So no, it is not just my problem or your problem, it's everyone's.
I think this example serves both our points. To your point, it's totally leaked this other person's info into my "google world" because I'm on gmail. On the other hand, that person is leaking his information directly to me just because of typos when he fills out online forms. Perfect privacy requires a lot of vigilance in a digital world, with or without google/gmail/hotmail/yahoo/etc.
Fun story there. Because Google's internal privacy safeguards are so strict, the people working on features like that can't look for example emails to train their ML models with.
They can only look at emails that were explicitly sent to them in order to improve the feature (and almost no one forwards along positive nor negative examples). What they can do across the email corpus is run jobs that return aggregate stats, where each stat must be coarse enough that it is infeasible to trace back to original users (often 100k+ users per data point).
So, AFAIK, training & testing models under these safeguards is more or less done blind. Build a model with the few examples you do have, and then run it against the corpus. If you see numbers change, you have no idea if that's good or bad, since you can't actually inspect the run.
(at least, this is the way it was a few years ago)
One time, when I marked a bunch of incorrectly-classified emails as "not spam", the Gmail web UI asked me if I wanted to send these emails to the Gmail spam team. Was this what you meant, or something else?
(That's different than just marking an email as spam, though)
It's not clear whether these AI models have much incentive to correct anything. If 99% of people with attributes x,y and z are bad candidates for a job, will you even get an interview? Is there any attempt to account for the fact that attribute x is something you were born with? Or that you are actually in the 1% and really are a good candidate? Or that you don't actually have attribute y, and it was just inferred from something else or some kind of mixup like an email address typo?
Machine learning is also very opaque.
If you verify the race field, then now you're in the business of enforcing racial definitions.
Why would that matter to the company? People are born with stupidity.
I receive a ridiculous amount of other people's email - for serious things like email account reset, to banking info. When the Ashley Madison hack happened, my email address was there multiple times! Imagine if my then-partner had bothered to look, what a mess that would be.
I've called American Express a couple of times to report errant emails with account info ending up in my email. THEY didn't care that one of their customers had an issue, they thought it was a great time to have me fork over MY info "to check".
From time to time I have had messages relating to a government planning committee as one of the members got the domain of someone's departmental email account wrong and the messages come instead to the domain I administer.
In another instance I was getting emails about an account someone created with American Express using my email address. I sent multiple emails to their customer support to get them to stop sending financial information to the wrong person with no results. In this I also found it difficult to even figure out what agency to report them to for failing to take action when notified. Eventually I took the time to call them. It took around 20 minutes (not counting time on hold) of talking to multiple people to get them to remove the email address from the account. This included them asking me several times for my social security number - which I flatly refused to provide since I had zero business relationship with them. This refusal actually seemed to confuse them.
Many of the people I know who have very common gmail addresses have set up canned replies to let senders know they've reached the wrong person.
I often get some misdirected emails because of a very banal name in my country.
When the email contains a thread history, I sometime noticed that the address was simply corrupted by a recipient, such as numbers getting dropped from the genuine address in their reply.
I guess some systems can't handle correctly numbers or other characters in email addresses.
The former doesn't fix the issue at all, and the latter is unworkable because the guy reliably giving out the wrong email address will absolutely not remember his public key.
Have the browser suggest the key IDs from `gpg --list-secret-keys`.
I was somewhat radical about privacy in the late 90s (only person I knew that read every EULA) and am still a supporter of the EFF but I don't really understand the issue here.
When you visit you friend's house, the data is not under their control, it is under Google's control.
Therefore, Google has a WAY bigger responsibility than most people realize, once they decided to collect this data.
Ultimately, whenever you visit any place, business or home, the data is under the control of the owner and anyone they abdicate those rights to.
Some interesting scenarios to consider: If I visit a friend's house, and I start getting targeted ads for a service I didn't subscribe to without prior consent or my knowledge, can I sue her/him? What about a scenario where some service collects my data, said service is hacked, and someone commits identity theft on me, who is liable for damages? Do I need my buddy to sign a waiver when he visits to play some Xbox for a bit?
But it was your friend's decision to delegate that control. So, Google having that control is still a consequence of your friend's control.
With LTE, I don't need wifi.
I would imagine if you walk into a home with google's AI doodads all over the place, you're gonna be picked up.
There was even a note about this feature in the privacy policy, IIRC.
Rumor is that even when your phone has been turned off, it can be turned back on remotely.
I have a couple of cameras, and at least one visitor has been uncomfortable with their presence, despite the fact they're not sending the data to a third party.
A business is typically located in a public space, where there is no expectation of privacy. In contrast, a home is by definition a private space where there is a strong expectation of privacy.
Aren't there some wiretapping laws around this sort of thing?
(IANAL, YMMV, etc.)
Tl;dr there's privacy in decentralization.
I'm very optimistic about Google making my life better in lots of little ways. I have virtually no concerns about my openness to Google causing me trouble.
I think that's a common goal and widespread belief and find its implication of having given up on "bigger ways" troubling.
Our industry was going to change the world. Rewrite the cultural rules of socializing. Rebuild the economy in a new form. Encourage major cultural and political shifts by empowering the little guy. Bring knowledge to the ignorant, companionship to the lonely, power to the powerless, jobs to the jobless.
What we have now is, well, maybe, with some luck, timidly, sometimes google can analyze the last time I went to a gas station, the number of miles I've driven at various speeds since then, the time of my next appointment, then it can adjust my google now card to encourage me to leave home earlier so I'll have time to fill up the tank and it'll find the cheapest advertised price along the way. That's nice ... but wheres my revolution?
Even worse in context of the article, OK well say I have to give up all privacy and go hard core 1984 telescreen big brother is always watching, to save endangered species and house the homeless and feed the starving and bring peace to the victimized. Well OK I'll think about it. Oh wait, we don't get any of that, all we're offered is slightly better appointment scheduling. Eh, no thanks.
Nothing is ever really new, and this era is likely similar to pre-quantum era Physics around 1890 where nothing is left to discover other than adding a few more decimal places here and there. The meme and speech patterns are all the same (although I'm not quite that old)
For centuries, people have navigated using stars and maps, yet now you have turn by turn navigation in your pocket with real time traffic and crowd sourced traffic incidents. You can reach most of the world population instantly by dialing a few numbers or even sending them a text message or mms, no matter where they are.
In the context of the article, a couple of years ago, Google Now told me I had to leave for a meetup in my calendar that I completely forgot about, gave me transit directions for a part of a city I've never been at and got me in exactly at the meetup start time.
While that all seems like modern conveniences nowadays, even thirty years ago if you'd have told people that you couldn't get lost anywhere in the world and could get ahold of just about anyone at anytime instantly, they'd think you'd be talking about science fiction, not today's reality.
Example: "Intuit’s TurboTax stores highly detailed financial data for millions of users who import their W2s, their banking data, info about their mortgages and more. Right now, all of this data is locked into TurboTax, but the company is now thinking about how it can do more with it by giving its users the option to share this data with reputable third parties." ... https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/22/intuit-wants-to-turn-turbo...
True, I don't mind Google today, but what about tomorrow? What about N years from now when they have failed to hit their financial targets 2 years running. Will that company have the same set of standards as the one today?
The reality is that once you've given up your privacy there is no getting it back.
Google might handle the data it collects better than other companies, but it would do much better still if it didn't collect any personal data at all.
Hands off my data, Google!
Going further, given that an encrypted email to Gmail will simply be unencrypted and then available to GMail, include in the protocol authorized (via both white and black list means) agents of the recipient. So, if you are hosting your own email but the intended recipient is expected to be not hosting their own email, the sender can blacklist "agents" such as Gmail and Yahoo! Mail, or blacklist all except for those chosen to be white-listed such as Proton Mail.
For almost all users getting a message from someone you personally know containing a message that they would legitimately send would be sufficient to trust the referenced key. If you are a little paranoid you could ask them over the phone or in person to send a specific message that you would then trust, or just ask for the URL itself. I believe that in-person key exchanges utilizing large trust networks are overkill for the vast majority of people sending everyday communications.
Make it so simple as 1) one time key creation and copying to each device 2) one time trust per other person that is completely streamlined by the software. If the gmail team implemented this for example other email providers would soon do the same and it would spread like wildfire. Very quickly a huge amount of email would be encrypted. Of course this would require an open design that anyone can implement.
Maybe there's a fundamental flaw with this idea that I'm not seeing. If so, please say so because otherwise I'm going to just be disappointed in five years when email is still 99% unencrypted.
Granted there may be a place for regulations to help us restrict what companies are able to do(perhaps making it easier for you to identify a region that is being recorded, right?), but, at some point society can't help the fact that you'd prefer if machines were unaware of your existence. That's just something you have to solve for yourself.
GPG doesn't hide that one is emailing, or when, or with whom; it only hides content.
Personally, I would have downvoted you because your original point seemed to condescendingly assume something about a large proportion of the community and their intentions - then you assume again that it's "The Google People" (and only them)?
Unless you can show that your downvotes came because of a specific reason, and from specific people...
I also fear you will be unable to notice in which areas of life and information the distinction between choice and reaction is harmless and which it isn't.
Of course, I'm not talking about "You" you, but just people. Me as well. I feel we are widening the field of unconscious decisions and I see that as inherently bad - in my fellow humans as well.
You could say that Plato wanted us to make easy things simple (link for distinction: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy).
I believe this to be a move in the opposite direction. We should have a care.
It's like saying we shouldn't use prescription glasses, or medication, or cars, because it's not "us".
Humans invent all these tools and systems to improve and optimize our life. Make our vision better. Make our health better. Make us move around faster. In the case of AI, make us do perform certain things more efficiently.
Imagine it wasn't an actually computer. Imagine it was a personal secretary you had that gave you the EXACT same information. Gave you your flight information, turned on the light when you asked, gave you the weather and your schedule. Would you think that was wrong? That this isn't "you"? No, it's just optimizing your life, but now available for a wider population rather than rich people.
In your metaphor, you are implicitly paying the secretary, so the secretary is incentivized to maintain your interests.
How much have you paid Google for its free services?
Your metaphor is inapplicable. You don't have a secretary telling you these things; you have a salesman trying to sell you things, and the salesman is getting smarter every day while you aren't. Not the same thing at all.
It seems to be a theme here today... a company can't serve both advertisers and customers. In the end, one of them has to win, and given the monetary flows, it's not even remotely a contest which it will be. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12644507
It's funny how bad of a stigma ads have gotten, but at the core, if you think of it, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Think of a friend recommending you a restaurant, a new game to play, a movie to go watch. In that case you'll be super interested, but now if this AI who probably knows your taste better than your friend suggests you something, you are instantly turned off and annoyed.
I think the root cause of this is that there is so much mediocre ads out there that ruin it for all. Your mind just blindly blocks all ads now.
When you aren't paying anything for something of value, YOU are the product.
No, that would be slavery, which is illegal.
Google is selling advertising space on various channels that you provide in exchange for Google services to advertisers.
> When you aren't paying anything for something of value, YOU are the product.
No, when you aren't paying money for something of value, you are probably paying something else of value for it; often, something that the person with which you are trading is then selling for money, making you a supplier of an input to the good or service they are selling for money.
And it's not a simple product like glasses where you pay with money and then they improve your vision. It's a product which goes far beyond your understanding and for which you don't pay money.
Google isn't interested in making your life better. What they are interested in is getting you to believe that they want to make your life better and to then recommend going to that bar, because the bar owner has given Google money to advertise for the bar.
Yes, you might actually like that bar, but Google isn't going to recommend going there in intervals which are beneficial to you. They'd rather have you go there a few too many times. Because that's what makes them money. It's not improving your life, which makes them money. Their AI will always work against you, whenever it can without you noticing.
First, there is a way to tell it to not do that. With Google Now, you simply tap the menu and say "No more notification like this". With the assistant, you will probably be able to ask directly.
Second, let's be honest, humans fail pretty often too, so that's just a weak argument.
Lastly, I think it's unfair to dismiss a new technology just because it could maybe fail, without having even tried it.
The awful success cases are far more interesting than the awful failure cases.
Your noose example is pretty contrived, however.
How about sleeping pills? Opiates? Local extortionist cult?
There's not only the "morally reprehensible" metric ("Don't be evil"); there's also the "absolute PR catastrophe" metric that printing such an ad for a rope would mean.
I think the real issue is the casual deception which you just fell for: It isn't "your" electronic secretary, and the thing it just did might actually be a "good job" from the perspective of those who control it.
I'm not saying we shouldn't use AIs. We should, however, think about how we use them.
To build on your example, what are the dangers of having a personal secretary on the payroll of anyone but you?
What I am expecting from this is a super devious filter bubble - because that's how you make money. Google's old slogan "Don't be evil" is long gone. "For a greater good" might be more on point.
What does the Google Assistant help me do more efficiently? In all honesty, I can't figure it out. I don't need or want a secretary, and I can do written planning for myself.
I need less paperwork and fewer web forms and identities, but the Google Assistant only promises more of that crap.
I'm never buying one. It's a sacrifice of privacy for zero to marginal gains in convenience.
If you do not care what I say, why even reply?
Google is designed to sell ads, and subtly influence your behavior towards the most profitable results. Please do not confuse a fact-based tool with an ad generator.
This is the very common theory that a company will (shadily) try to offer you a worse product to make more profit. It fails to account for competing companies that would jump on that opportunity to offer their better product, and get the market share.
But what's funny here is that the suggested alternative is to not get any product at all. As in: "Poor OP, didn't realize that it wasn't really him who was enjoying that burger he was enjoying."
Maybe Play Music is the best thing. Maybe it is not. Neither of us can answer that. But if a definitively better product comes along it will have no way to make a foothold because Google is still pushing everyone to their own product, from their other product (Search), and even when people try your product, if they use Google's other products, they'll tend to stick to other Google products.
Honestly, the worst problem with companies like Google is vertical integration. The ability to provide a wide product line where you integrate best with other products your own company makes has an incredibly chilling effect on competition, and therefore, innovation.
And if your theory that companies prioritizing results for profit would lose to companies that always prefer the best products, why is DuckDuckGo still in what... fourth or fifth place?
You'd need to argue that DuckDuckGo's search results are better; I don't think they are. That's what made Google first among many competing search engines, before there was even a clear business model in it. Today the incentive to outperform is bigger.
If a product Y definitely better than X comes along, and only Google Search fails to rank it higher, people will start thinking "I rather search on Bing too, as it finds better products in this category".
"I ordered this burger because I was hungry and it tastes good" vs "I ordered this burger because Google was able to successfully predict that I would be receptive to having burgers, or the idea of burgers, placed in my environment"
Other people's happiness metrics work differently, and all popular web services are popular precisely because they satisfy the unconscious desires of the majority of people.
I wonder what is then causing inefficiency when we read restaurant's menu and can't decide what we will have.
I'm with those who think we make choices and decisions far less often than we think, but that we still do make them.
this is like absolutely full on plugged into the matrix world. and we're living right in it.
these guys are like the ones who've taken the red pill, and gone on to find out how far the rabbit hole is going.
(edit: i'm even more intrigued by the possibility that the future is not just the matrix singularity, but an oligopoly of several large singularities, all fighting to plug us in)
We already see what happens when peoples decision making is coloured by mass media advertising. An obese population trapped by debts taken out to fuel consumption.
It is in other peoples best interests for you to work like a slave, be addicted to unhealthy habits & run up vast debts in order to buy their products.
We keep allowing those with power to distort the markets gaining themselves more money and more power at the expense of the little guy. I don't see any reason why AI in the service of the powerful will do anything but accelerate that.
But I think it would be a problem if every Monday and Thursday night Google Now started providing information about AA meetings in the area, instead of bar information. It's up to the user to make the choice, Google Now just detects trends and then displays information based on those trends.
I go to the gym every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday morning. And each of those mornings Google Now tells me how many minutes it will take me to get to the gym from my current location. Should Google Now start giving me directions to the nearest breakfast place instead? No, not unless that starts becoming my pattern.
Google may not have a responsibility to be a good friend, but personally I'd prefer not to have a bad friend always following me around, thus I'm a little less excited about this feature.
> Should Google Now start giving me directions to the nearest breakfast place instead?
That may depend on how much Waffle House pays for advertising, and that is the problem.
If you replace "AI" with "marketing" would you still make that statement?
should I just be a actor playing through a set itinerary of vacations and movies and burgers and relationships? maybe you think its that way already, except less perfect than it might be, but thats a pretty frightening notion to me.
My culture, education and skills limit what work I can do.
Our culture places limits on a vast number of experiences. On the road and the only thing is fast food? Welp, eating fast food. Live somewhere that only has one grocery store or cable provider?
I don't really see AI in the form Google is peddling as really all that much different. We're just 'more aware' that the world around us is really guiding us.
I may be somewhere new, and can only see the immediate surroundings without a lot of exploring. And let's be real, in the US, most cities are the same when it comes to restaurants/hotels and such. There are differences in culture but we don't usually see them if we're just visiting. Not in a way that matters.
Google will let me know that the things I prefer back home? there are equivalents nearby.
Fencing ourselves in is what we do. Who knows, perhaps a digital assistant would help us stick to our personal goals and decisions better. Rather than just having to accept what's there.
I'm curious why you think this is bad. I don't necessarily think it is good but I also don't necessarily think it is actually happening
Which news-sources are you going to learn about?
Which news-sources are you for some reason very unlikely to encounter?
Now apply a real-time AI filter-bubble, able to also include government policies in its decision-making, onto those questions.
I believe the most important thing in life is thinking. I believe a key element of thinking is looking at "easy stuff", the stuff we just live with every day and don't think about, and for some reason be forced to think about it and make it simple.
Take the Snowden-leak. We lived a nice life being the good guys and that kind of surveillance was publicly thought of as conspiracy theories. Suddenly we were forced to look at what was going on. How much of it are we okay with? On the grounds of what principles and tradeoffs? This is all very unpleasant, but we're all better off for facing those questions and work towards new principles. We take a chaotic gruel of cons and pros, and try to hammer them into a few simple principles our societies may function by. For instance, the separation of power into 3 has served us well.
I fear that we end up in a world where raising such unpleasant questions becomes almost impossible - and we'll never even notice. Not because of AI (I believe AI to be inevitable and fascinating) but because of the way AI is used.
Living a life assisted by an AI, made and paid for by someone else, seems like the epitome of naivete to me.
Maybe the illusion is that it was a choice . . .
As example, the old weather widget from Google's "News & Weather" was replaced by Google Now. That provided a similar experience for some time but then stopped working with another update that required search history to be enabled and/or some other setting in privacy control.
Also the launcher integrated Google with a system update(Moto G line of phones). I have since replaced launcher, browser, search app (all with open source replacements), weather app (with a paid service). Convenience has suffered...
At that point I turned it on but deleted* the search history each day, until such point as they changed the delete controls to be more of a nuisance.
I now use DuckDuckGo and an iPhone instead.
* Or so their site claims.
Your location history tracking is paused..
It can probably save them from a legal mess if they 'resume' it in future updates.
The more specific work I need to go through to set up my privacy, the less inclined I am to do it. If I didn't think I was able to be manipulated psychologically in this way, well, I wouldn't worry about advertising at all! If I were to ever do something politically dissident/personally embarrassing on the internet (not that I ever have of course) I'd go to the trouble of ensuring encryption and being hard to track, but I think it's important that I'm able to say to Google "Hey, I'm cool with you telling me when I should check off work to hit the bar, but it's super weird that you know what I should get my Mom for Mother's Day."
Of course, the simplest way of making a system that's both fine-grained and intuitive might involve... more AI, so I'm not sure how to crack that issue.
This is by design, so that the majority of users are confused and leave the defaults as is, enabling Google to do whatever they like.
I never thought of that before. But, what a subtle way for Google to dissuade people from using a tool that could impact their revenue.
And it annoys me that on maps, when you turn off all the spying capabilities there's no fallback to local history. You either share it with us or you get none.
> ... it was creepy as all hell that the people [...] knew enough about me
Speaking of which, anyone following today's stories about the Yahoo email scandal, the pressure on the folks who own Signal, and recent litigation from Microsoft against government gag orders?
But, let's go back to talking about none of us have free will and talking about how clever Now is.
GPS navigation devices with much less storage than a phone have been more than capable of what Google Maps offers for a long time. There's essentially no reason for it to do anything with the Internet except getting map updates.
I use Google Maps every single day to get to and from work, simply because it knows how to avoid traffic. 10% of the time it saves me half an hour on my commute.
1- There is no way to set your privacy level.
2- Things that Google/Siri/Alexa know about you are not limited with the name of the bar you go frequently. They know much more about you. And you don't know what they know. The sky is the limit here.
3- Things that they know are not limited with you personally. They know about you, your family, your friends and all their interactions. They know very much about the whole society.
2 - My point is that I personally am OK with Google's AI knowing more about me. I respect that others aren't. I'm not naive in my acceptance.
3 - I don't really have a response here.
The privacy control where I disable location tracking and half a year later when I look in Google Dashboard I see months of travel history?
I respect that others aren't. I'm not naive in my acceptance.
So what do you do in a situation where your use of Google's data collection also affects people who do mind it? I would not be comfortable visiting a friend with an always-listening device like Alexa or Google's equivalent.
I nuked my paid Google Apps account a couple of months ago. I had enough of their total disrespect for privacy. E.g. conversations that I had in Google Mail (which is protected by the Google Apps agreement) were used for suggestions, etc. in Google+ (which is not covered by the Google Apps agreement and uses data for targeted advertising).
I'd turn it off if/when they ask. I don't think that's unreasonable in the least. I'm not responsible for enforcing everyone's privacy preference, but I also respect them and will accommodate guests in my house.
It could have been a visit to a website.
You can monitor the traffic of the Alexa and see that it is only sending data when you ask it to do something, and furthermore, Amazon gives you a log of everything you've said to it and it recorded.
Others may be reviews left, reviews voted on, prime video consumed, audio/video/book samples consumed, kindle activity, how long you spend on a product page, how you scroll on it, the breadcrumb of how you got there, and surely dozens more.
My impression also is that most early adopters of this kind of technology are younger people. (again: mostly)
So this brings up an interesting question about the future. As the young early adopters age, what will happen?
a) their privacy thresholds will also increase and they will have a "oh holy crap" moment in the future, where as a middle-aged or older person, who has lived a now much richer and problem-laden life, they will realize that google (and/or other co's) have what they consider now, as too much personal information about them,
or
b) they will keep their young-ish privacy thresholds as older people, and in general, across society, people will have lower thresholds than exist nowadays. In other words the world will change.
My money is on a)
My impression (in the main) is that younger and older people have different views on privacy. Older folk might be creeped out by Google knowing their schedule, but okay with the NSA or FBI or whomever reading their emails because "because terrorists" whereas younger folk are more likely to balk at the latter, but very much okay the former.
Do you think my opinion is accurate? I'm curious because to some extent I completely agree with you.
Of course it also once told me how long it would take to get to an ex's house from my current girlfriend's place.
How about an 'OK, funny once' command?
(eugenics through large scale suggestions anyone? ;>)
There are even apps to that... It wouldn't surprise me if someday this tracking was learnt by Google
This isn't funny at all. "They" (or Skynet) could totally do this and who would be the wiser?
> How about an 'OK, funny once' command?
My whole point in posting originally was to bring up the fact that the interesting discussion of different thresholds and having a spectrum of options is being lost in binary "privacy vs complete corporate control". It's not binary, and it does everyone a disservice to act like it can be for everyone.
Your phone's microphone can be turned on remotely and listen to what you say (I know several startups that do this). Security/traffic/drone/satellite cameras are everywhere. You are being watched literally all the time, but to think the watchers actually care about your personal life indicates a pretty inflated view of self-importance. We're starting to complain about it about 20 years too late.
If i'm on gmail, then you need to talk to gmail to talk to me. It's a tradeoff you'll need to make. If you want you can GPG encrypt the email, but there is nothing from stopping me (legally, morally, or otherwise) from just decrypting it and replying with the contents, or saving the decrypted message in my google drive.
So, by the same token, does Google have the rights to profile people even if they haven't consented to that? One answer, as with copyright, is to see what the law says; and it's very possible that the law says no, especially in the EU. (I've not researched it; others will doubtless know much more than I do.)
Or Google could just seek to do the right thing and not profile people unless they've opted in. But my definition of the right thing may well be different to theirs.
1. finding someone who is not using any Google service at all, and
2. finding their data in a Google database.
I hope that there will be a day when Google and Facebook will combine forces and work on a sequel to "The Lives of Others" [0].
Yeah, that's a great movie.
Pretty much your only privacy is in your head at that point.
I'm not sure that is a "threshold" of privacy but rather a "I am okay with 24/7 surveillance of all of my activity."
is this story unrealistic, or has it already occurred?
One Wednesday afternoon, at work, I got a notification saying "Travel time to the Lion & Crown". The first thing that ran through my head was "oh my god, I'm living in the future".
The problem is that I want to use Google Maps so what choice do I really have?
Sure I use a dedicated gmail for my phone but that really does not help much.
"Hey, it's a been a while. Why don't you go to ... today? Traffic conditions are favorable too."
Given that, and the existence of pervasive surveillance and data mining, the above is inevitable.
"Oh you wanted to go to the bank today? Fuck you, we're going over by the mall" doors lock shut
"I was feeling bored, so I drove down to the mall. Look what all did I get!"
And then prepares to rush the owner to the hospital.
I think that it is different for everyone is completely and utterly obvious. It's clear the author doesn't think it's OK, but that it's his/her opinion.
Extremely annoying. This sort of thing should not be acceptable, an honest mistake results in every place I've been being logged in such a way that anyone with access to my Google account, access to Google servers or with a subpoena can have my full location history in a matter of seconds.
This needs to be a big red option every time you add an account "we're gonna log everywhere you go and hand it over to whoever we feel like, you cool with that?". It'd be different if the log and analysis were done only on my device, but doing this on Google's servers is completely unacceptable by anyone with even the weakest standards of privacy.
In your Settings app Settings, scroll down and tap Google. Open a separate app called Google Settings Google Settings.
Tap Location and then Location History.
At the bottom of the screen, tap Delete Location History.
Also https://maps.google.com/locationhistory allows for delete all history.
Schrems described the file obtained through a legal request as
a 500MB PDF including data the user thought they had
deleted. The one sent through a regular Facebook request was a
150MB HTML file and included video (the PDF did not) but did
not have the deleted data.
EDIT: Okay, found it. Follow your instructions then open that "Manage Activities" -> Menu -> Settings -> Scroll down -> Delete All Location History.
You _must_ do this for every account if you have multiple.
You _must_ do this for every account if you have multiple.
At least for turning it off I expected it to be phone wide, not account specific. Deletion yeah, I suppose you're right.
Do you think you're setting a behavior of the phone, or a behavior of your account?
Totally OK for me Google. I respect that people have different privacy thresholds, but I think the fact that it's different for everyone is being lost in articles like this.