There's no such thing, at least at scale, as sharing your information without also storing it. Not if you want the system to be reliable. So in order to make Google share your location with others, you have to give them permission to store your location. This should be self-evident enough if you take a moment to think about it.

As for lumping web history together with location history, it turns out you can derive the latter if you know the former. There's been a lot of fuss and breathless reporting about that fact. So authorizing them to know the one without the other is a bit of a fiction, especially in those cases that get written up by tech journalists. Best not to pretend that it's possible to keep them separate.

This new thing is an acknowledgement of the fact that the whole point of using Google services is sharing information with them and asking them to hold on to it, at least for a bit, at least until you've gotten the desired use out of the service... but also of the fact that a certain kind of person, the kind you often find on HN, would sleep better if Google deleted that data after it had served it's immediate purpose.

Sure. I have no problem with that. What I have a problem with is, why is google insisting on storing all the locations that I am not sharing?

I only want to share this current location. So yes, that will have to be stored somewhere. But for the love of everything I don't see why sharing my current location requires saving all my future locations.

You can also imagine the other sub-rosa reasons for this.

So, the question remains, why do they need to record your web history if you want to save your location? You can't derive it that way round.

I have all this stuff turned off, there is no good reason for google to store it, it's a privacy nightmare, esp given automated sharing with the state.

I can understand needing to remember the last query, in order to provide context for the next one. Automatic scrubbing would be helpful...but it's missing an "every 10 minutes" option.

(Today, my solution is a completely separate Google account that only gets used for Google Home/Assistant.)

A Google employee once called me on my personal cell phone when I was a few minutes late to a business meeting. I still don't see how that could've happened unless they'd linked my work (g-suite) account with my personal (gmail) account, and then allowed their employees to access personal data in a totally inappropriate fashion.

Maybe there's some other explanation, but I can't fathom what it would have been.

I in fact do have evidence to believe it's more correct than yours but I have no inclination to discuss it further.

Evidence. Not proof. And it's not secret. Just not something I'm inclined to share here.

> which you refuse to share, but that sounds more like a troll or a bullshitter than somebody with actual evidence. I wonder why.

Because of (1) my privacy and (2) the fact that you're attacking me like this. You're welcome to see me as a troll if you'd prefer that.

I have phone calls and e-mails to a personal g-mail account that make literally no sense to receive _unless_ Google had linked my personal and business accounts in a CRM someplace; an d then given access to personal contact info to some of their staff.

> the fact that you're attacking me like this

How is this an attack? I've done nothing to you that you didn't do to me. Except in my case I revealed the nature of my evidence whereas you revealed literally nothing. You just came up with a dumb and obviously false hypothesis and declared it true.

You're saying I called you a troll?

(This discussion is over from my end.)

And it's absolutely not Android's fault as much it is app developers' faults. Want to use an app that tracks your dreams? Most devs will have you sign up for their terrible service so they can store the information in plaintext on a server.

At least with iOS most devs seem to opt for CloudKit with E2E encryption. Privacy seems more wired into the iOS ecosystem than Android.

I do see it as a shortcoming of android that i cannot redirect unwanted capabilities into a harmless sandbox version of those.

The issue is that the developers themselves don't really seem to care as much about privacy etc as iOS developers. This effectively renders the privacy measures mostly meaningless. If I'm writing my dreams into your app and you can read them on your own server, I've already lost all semblance of privacy.

Not sure if you're trying to provide defensive cover to Google with your comment or not, but it clearly goes to show they are not above these kind of dark UI patterns.

I would very much like to store my home and work addresses in Google Maps on my phone, but I can't do that without them also storing everywhere I go.

There is no good reason for these two things being tied together other than to make we share my location data. We are talking about storing a few hundred bytes of relatively static data and letting me select them as a shortcut, this is not a complex feature, it's a simple shortcut.

I turned off youtube watch history.

I can no longer see my google play music played counts, because somehow the same permission covers both, even though I would like music history but not youtube history.

The YouTube music experience is kind of odd. It seems that you can only listen to full albums if someone has uploaded them to YouTube as separate songs. Which makes sense, but it means that currently a lot of the music I listen to is nowhere to be found on YouTube music.

There are ways for technical users, but it nudges users to leave all the juicy data to the company, which can then use it in any way it feels (including monetization)

In theory the links are only valid for a few hours. In practice I don't trust that.

Even then, it's not about clamoring, but just having a way to create rules. You just can't do that easily in gmail.

The actual email to non-gmail addresses is just a link to fetch the mail body, which can be validated with SMS.

you know why. It's profitable. This information makes them money.

whoops