a contextual perspective. I don't think you can do that without meaningful policy controls outside of your local computer.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoApple is fixing this in iOS 14. It allows you to give an app access to only approximate location. Note that if your location history (precise every five minute location stored to your account) is off, Google won't even suggest a locally-stored list of previous locations you used with Maps. Which is an absolutist position that is usability-wise incredibly frustrating.
- inetknght 6y ago> Apple is fixing this in iOS 14. It allows you to give an app access to only approximate location. I would rather have the ability give a custom location instead.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoThat'd certainly be a nice feature. I'd be happy to tell my phone the address of a well-known public building in my area and have all location-based queries orient from that.
- boring_twenties 6y agoXPrivacyLua for Android supports this. (Requires root and Xposed framework, though.)
- pfundstein 6y ago1. Download a GPS spoofing app 2. Enable Developer options 3. Select mock location app 4. Spoof your location
- RandallBrown 6y agoThis isn't a surprise. Google is a huge company with probably hundreds of teams working on these things. The fact that the privacy settings can be figured out at all is a bit of a miracle. I doubt the privacy settings are "designed" as much as it is a bunch of disparate teams working on it together with maybe somebody coordinating it.
- robin_reala 6y agoSorry, that might be an explanation but it’s not an excuse. Privacy controls in a global organisation are a legal requirement for your software, and you don’t get to just haphazardly throw it together.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sukilot 6y agoIt's a very recent requirement in a long established industry.
- ForHackernews 6y agoGoogle is a trillion dollar company that employs some of the best software developers on earth. I have zero sympathy. Sort your shit out or prepare to have hostile regulators take a bat to your business model.
- badRNG 6y agoConsidering both the wealth and caliber of engineering talent at Google, for this feature that has been at the center of attention for both regulators and the public to be as user hostile as it is, it certainly can lead a reasonable person to think that Google is intentionally misleading and confusing its users. It seems the primary question worth considering now is what regulators are to do in response.
- aboringusername 6y agoHopefully Google is forced to follow Apple's lead and implement consent dialogs into Android to allow/deny tracking or usage of any form of identifier/fingerprint. I am surprised the EU haven't investigated Android and found it breaches GDPR requirements, simply due to the fact it's too easy to collect information that can later be used for analytical purposes without the users consent. I imagine you can find instances of GDPR breaches in all modern OS' if you looked hard enough - something as simple as a HTTP POST request may be illegal depending on the payload. Sadly, progress is often slow, but Apple's progress in this area will hopefully inspire Googlers like the one in this article to make statements and drive progress forward.
- jmnicolas 6y agoThe GDPR is one of those "useful" laws created to open the possibilities to strong arm any company at will. Most of the time it's not really enforced (apart of a couple unlucky few to show they mean business) but if they need to put pressure on any company they know they'll find something to hang them with.
- wruza 6y ago"The current UI <cut> is designed to make things possible, yet difficult enough that people won’t figure it out." Let's be honest. Don't attribute it to the system complexity or interop failures — that's bullshit. When they need to shove you an ads under your finger, the complexity suddenly vanishes.
- RedComet 6y agoSome sensible government intervention would be nice. Into Google and most of these tech giants, actually. Who ever thought that our cyberpunk future would be such a lame and mundane dystopia.
- jmnicolas 6y ago> sensible government intervention I imagine the scene in a noisy Irish pub then total silence and everybody stares at you :)
- RedComet 6y agoThis is the role of the government. Unfortunately, sensible intervention will only become more and more unlikely as we allow mega-corps like google to proceed unimpeded. (see: revolving door, funding of political parties, control of search results including news, etc)
- nickff 6y agoDo you think that the same governments which are against cryptography will actually look after your privacy? They'll probably require a pop-up that asks: "Is it okay if Google keeps your data, or should we just send it to the NSA?".
- RedComet 6y agoI'm not sure what cryptography laws have to do with anything. But in this false dichotomy, I'd much rather the NSA have the data. They have far less power and influence. Google censors dissidents and shapes public opinion each and every day.
- nickff 6y agoI think that an organization's bad behavior in one area can undermine its credibility in others, particularly when the subjects are closely related (by privacy in this case).
- 6y ago
- nocturnial 6y agoI've tried to follow the links from the article and eventually came across this document [0] What the attorney general Brnovich references are emails which shows google engineers are aware that people are confused by the settings. The specific example in this case is that your location is still tracked if you enabled Web & App Activity, but disabled Location. The emails show the google engineers aren't surprised why users would expect a different result. The main reason people are confused, the google engineers think, is because google doesn't display they are still being tracked in their timeline (in this specific case). Disclaimer: I'm biased against google, but hope I kept it factual. [0] https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20385394-arizona-v-google-exhibits-212-227#document/p14/a2001255 https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20385394-arizona-v-...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TillE 6y agoI noticed fairly recently that YouTube has undeniably started tracking my watch history even though I've had watch and search history turned off forever, and it's still turned off with (apparently) no data in it. On the front page, there are constantly recommendations of videos which I have just watched (not liked, commented, only watched). Old, new, whatever. Videos which would be quite random if I hadn't just watched them. I stopped using Chrome a long time ago after similar observations of how it tracks usage. Good thing I don't really do anything sensitive with YouTube.
- RL_Quine 6y agoI have noticed the same using their app, which is the only place I can't easily block them from doing so.
- whatch 6y agoRecently I've disabled search and watch history, and home page content became very similar to the Trending tab in my country (i.e. pure garbage). Also I've lost ability to resume playback from last known position across devices, so had to turn watch history on back. And it made my home page great again.
- on_and_off 6y agodoesn't that make sense though ? If there is no watch history, not possible for google to make recommendations ? or am I missing something ?
- whatch 6y agoIt does. My point was that for me disabling history disabled _good_ recommendations based on my activity (and some other features), which is different from anecdotes in parent and sibling comments.
- molticrystal 6y agoWell Chrome does have an installation identifier that was/is transmitted only to google properties. That would explain the behavior you describe. Google says it is only for tracking experiments and tests, but I doubt even they know what everybody is doing with it, and perhaps you were a member of an experiment where they used it to track you. "Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID" [0] An article about it was here [1] Discussion on hackernews was here [2] [0] https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/467#issuecomment-581944600 https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/467#issuecom... [1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/05/google_chrome_id_numbers/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/05/google_chrome_id_numb... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22239641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22239641
- mnutsch23 6y agoAfter reading this article, I signed into my account. I found that even though I turned off tracking in Google years ago, it still kept my old history. The article says that Google turned on auto-delete for new accounts by default as the result of a lawsuit. However, if your Google account is older than x years, then they still keep all of your location history unless you go in and manually choose to delete it. Even then, I no longer trust that Google will actually delete it.
- elchin 6y agoAs an ex-Googler it makes me sad that an internal discussion leaked like this.
- nitrogen 6y agoAre you sad about the leak, or about the nature of the discussion?
- finnthehuman 6y agoYou're sad about the existence of discovery in our legal system? Or is there something about the way the AG received the documents not covered in the article?
- brandmeyer 6y agoDiscovery in a court case isn't "leaking to the press". A court of law decided that the public's interest was more important in this matter.
- motohagiography 6y agoNothing is stupid, it works for someone. It's called a "dark pattern," (https://darkpatterns.org/ https://darkpatterns.org/) and it's by design. Can pretty much guarantee the accountability for the design decisions goes to a "consensus," from a series of informal meetings, with no individual ownership, because that's also by design. I'm not involved with this at all, but having spent time in many different organizations as a consultant, this is very much a common strategy.
- typenil 6y agoThese dark patterns around location tracking was what finally made me give up on Android. I knew Google tracked location even when the location setting was turned off, so I had App & Web activity disabled. As Google bricked more and more functionality to dis-incentivize disabling that setting, they dis-incentivized me right off the Android platform and off of the rest of their services. They did me a favor, really. I was far too naive about them prior to that wake-up call.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- freeAgent 6y agoSame here. By totally borking the user experience when one attempts to disable location tracking, they just encouraged me to stop using their services. I switched to iOS for mobile devices and now I don’t even use Google Maps on mobile. Apple Maps is good enough. Now Google have no idea where I am when I leave my house, and that’s a good feeling.
- princevegeta89 6y agoTo be frank, the entire thing around "privacy checkup", and the way settings are presented to users to allow them to control what they want to share and what not to, is so damn confusing. I tried following my Privacy Settings, and every now and then, Google seems to revise/change existing settings by introducing new sharing settings, which are turned on by default. Honestly, all of this seems to be a false painting to calm down Congress folks and other legal entities alongside users who are either amateur or those that "don't care" so that things don't blatantly look evil.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]