In the old days of the web, before CSS became widespread, all links were blue by default and turned purple when visited. Back then people would also bookmark things and organize their bookmarks.

Somewhere along the line, we stopped caring about trying to manage our own information and handed it over to big cloud companies like Google and Facebook. Now we’re seeing the downsides of that tradeoff.

While I'm preety deep in the camp of those who don't want or let google save their history, I didn't stop caring about managing my own information, I just gave up. The amount of info I'm processing today is on a different scale than it used to be on the good old days, and the tools we have - browser history for instance - just didn't scale.

I wish we had a middle ground between browser history and favourites - just a way to preferentially find something I’ve visited and tagged before by keyword that works in the address bar. “What was the name of that one article Among hundreds from 3 months ago about X...”

One feature I've wanted since forever is a full text search engine of only stuff I've previously seen before. I've spent hours typing in various search queries for an article I'm sure I read 3 years ago but am fuzzy on the details of. Doesn't seem too hard to do technologically and would solve a real problem in my life.

The Firefox address bar doesn't let you tag things by keyword afaik, but it is pretty good at pulling up articles based on both their URL and title. It's definitely improved my ability to go back and find stuff from a few weeks or months back.

You definitely can tag bookmarks in Firefox, and typing the tag will bring up that item.

Adding a tag to bookmark: https://i.imgur.com/iVElOWb.png

Searching by tag: https://i.imgur.com/e3UmQDG.png

I don't use any bookmark management addons, so this is definitely default behaviour.

Perhaps session buddy, if you're the type to have a bunch of tabs on a topic. You can search for names of sessions, or for pages in a saved session.

Something like Pinboard?

https://pinboard.in/

Pinboard is a bookmarking solution, not a middle ground between bookmarks and browser history.

I am currently evaluating worldbrains memex for firefox. It let's you full text search your visited sites the results can also be included in a google search via the plugin. Sites can be annotated, tagged.

When I said we, I meant all of us, including developers. Economic forces had a lot to do with it, of course, but developers flocked to SaaS business models and away from traditional native apps. This is a huge loss for user control of their data.

Imagine if that hadn't happened! I think we would have amazing tools for managing our information locally, in a highly automated and intuitive way.

The seeds of these possibilities are everywhere. Search, of course, but also things like tagging and even automatic tagging with with machine learning models. Imagine if Chrome had the same tools for organizing bookmarks as Gmail has for tagging email, plus all of the power of recommendation engines under the user's control.

No, instead Google keeps bookmarks extremely underpowered because they'd rather have people search for everything all the time in order to drive traffic to their ads.

It's not just bookmarks. I didn't realize for a long time that chrome was silently deleting my browsing history. Now I bookmark anything that seems even vaguely interesting, which in turn makes my address bar suggestions less than useful.

The tools that were developed in the interim were designed not to scale.

Giving up is the same thing as stopped caring!

The web back then was also useless.

I know because I was there trying to learn programming, or anything, from the web of 1996-2000 and it was a freaking pain, a garbage dump of poor content filled with banner ads and popups and searching on AltaVista and Yahoo! was completely futile. The only useful content I found was not on the web, but in FTP directories. And learning was all you could (barely) do.

People were doing bookmarks because it was rare to find something good, so remembering stuff that wasn't crap was worthwhile.

People tend to glorify the old days. That's because memory starts playing tricks on us.

Only in the very early days of the web, were links standardized around blue/purple text, and even linked images had blue/purple borders.

But quickly web designers decided that the conventions were boring or ugly, and changed the default color schemes and removed underlines and borders. The web as a whole began moving towards CSS and JavaScript and more full-fledged web applications.

Putting the disappearance of purple links on cloud companies and Facebook and Google is rather preposterous.

Parent is talking about physical location.

https://www.google.ca/maps/timeline

That particularly useful thing got taken away from us because it was too hard to hide the changed-appearance from predatory trackers who would link to many websites to determine if you'd been there before.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Privacy_and...

Not all of us. Cloud-based bookmarking services are great. I use https://pinboard.in/

I also like this feature - it's never been a problem for me. What is the problem is the data that they keep that I don't easily know about. I may be wrong, but this article sounds to me like it's going to delete the data you use so they don't have to store it (saving space) not the analytics data that they use to show you targeted advertisements.

While deleting data does save space, one 10-minute YouTube video is far bigger than a few years of browsing history. Google isn't turning auto-delete for storage reasons.

YouTube watch data is used to personalize recommendations, and browsing data is used to personalize ads: https://policies.google.com/privacy#whycollect.

Disclaimer: I work at Google.

Can I consent to permanent storage somewhere? I love using the timeline in Google Maps!

Yes, in “my activity.”

https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols

The location history setting toggles whether data for My Timeline is kept.

I just don't get how Youtube recommendations are so bad. So often it recommends me things I have already watched.

Or the algorithm knows I like David Bowie so recommends me "Changes". The most boring possible recommendation it can give to a David Bowie fan.

I really wish it had a setting to up the daring of the recommendation. It seems designed to just never recommend something that I would really hate but in doing so it never recommends me anything all that interesting.

Thanks for sharing.

I think the minority opinion is those who don't like this. This group is much more vocal about their privacy, while the other group is either okay with it or blissfully ignorant. I do prefer an opt-in default though, because the blissfully ignorant shouldn't have to bear such a responsibility.

I too really like this data, specifically location history. It's come in extremely handy for a number of reasons, whether finding a restaurant I really liked but forgot the name of, finding exact dates and times when I was in certain places (which is handy to know if said place had a COVID-19 outbreak, for example).

Understand where you're coming from and agree there are real benefits to using your data to improve experience.

I don't think the debate is whether this data can improve your experience. The debate is in how the data is leveraged.

Watching the WWDC 2020 keynote, lost count of how many times the presenters referred to "on device" computation to create the same improved experience you're describing, but without sacrificing privacy.

When Google does it, we know the data is being leveraged not only for the betterment of our experience, but also for the betterment of their advertising products.

> but also for the betterment of their advertising products

I guess this just doesn't really bother me that much. Honest question - why should it?

I generally filter advertising out of my consciousness. I've clicked on exactly one ad in my life (that mystery box company). Maybe if everything advertised to me was that interesting (to me), it would be a net win for everyone?

Everyone thinks they are not susceptible to advertising.

Advertising metrics continue to prove that they are wrong.

HN will continue to have "contrarians" who think they are smarter than everyone else, and who reflexively argue contrarian positions, like "privacy is bad, actually", not because those positions are smart, but because the speakers are addicted to being "clever" contrarians.

Less than 1% of Facebook ads get clicked. Not sure what sort of roi marketing folks have come up with to convince purse strings their ads are actually producing, but if the "marketing" department can't spin numbers to look good, might be time find a new marketing department.

Then you can get 2% of your ads clicked on.

All that said, I'd be interested in learning if my layman's perspective is garbage (which, let's be honest, it probably is).

The number is far less than 1%. Other than that, your layman's perspective is correct.

I'm in the custom apparel industry, where a lot of purchases are (were - it's dropped off) driven by facebook ads. If Facebook ads were as effective as the HN zeitgeist seems to think, there would be no other kind of commerce.

advertising is manipulation. It's not even always about a trying to get you to hand over your money, sometimes it's about pushing politics or changing opinions and public perception. You can filter advertising out of your immediate consciousness, but you can't keep it out of your subconsciousness and the ads you can't even remember have an impact on your decisions and your beliefs.

I'm trying to figure out what you're suggesting here. That we should ban advertising? That untargeted advertising is somehow socially better than targeted advertising?

Practically every commercial interaction (and most social interactions) are "manipulation" of some sort. At the moment we're trying to manipulate each other into adopting the other person's perspective. I don't understand what you find insidious about sales pitches; I'm sure they've been with us almost as long as prostitution.

> I guess this just doesn't really bother me that much. Honest question - why should it?

Because of the impact of advertising on everyone's lives and the society at large.

An incomplete list of issues: http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html.

> I generally filter advertising out of my consciousness. I've clicked on exactly one ad in my life

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli

Google also has been moving to federated learning for their products such as Translation, Keyboard, Voice Recorder where the data doesnt leave the phone. Your point is fair though reply

Some data could still leave the phone with federated learning. Although it is said to not be stored in the cloud.

> It works like this: your device downloads the current model, improves it by learning from data on your phone, and then summarizes the changes as a small focused update. Only this update to the model is sent to the cloud, using encrypted communication, where it is immediately averaged with other user updates to improve the shared model. All the training data remains on your device, and no individual updates are stored in the cloud.

> https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collabo...

awesome, thanks for sharing.

The historical problem with a lot of these companies hasn’t been whether or not they keep data, but the lack of transparency and control given to end users about what data they keep and what it’s used for.

You should be allowed to make trade offs between privacy and convenience where it’s available, but it should be transparent exactly what tradeoff you’re making.

Not minority. I love this stuff too, I can find project links I saved years ago by searching my own history. I like Timeline on Google maps and seeing where I've been. Check out the movie The Circle.

Yeah, Timeline is the only thing that I find useful and wish to keep forever. Other people use photos to remember places they've been. I use Timeline. I like it because it works all the time. I rarely take selfies, because Timeline does it for me. I don't even have to take the phone out of my pocket when I'm tourist-ing.

Even with their infinite retention, I've been annoyed recently at YouTube recommending videos I've already watched. Without the red bar beneath the thumbnail, I might get caught in an 18-month loop of watching the same videos forever...

>I might get caught in an 18-month loop of watching the same videos forever...

sounds like a feature (for them) to me. why bother showing your users new videos when they're perfectly content watching the same old videos over and over again? Better than not showing anything and them leaving your site because there's no more relevant/new videos.

Seriously. It's not like people don't rewatch things all the time. They already know you liked the video enough to sit through the whole thing and it costs them nothing to suggest it again.

If they delete your data, it's likely that still happens, just without the red bar...

Try this...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-watch...

iOS remembers that stuff too. It just stores it device-side and doesn't use it for advertising.

Edit: Turns out it doesn't actually provide a location history visualization like GMaps does - it only shows "significant locations" - but to my knowledge there's no technical reason it couldn't do so

You don't have to save all the user's location data to a central server for the local device to remember your common navigation request endpoints.

You don't have to send any data to a central server at all.

I always find it fascinating when you show up at a restaurants and google says you were last here 4 years ago.

Honestly, I agree with you.

I believe we should have control over our own data, and it looks like Google is giving us that.

So I'm glad we can choose to enable/disable this ourselves.

I would like it if only it was opt in, temporary, and the data usage was strictly limited in scope. I only ever find that combination in open source

The feature is fine by itself and potentially very useful. But it’s not good if that data is mined and sold for profit without the user knowing what’s happening. For example if I could set up it in a way that the data is streamed into a database I control access to, things would be great.

Google maps timeline allowed me to remain free. Though I explicitly opted into it for this reason.

You know what computers can do for us if Google wanted to respect the spirit of Asimov's First Law? They could do all the things you like with your data while NOT doing want you don't like.

You wouldn't be in the minority if you thought of it this way.

> I know I am in the minority, but I like the feature of Google letting me know when I've been somewhere in the past or if I have been to a site. I understand the trade offs in terms or my privacy (...)

There is no trade off because you can have both! It's just that Google doesn't offer this.

I am very privacy focused and I do like this feature. I like it so much that I've cobbled together a bunch of tools to do essentially the same thing without relying on Google. I have a program on my phone that is always running and capturing my location and saving it to gpx files in a specific folder. That folder is synced to my desktop (directly over SyncThing), and I can evaluate the files easily with Python to see where I've been at any given time. I usually don't do anything with the gpx files, but there have been situations where I needed to know how long I was in a particular place over a longer period of time (for work) where it was incredibly useful to have the data.

One thing I've noticed is that Google must obviously do a lot of filtering and correction to the data, because my data is nowhere as clean as I've seen on Gmaps, and I haven't found a way to replicate that in any way. My data is totally sufficient for whenever I've needed it, but it's not perfect. The most I'll do is filter out data that is ridiculously out of bounds from what the data directly before and after say, but I wish there were a better solution (and if there is, I haven't found it yet).

I think one big problem with Google collecting all this data is that you don't own it. You can't choose to use this location data to solve your problems in a way that you'd prefer. Instead, you have to hope that Google has covered your needs for the data and if not, tough luck, you're stuck doing a lot of manual work.

One way to do it will be to get OpenStreetMap at least the road and path database. The quality of it vary at lot by cities/countries. The easy way, is to set a reasonable buffer for you GPX points (dunno, let's say 10m at least) and check if they intersect with the roads/path/street they connect to. It is a bit like your way of filtering (and probably a bit like Google must do it : Check around infrastructure and filter based on the probability to be on that road/path/poi between the two points before and after.)

If you want to go the extra miles, I remember this talk of Ilya Zverev "Hundred thousand rides a day"[1] seen at FOSDEM 2019.

[1] https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/geo_gpxtraces...

You can get similar functionality by mapping the pictures you've taken using their coordinate metadata. Google is even working on this for Google Photos:

https://9to5google.com/2020/06/11/google-photos-explore-map/

In general, I think "privacy as a right" is a better approach for society. If people want to opt out of privacy, they should have that ability, but that should be a choice.

Not everyone snaps a selfie every time they go to the bathroom, so no, a lot of us can’t get the same functionality by mapping photos.

That is not to say your device can’t keep a location history without sending it to someone’s server.

You have a very narrow view of how people use smartphone cameras.

Want to remember your e.g. hotel room number, parking garage floor/zone, or bus stop? Snap. Backup your plane ticket? Snap it. Record the wiring before an upgrade? Snap. To input your dietary nutrition later? Food picture. Part/model number? That's a picture. See behind something? Etc, etc.

The fact you only think smartphone cameras are for "bathroom selfies" (?) says more about you than whomever you're trying to disparage, because you're obviously under-utilizing an extremely valuable tool in your pocket because you've put it into a tiny box and dismissed it.

Huh? You claim you can get the same functionality of location tracking by just taking photos of everywhere you've ever gone, and oefrha said they don't want to take a picture at every place they've ever gone (like a bathroom). I don't think his take is that narrow or regressive.

When I go to a restaurant I don't like taking pictures of the food, or pictures of the restaurant. I like enjoying the food and the company I'm with - but maybe I'm regressive.

“Bathroom selfies” is just a tongue-in-cheek way to refer to frequent photo takers. If you’re somehow offended, I apologize, what the hell.

I don’t need to remember my hotel room number or parking garage zone or bus stop every day. Even when I do I don’t need a photo, sorry, got a pretty good memory, and a digital notebook too. Under-utilize, sure, whatever, it’s my fucking phone and I didn’t ask you to judge. The fact is me and a whole host of people I know who don’t snap photos frequently enough (yeah, been talking to quite some friends about how we’ve basically been spending a fair bit of money on cameras that we don’t use very much) won’t get “the same functionality” as you were claiming, so I hope you’re not on a design panel for something like this where people who don’t conform to your expected usage pattern just get a FU.

Also: who the hell keep those parking garage photos around?

> Also: who the hell keep those parking garage photos around?

Storage is cheap. Having the image for some currently-undefined later use can be invaluable. Never using it later is cheaper than the opportunity cost of knowing it was there but now isn't.

> Also: who the hell keep those parking garage photos around?

I do! Although, that's because I don't take a lot of pictures, and I look at them even less, so they just accumulate. But it's rarely become a space issue (because I'm not taking many), so whatever. The act of taking the picture seals the memory, so I don't usually have to look.

Consent is a big deal. It really grinds my gears when companies (or people) try to be sneaky by treating silence as consent.