The most frightening thing about the data Google collects is location history. It was a real wake-up when I realised they use that data to map real life social networks. They know everyone you've bumped into every day, how long you talked to them for, who you've had a one night stand with. Your daily routines, who your friends are, and more, which all can be discovered just by analysing location history.
Them knowing what your favourite coffee shop is or where you work and live is just the tip of the iceberg.
I used to be a very heavy and trusting Google user. It started to get a little bit uncomfortable when I noticed an alert on my phone notifying me that there was a restaurant nearby that I might like to try. It occurred when I had 30-40 minutes to spare, it was a restaurant that indeed looked interesting to me, and was within a 5 minute walk. Yes that's useful but my conclusion was that this company knows way too much about me. It didn't make me comfortable when Google alerted me about flights I never explicitly told it that I was taking, and offered suggestions about how to get to the Airport that suited my routine.
How did you minimize your usage of Google?
Most of the smart phones are juggle between Apple and google? Where do you go for research questions and topics?
Google is not making it easy to avoid Google but I've done what I can to cut them out of my life. My smartphone is a custom build of Lineageos, clear of any closed source Google code, I don't use gmail or any other Google services and block Google cookies.
There are alternative mobile OS options, such as LineageOS or Plasma Mobile.
There is also NextCloud, which has an impressive number of apps that could help make getting off of Google easier.. mail, calendar, contacts, notes, drive, xmpp chat, video chat, trello clone, password manager, music player....
Collabora can also be installed to give an alternative to Docs / Sheets / etc..
Most of spying comes on behalf od google framework, that comes with google play. LineageOS wont solve that (actually they refused changes that would allow replacing google framework with microg) but a fork of it will. They are reimplementing oss, google compatible framework, also your battery will last ~30% longer (no battery drain due to google spying).
Why google framework is a problem and why bother with microg? Android developers are using calls to it and without it, half or even more apps would break. Microg implements those calls and fakes electronic signatures of google binaries to keep them working.
That’s funny, I just enabled location sharing with friends in gmaps, and I enjoy the timeline view where I can click a day on the calendar and it shows everywhere I have been.
Pretty sure this is not the full info that Google and Facebook keep. For ex, FB tracks most viewed profile by user and is accessible to employees who work on munging data.
Not revealed in any Facebook dataset that you could request and download from the site.
No, I won't. I've seen this page before and I've disabled a lot of the stuff that I'm uncomfortable with having them track. Google does a lot of shady creepy stuff, but I think just linking to your activity timeline doesn't add much value. How about writing a blog post about which items you found most surprising instead?
I do wish we had was better controls. For example, if you disable location tracking, Google Maps won't remember any address you visit. Why can't it be cached locally? If I regularly visit an address on my phone, it should be included in my autocomplete. I don't need cross-device history or tracking, I just want my damn phone to remember places I've visited previously without uploading it to the cloud. Taking an all-or-nothing approach seriously harms the user experience.
Despite it taking years, I've gradually been migrating away from my hard dependency on Google services. With that being said, if I were locked out of my gmail account I'd be seriously fucked. Maybe some day I'll reach the point where that's not the case.
I'd be interested to hear how eg fastmail is or isn't an alternative for someone who feel locked-in to Gmail.
In my mind it's mostly a creepy and half-assed webmail provider with crappy imap support. But I've never really used Gmail all that much (because: creepy evil ad company and email is an obvious bad combination).
I've been working on webmail that only receives messages, doesn't send any. And I've been using it to signup on websites with, it works really well for the purpose because anything that ever arrives was sent by a computer.
I bring it up because it feels like that's a primary reason why people might be trapped on gmail is just that all the websites they are signed up on are linked to it.
I think the Google Maps annoyance after activity tracking is disabled is designed intensionally. To force users to give up the control with easy to click buttons.
I too dislike how many of Google's consumer services are being increasingly gated on the location history permission, which I too have disabled and which therefore means I can't use those services.
However, having worked at other parts of Google (not on Maps or location stuff), I'd guess at a much more prosaic explanation than that kind of conspiracy: the product managers / engineers / tech writers / UI designers don't want to maintain the complexity of both code paths and UX flows indefinitely if most users are happy to share their location server-side in exchange for the conveniences and features that enables.
You and I aren't happy to do that, but we on Hacker News aren't representative of most consumer-product Google users.
> I too dislike how many of Google's consumer services are being increasingly gated on the location history permission, which I too have disabled and which therefore means I can't use those services.
Huh? Google Maps works fine for me despite having disabled location services. It nags me nearly everytime I open the app to "enable location services to proceed", making it sound as though it is required, but I just click "No" and get on with it. Haven't noticed any missing features.
One example of a Google consumer service that needs location history is the Google Assistant. on my Google Pixel phone, that has fully replaced the older non-Assistant OK Google system which didn't require location history.
On Android there is OSMand and Openstreetmap in general.
The only problem being that address search is not great and there is no context search.
You can get an app called AddresstoGPS, which anonymously queries Google's search and let's you output GPS coordinates to OSMand or similar.
As for Google Mail - There are many great E-Mail hosters like ProtonMail, coupled with your favorite E-Mail client it has no downsides, unless you miss tight Google Products integration.
I have just installed OSMAnd to give it a try but well; there is a lot of features to cover :
- navigation
- address search (not the first time I hear it is awful in OSM)
- pictures of places
- live traffic data, both streets and public transportation
- great search (like gyms near me)
- colored points of interest on the map. Kind of an hidden feature but that's immensely useful when you know it is there and you don't know the city you are in.
- reviews
It might take 5 or 6 apps to replace it entirely.
As for inbox, their spam filter is top notch and I like the automatic tagging system.
edit : just started trying OSMAnd, wow it is extremely laggy on my high end phone.
Ye, it is not as smooth in scrolling as GMaps, though more feature rich.
If this bothers you, there is an app called Maps.Me. it is minimalistic, has smooth scrolling like Gmaps but not as feature rich as OSMand and has a non-free (as in freedom) map data service behind it.
But if performance of osmand bothers you, this is the place to go.
When you download map data from Maps.me, it loads them from the maps.me servers. But that's to be expected. openstreetmap.org isn't going to be hosting those files.
Maps.me also includes some hotels from booking.com
Same here. WTF! That's some next level bullshit. How does even Apple allow that? They must be leveraging a phone API because it's tracking the name of the binary. So not only Google has access to this data but virtually any app installed in my phone.
I find it devious that they bundle Web and App activity. I get value from tracking my Web activity on all devices. But tracking every time I click on app launcher, every app I use-this is creepy. You can't turn off app tracking separately
I see my Youtube views. Shortly after getting my first Android phone, I got creeped out by a link like this (and the phone's "helpful" suggestions for products and services) and asked them to stop tracking everything that I could find an option for.
Its funny how I regularly have to visit this page and delete new stuff.
This time it shows my activity on the Google Play developer console all the way back to a couple of years ago. That wasn't there last time I went to empty their spy machine trashcan.
That's what I've done. Someone recently mocked me for using DDG instead of google and I explained that I did it to keep my data store shown by this link empty. I check regularly to make sure nothings new is turned on. Happy to always find it empty.
If you clicked the link and found the amount of information they have on your surprising, and now feel a bit violated, then good; you should.
You'll probably try to do a bit of research and try to figure out how to opt out of all this and protect yourself. And you should. But you shouldn't just stop there.
Many of the people who are reading this right now are responsible for designing and implementing systems that collect massive amounts of data. I implore you to not just think about your own privacy moving forward, but the privacy of your users. Security and privacy should be two of your top level concerns when designing systems, not just tack-ons.
Simply hating of Google/Facebook/$$$Corp for invading your privacy and not doing anything to rememdy the general poor state of privacy in the modern connected world when you have the power to do so is hypocritical.
Next time you're given a project that has PII and the security user story gets deprioritized, raise it as an issue. Aside from being the right thing to do, many places, such as Canada and California, are looking at GDPR-like regulations. So it makes sense to do it now instead of later.
And if you're going to argue that it's hard, and it's time consuming, and you're a startup just trying to get on their feet so you can't be bothered, then consider that you may be part of the reason we find ourselves in this sorry state.
Not surprising at all. I've been actively logging into Google and confirming my visits at various restaurants. I've been using it to track my past activities, and I hope it can provide more accurate restaurant recommendations for me. It has been quite useful. Video recommendations on Youtube are also way more accurate than any other service I've ever seen. If you don't mind sharing your personal data, you do get better service over time.
Awesome, now you're stuck in a bubble where serendipity will no longer play a role in you stumbling upon interesting videos you NEVER thought you'd like, same for restaurants, websites and who nows what more?
On a more serious note, I'd argue that you do not get a better service, your profile becomes near to perfect and your experience online, and increasingly offline, will stagnate.
I recently started actively using profiles feature in Chrome. At first because it was convenient to keep each profile on each own KDE activity, but after awhile I started to use separate profiles for anonymous browsing, testing various chrome extension testing, throwaway-ish social accounts, etc.
I disabled most of it 12 months ago, not just because of privacy but because they were continually in my face attempting to make the data useful through google now. Through no prompting google worked out where I lived and would "notify" me of my commute time every morning, except it didn't realize I was taking PT and traffic didn't affect me. Every time I had lunch at the train station it would notify me of train delays, even though I wasn't catching the train and had already left the station. More than once it notified me of a delayed flight that wasn't really delayed. So all the data I was giving to google was a net negative to me.
Disabling everything is only the start though because google does a really poor job of actually respecting this. The maps app is constantly prompting me to re-enable the tracking. I'm forever one dark pattern or one urgent "just f-ing work" instance away from re-enabling this tracking. For most cases It's easier to give up google products entirely rather than be eternally and infallibly vigilant when I use my phone.
I tend to not be logged in for the times I use their search engine. This is easily achieved by using the tab containers in Firefox. So for my mail, I'm logged in in a tab container. So when I go searching at their search engine, I just press Ctrl-t to open a tab (which isn't the same container as I'm logged in) and search.
I was surprised of how little data they had just by doing this.
They're also excluding vastly more information than they know about you - they're only showing your activity on Google properties, but not your activity on sites which use Google Analytics or Google Ads.. which is most of them.
Blocking Google Analytics is a good antidote against it collecting any data on you. Block it at the router, in the hosts file and by using adblockers (which also block other analytics "services").
It's exclusively Youtube, which I use logged in to get the benefit of history tracking. Every so often I clear my history, but apparently searches (again... Youtube searches, there's nothing else here) don't get cleared when you do that.
I use gmail and search for stuff. That is about it. And because of that, I only log in like once a day into gmail, check mails and log out. Why would I want to stay logged in after that?
This site only showed me that it knows nothing about me which is intended.
Is there surprising or troubling stuff on others’ feeds that I’m not seeing on mine? Mine is just a list of searches I’ve made while logged in on Google products: maps, search, etc.
I was expecting to see something less obvious, like location data that I didn’t explicitly or knowingly share with Google.
If you go to "Other Google activity" via the sidebar you can find Location History, Device Information, Google Play Sound Search History and some other stuff.
All three are empty, at least in the last 2 weeks. I would expect there to be some location history, since I use google maps logged in all the time, but nope.
That would only trap up the arms race. It would also rob Google of one of its advantages being its "simple" interface (although this is something they've been doing to themselves already by adding all sorts of unnecessary scripting to the search page - at least it still works with JS disabled, this in contrast to many other sites).
The core functionality of encrypted.google.com has been incorporated into the Google search homepage. Those visiting this URL after April 30, 2018 will be redirected to https://www.google.com.
DuckDuckGo may be the best non-Google search engine but it's nowhere near anything even remotely resembling a "good" Google replacement. There is no such thing.
91 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 67.3 ms ] threadThem knowing what your favourite coffee shop is or where you work and live is just the tip of the iceberg.
I used to be a very heavy and trusting Google user. It started to get a little bit uncomfortable when I noticed an alert on my phone notifying me that there was a restaurant nearby that I might like to try. It occurred when I had 30-40 minutes to spare, it was a restaurant that indeed looked interesting to me, and was within a 5 minute walk. Yes that's useful but my conclusion was that this company knows way too much about me. It didn't make me comfortable when Google alerted me about flights I never explicitly told it that I was taking, and offered suggestions about how to get to the Airport that suited my routine.
There is also NextCloud, which has an impressive number of apps that could help make getting off of Google easier.. mail, calendar, contacts, notes, drive, xmpp chat, video chat, trello clone, password manager, music player....
Collabora can also be installed to give an alternative to Docs / Sheets / etc..
https://lineage.microg.org/
To use google play store, find yalp explorer.
Why google framework is a problem and why bother with microg? Android developers are using calls to it and without it, half or even more apps would break. Microg implements those calls and fakes electronic signatures of google binaries to keep them working.
I do wish we had was better controls. For example, if you disable location tracking, Google Maps won't remember any address you visit. Why can't it be cached locally? If I regularly visit an address on my phone, it should be included in my autocomplete. I don't need cross-device history or tracking, I just want my damn phone to remember places I've visited previously without uploading it to the cloud. Taking an all-or-nothing approach seriously harms the user experience.
Despite it taking years, I've gradually been migrating away from my hard dependency on Google services. With that being said, if I were locked out of my gmail account I'd be seriously fucked. Maybe some day I'll reach the point where that's not the case.
In my mind it's mostly a creepy and half-assed webmail provider with crappy imap support. But I've never really used Gmail all that much (because: creepy evil ad company and email is an obvious bad combination).
I bring it up because it feels like that's a primary reason why people might be trapped on gmail is just that all the websites they are signed up on are linked to it.
However, having worked at other parts of Google (not on Maps or location stuff), I'd guess at a much more prosaic explanation than that kind of conspiracy: the product managers / engineers / tech writers / UI designers don't want to maintain the complexity of both code paths and UX flows indefinitely if most users are happy to share their location server-side in exchange for the conveniences and features that enables.
You and I aren't happy to do that, but we on Hacker News aren't representative of most consumer-product Google users.
Huh? Google Maps works fine for me despite having disabled location services. It nags me nearly everytime I open the app to "enable location services to proceed", making it sound as though it is required, but I just click "No" and get on with it. Haven't noticed any missing features.
Google search has been awesome for me when logged in, Maps is irreplaceable; as well as Inbox :/
As for Google Mail - There are many great E-Mail hosters like ProtonMail, coupled with your favorite E-Mail client it has no downsides, unless you miss tight Google Products integration.
- navigation
- address search (not the first time I hear it is awful in OSM)
- pictures of places
- live traffic data, both streets and public transportation
- great search (like gyms near me)
- colored points of interest on the map. Kind of an hidden feature but that's immensely useful when you know it is there and you don't know the city you are in.
- reviews
It might take 5 or 6 apps to replace it entirely.
As for inbox, their spam filter is top notch and I like the automatic tagging system.
edit : just started trying OSMAnd, wow it is extremely laggy on my high end phone.
But if performance of osmand bothers you, this is the place to go.
>non-free (as in freedom) map data service
As in, it's all OSM data but not directly from their servers? Or is maps.me adding extra some extra info to the displayed map?
I wonder if OSMand could make use of maps.me code to speed up their rendering - or perhaps it's not possible without cutting out information/features.
It makes sense that Facebook gets all your call data and Google knows things like what apps you have when your operating system allows it.
This time it shows my activity on the Google Play developer console all the way back to a couple of years ago. That wasn't there last time I went to empty their spy machine trashcan.
You'll probably try to do a bit of research and try to figure out how to opt out of all this and protect yourself. And you should. But you shouldn't just stop there.
Many of the people who are reading this right now are responsible for designing and implementing systems that collect massive amounts of data. I implore you to not just think about your own privacy moving forward, but the privacy of your users. Security and privacy should be two of your top level concerns when designing systems, not just tack-ons.
Simply hating of Google/Facebook/$$$Corp for invading your privacy and not doing anything to rememdy the general poor state of privacy in the modern connected world when you have the power to do so is hypocritical.
Next time you're given a project that has PII and the security user story gets deprioritized, raise it as an issue. Aside from being the right thing to do, many places, such as Canada and California, are looking at GDPR-like regulations. So it makes sense to do it now instead of later.
And if you're going to argue that it's hard, and it's time consuming, and you're a startup just trying to get on their feet so you can't be bothered, then consider that you may be part of the reason we find ourselves in this sorry state.
/rant
Awesome, now you're stuck in a bubble where serendipity will no longer play a role in you stumbling upon interesting videos you NEVER thought you'd like, same for restaurants, websites and who nows what more?
On a more serious note, I'd argue that you do not get a better service, your profile becomes near to perfect and your experience online, and increasingly offline, will stagnate.
Highly recommend it - super convenient.
Disabling everything is only the start though because google does a really poor job of actually respecting this. The maps app is constantly prompting me to re-enable the tracking. I'm forever one dark pattern or one urgent "just f-ing work" instance away from re-enabling this tracking. For most cases It's easier to give up google products entirely rather than be eternally and infallibly vigilant when I use my phone.
I was surprised of how little data they had just by doing this.
It's exclusively Youtube, which I use logged in to get the benefit of history tracking. Every so often I clear my history, but apparently searches (again... Youtube searches, there's nothing else here) don't get cleared when you do that.
I see no real problems here.
I was expecting to see something less obvious, like location data that I didn’t explicitly or knowingly share with Google.
2. Go to content settings add domain encrypted.google.com
3. disable javascript & cookie on this domain.
4. Search exclusively on encrypted.google.com
5. Download adblocker and disable all google ads.
Google can't track no shit. I reviewed https://myactivity.google.com/item and all I can see is youtube browsing history.
I am pretty sure google has some more subdomains to block.
Adblocker is great though.