I'm not sure why people are surprised. Google has been downright evil for quite a while now. They do this in all their products, down to the point of intentionally crippling them.
For instance, since Android 5, the standard contact app doesn't allow you to modify a contact which is not synced with an account. Why even do this? The list of tracking settings that can be turned permanently on, but only temporarily off is ever growing. At some point, you just give up because it's such a silly waste of time. Google knows this very well.
Almost all the google websites, except google search, work badly on anything except chrome. I mean, google groups is rotten already on chrome, but just try it on firefox for the full experience.
Maps (the website) used to be a game-changer in the past. It was insanely fast. Nowdays I hate it. The UI is just horrid. On Firefox it just misbehaves constantly. I only use it for streetview, and still I'm appalled at how badly it has evolved.
They are pushing still impressive libraries and tools. But there's not a single of their products I still like to use.
A bit of a side note, but we should avoid saying things like "not sure why people are surprised" or similar, like in a few other comments.
It is true that Google has done this several times over, but we shouldn't normalize it as nothing new, move on. We should still call it out each and every time we see it, even if we are repeating ourselves. Also, what might be obvious to our community is not to those outside, which in the end are the majority.
Comments that say "this is not a surprise" have a strong subtext of "I told you so" and "I knew this all along, but you didn't", whether the author realizes it or not.
They're usually made so the authors feel better about themselves, but they have a very negative effect on the rest of the community reading them as it gives them a sense of powerlessness.
I always try to counteract such comments with 2 arguments:
1) it may not be news to you, but it's probably news for a lot of other people. Most people have their own real-world issues to think about, they don't wonder about for hours every day on what Google may be doing against them while utilizing Google's services. Most people are trusting and think company X (or their government) "wouldn't do evil thing Y" to them. Of course, they're usually wrong. Company X/government would absolutely do that evil thing Y to them if they are not vigilant or it benefits them monetarily or otherwise.
2) Something is still news if it happens again or it gets escalated to a higher degree of aggressiveness from that company X/government. Should we all hear about something evil Google has done once and be done with it? Then make our choice whether or not to trust them and use their services forever? Of course not. These things need a "build-up" period before a decision is made. This is why the expression "breaking the camel's back" exists, and it's what happened now with Chrome 69 and these new issues coming up. It's only now that people have said "Okay, are you f-king serious now, Google?! I've let your shit slide in the past, but no longer!"
> We should still call it out each and every time we see it, even if we are repeating ourselves.
Seems like the right response would be to stop using the problem products. If you think you can't afford to, I hope you like Google. This is in no way surprising.
Yep. I’m not using Google for anything anymore and have to say, the inconvenience is very minor. The rest of the web still syncs fine (IMAP, CalDAV etc.)
Only YouTube is irreplaceable, and you need an account to save videos and subscribe to channels. Luckily a throwaway Google account with BS info and a temporary backup e-mail address is easily created every 3 months.
The new Gmail, Adwords, and Analytics run horribly slow in FF, so I have a separate Chromium portable installation simply for those pages. It's so annoying that Google only cares how their own products run in Chrome.
I can confirm that Google Ads and G Suite support reps ask you "what browser are you using?" as one of their first queries. The response in my head is always "why the fuck would that matter?" but what comes out of my mouth is usually "Chrome" even when it's Firefox because my issues have never, ever been browser related.
Here's how it should go:
Me: Hey support, feature X isn't working for me.
Google: What browser are you using?
Me: Firefox
Google: Ok, thanks for reporting a bug in our software. We'll address the issue with Firefox and get back to you.
> The new Gmail, Adwords, and Analytics run horribly slow in FF, so I have a separate Chromium portable installation simply for those pages. It's so annoying that Google only cares how their own products run in Chrome.
Reminds me of when Microsoft used to optimize it's products for Windows and other OSs were an afterthought...
That might be but I'm using dotnet core and vscode on Linux now and except autocomplete being weaker than I'm used to in Java and config files being a mess, -both of which are true on Windows as well, I haven't found a single thing to complain about.
And while I have stopped trusting MS (again) after their recent browser failure it seems they are very much trying to sell software and services on all platforms.
I feel the same way, and it makes me sad. I was so bullish on Google when I first got a job and investing my savings, bought into the company when it was still Google. I thought the rebrand to Alphabet was a good idea like everything Google, though their abandonment of 'Don't be Evil' planted the first seed of doubt. What made that doubt grow was that I use Youtube as a customer and... well. I'm sure you've seen the same decline.
I finally divested this Spring after giving Google six months to come out with something that would reawaken my old optimism. Besides coming out with a mean go engine, all the news out of Google in that time was depressing.
I'm frankly surprised at how easily a true believer like myself could do a one-eighty in their opinion of the company. I know there's a possibility that they turn this thing around and I look foolish, but they'd have to do that without my cheerleading.
OP here on a different device, a lot of people have been asking about my beef with Youtube, so I'll try and put what I noticed in a timeline.
1. Youtube comes out with the promise of revolutionizing video, I immediately love it because of its idiosyncrasy and unpredictability. Despite low production values, the videos are varied enough that I can always find something interesting and the algorithm is quite good at suggesting things I'll like.
2. Google acquires youtube, whether because of more money or improving the algorithm, the offerings get even better
3. Youtube merges with google+.
4. Youtube hires new management and begins modeling itself after the old cable companies whose lunch it had 'till now been happily eating.
5. Youtube's algorithms progressively play it safer with their recommendations, the youtube personalities I follow either become more mainstream (Joe Rogan) or increasingly complain of being arbitrarily demonetized (Phillip Defranco).
7. Present day
If you use Youtube as a substitute for television, it might not look like a decline. But I find television generally boring, and Youtube seemed to promise a general improvement. With a better algorithm for suggesting videos and a less hostile relationship to creators it still could be, but for years now it's been moving in the opposite direction on both counts.
Can you elaborate on the problem with YouTube? Other people have mentioned it too here. I use it pretty frequently and it seems to work the way it always did, more or less. Hell, they don't even bug me with original content recommendations the way they did briefly (and the way Netflix continues to).
The recommendation algorithm seems to radicalise people politically. There is some research on this - Zeynep Tufekci is the best communicator of it. Overview in the New York Times.
There are flaws in the algorithm - 1) for scaling reasons it doesn't run full deep learning over everything, but uses a simple popular-only algorithm first. 2) it is optimised for next video watch time, which is a very shallow measure of what the user really wants long term.
Interesting, I haven't ever used YouTube mobile web (despite generally preferring to use web to native when possible) because I've never found it up to snuff, presumably for technical reasons. I wasn't aware the quality had declined. Thanks for the info!
Separate from the recommendation problems, which seem to vary by person, the site has gotten substantially worse for mobile players, to the point I've almost entirely stopped using it:
- The mobile page does not allow quality selection, and always selects quality options far below what would be supported by your connection (It sometimes drops to 240p, and I have not seen it select anything above 480p, yet can easily stream 1080p on the desktop site or other players).
- The mobile page does not respect the "Request Desktop Site" option, even in Chrome - and neither does their own "Desktop Site" link; Both still use the abysmal mobile player, and only by enabling both can you use a high-quality video player.
- Anything 60fps has issues on my mobile device, while other web players are fine - even 720p60 lags, while I can stream 1080p60 elsewhere.
I uninstalled the app years ago when it requested additional permissions with an update, and implemented a 30-second delay (with countdown!) before launching until I updated. YouTube is no longer the pinnacle of web video, and have not been for years.
That's a good point - I pretty much always use cellular, so I wonder if the quality cap for the mobile player is there as a misguided attempt to reduce data usage. Would make it more understandable, if no less irritating.
I agree that if you leave it playing it will go off on a tangent, but I find the list of recommended videos along the right side to be _very_ good. It really does list things I would want to watch based off past viewing and what's currently playing. I find it to be the most useful (only useful?) recommendation engine in any product.
It's good at finding things you'd watch, but not necessarily things you should be watching. Ex-youtube employees said that the algorithm is trained to keep you engaged and watching videos, so the recommended videos keep getting more and more extreme. This isn't really an issue with music because it just ends up at more niche artists, but if you watch a political video and keep following its recommendations, eventually you end up wathcing extremist left/right wing propaganda. Sure, it's something you don't mind watching once you get there, but it's not necessarily something you would have wanted to watch before the youtube algorithm led you there. Again, this is how the algorithm was described by an ex-youtube employee, not just a casual user.
In addition to those technical options, they have been substantially reducing revenue to producers and their algorithms have been shifting popular videos out of visible areas. Often popular producers will see sudden losses in their incomes.
Videos are not enough to sustain, they're like apps; a part of a larger revenue model. This disincentivizes smaller, interesting producers and pushes the platform to be more like network television was, with handfuls of large, conventionally attractive people.
I don't find it terrible at all now, but i hope it doesn't keep going in this direction. It's currently a wonderful resource for people who want to do all kinds of things from home and garden improvements, to cooking, improve mental and physical health, etc. Far closer to the utopian dreams of early internet enthusiasts than most other sites.
I completely agree on the Maps experience. These days I'm constantly annoyed by it. When I search for a place the map jumps around like crazy, causing me to lose track of my current focus area and my points of interest from previous search. Not to mention the hiccups on 3rd party browsers.
There was a post on HN a while back which compares Google Maps with traditional paper maps. It had a lot of insights I wish I could find it.
I use maps heavily for restaurant recommendations and tracking. This involves staring and tagging places all over Chicago. Maps will barely run on my phone at this point. I expect it to crash once or twice while I'm using it. I know I use the product in a memory heavily way but it's still very frustrating because I don't expect this to ever be addressed.
> Maps (the website) used to be a game-changer in the past. It was insanely fast. Nowdays I hate it. The UI is just horrid. On Firefox it just misbehaves constantly.
No kidding there. If you leave it alone for a few minutes (that is, not scrolling, zooming, clicking anything), it will give you a Black Window of Death.
Maps is insanely laggy on my Xiaomi Redmi note 4x. THis is with the performance kernel configuration on with GPU running 100%. Its just horribly optimised and has so much clutter now.
Does anyone know a decent alternative? (please don't say waze)
I've been using OSMAnd+ for a while now and it's awesome. Offline maps, navigation with voice prompts, pretty much everything you expect, and it doesn't spam your location to a third party. Yay!
I am constantly and genuinely confused about why people care just so damn much about other people's privacy.
What is it about privacy that bothers people so much more than the myriad of other violations that take place across the world, and what makes the fact that corporations are committing this sin so much worse than when individuals do it?
But the funny part is Google keep your saved addresses. It only block the access.
If you have your home and/or
work address set in Gmaps, and you disable all tracking in myactivity.google.com. The address will disappear and GMaps will invite you to reactive App and Web tracking. If you do it, your saved addresses will reappear. This is slightly dodgy.
It is punitive. They are (and are within their rights to) withholding value because you aren't giving them what they want, which is mineable activity information.
I notice that there are always cartoons of happy users getting additional useful features from their services when tracking is enbled, but never cute cartoons of the other actors extracting value based upon advertising etc. Truth In Condescending Explain-o-Toons, now! etc.
I completely understand, it's in their right, absolutely.
However, once you disable the tracking, the UI no longer show the address and even say "Set location" under Home address and Work address. This let you think that Google doesn't have this information, which is false. This makes me feel like Google got info about me and I can't use it. I find this part dodgy. Once you disable a setting it should be clearer that data is not deleted.
Sounds more like a UI bug/oversight than intentional deception.
Google Maps UI has a feature to display your set home address, once you turn off tracking or whatever it no longer has access to that home address in its UI so the default state is to ask you to set one.
If that's the case then the real problem would be that the address data is siloed off somewhere in your Google account under maps and isn't accessible to be changed/cleared from your general account settings.
I disagree. When they say "you can only use this feature by opting in our programs that allow you to track us". A lot of people would think that most Google tracking doesn't happen when you don't opt in.
This example shows that that most likely isn't true, since when you disable that setting, they keep all data anyway.
I think it's more of a UX dark pattern where they act like "we only track you if you specifically allow us", but if you don't allow them they will track you anyway, they just do it all behind the scenes.
> It is punitive. They are (and are within their rights to) withholding value because you aren't giving them what they want, which is mineable activity information.
What I don't understand is when we started expecting _anything other than this_ in a commercial transaction. Google's whole thing is they give out services in exchange for information.
There is another interesting thing. You need to allow google tracking if you want to do searches in google maps. If you block it maps will crash. Turns out it needs a proper country code to work, regardless of where you're searching.
Also of note: On the maps app, saved home and work locations are unavailable any time you have the location function disabled. Allow maps access to your location, and suddenly all saved locations are once again visible.
In a way stuff like this and the recent news that they don't delete their own cookies from Chrome when deleting all cookies could be good news. It seems to become clearer and clearer that Google is getting desperate to squeeze more and more data out of people in order to sell that data. Hope they will lose their good guy image because now they are just another big greedy company like all others. Nothing wrong with that though. It's just good for people to realize that.
Why on earth would you think Google would sell its most valuable asset? Google does not sell user data, it builds on it. The more data they get, the better and better their AI will develop.
Looking back, when they announced they were going to become an AI-first company these sort of drastic data-grabs and privacy issues should have been apparent. But hindsight is 20/20...
You know what they meant. Google is milking users for all data they can derive from their activity and creating value from that. It's not so much the use of the data that's the problem as the lengths they go to to create that data.
I recall someone from one of the major tech companies talking about how their users "emit data", implying the data just happens and their role is purely passive with the users practically handing them that data. That's a perverse way of looking at it when you contrast it with e.g. the GDPR's premise that data belongs to the user and companies need (withdrawable) consent to collect and process it.
In the US tech companies don't collect user data, users "emit" it -- even if the only reason the data is "emitted" is because the tech is actively spying on its users' every move.
That may be an explanation, but IMO there's a huge difference between the two, and putting both concepts under the same wording is dangerous. Selling data means surrendering any and every control over it, and if from a user (trust) perspective there's no difference to offering a service based on data, companies will choose the more lucrative one.
I agree that there is a difference. But in both cases we have a company sucking up as much data as it can and even if it doesn't sell the data today they still have it and can decide to sell it tomorrow. Or be forced by governments.
There's a difference. But in practice the difference doesn't matter.
As a user you expect a reasonable level of privacy unless the software explicitly requests your consent for providing certain information or explicitly asks you to provide that information manually. If the software then hands that information off to a third party you expect that only to happen with explicit consent.
The problem in this case is that Google isn't interested in consent. It tries to get as much information as it can without needing to ask for consent and when it does ask for consent it's through coercion by tying that consent request to actions that are not reflective of the scope of the request ("You want to save your home location? Okay but in order to do that we need to be able to track your every move forever").
That's arguably far more malicious than explicitly saying "please let us share this info with company XYZ so we can continue offering this service for free". That most companies selling data to third parties aren't so explicit about it is irrelevant -- this is just about the claim that "selling data" is inherently more malicious than what Google is doing.
That said, no, selling does not mean "surrendering any and every control over it". GDPR and friends specifically address that by stating that the human being the data is about continues to own that data and can withdraw consent at any time (at any depth of sharing).
There is a difference, and in practice as in theory, it matters a lot. You can delete your data on your Google account - that gets rid of your data. Deleting that data after it was sold to 3rd parties is like trying to delete your drunk party picture from the internet. Sure, you can try to invoke GDPR, but that's going to be hard when the data was sold to some Chinese company that doesn't operate financially in Europe.
You don't seem to comprehend the fact that in the scope of the GDPR they can't sell to "some Chinese company" without your consent.
If you can only explain why selling is worse by creating a scenario where the selling is done without consent or in an equally malicious/shady way, that doesn't demonstrate that selling is inherently worse.
Selling isn't worse. Selling without regard for a user's rights is bad. But Google is already engaging in abusive behavior as far as users' rights are concerned.
Also, I know this is hard to understand if you're not used to real privacy laws, but if a company sells your data and you invoke your rights against the company, it's the company's responsibility to go after whoever they sold the data to, not yours.
I think this is a critical point of misunderstanding:
> if a company sells your data and you invoke your rights against the company, it's the company's responsibility to go after whoever they sold the data to, not yours.
Can you point me to more details on this? I have my doubts about it.
As a user your contract is with the company you give the data to. That's simply how contracts work. If the contract says they can give that data to someone else, that's fine. If it doesn't, they can't. That shouldn't be surprising.
The GDPR treats personal information as property of the user. Even if access to and processing of that data is permitted by the user, it remains the property of the user. If the company is permitted to also pass that data on, they're still responsible for ensuring the data is handled appropriately.
I'm not sure what you are doubting. The GDPR is (in)famous for this.
This is why GDPR compliance makes it nearly impossible to hand over information to third parties who aren't GDPR compliant and why EU companies are nervous about working with Google and other US companies (because the Privacy Shield is not any more trustworthy than Safe Harbor which died an extremely swift death).
As far as the user concerned there's no difference between you "selling" their data and you handing it over to a third party as a data processor. You can't "sell" it because it's not yours, you can just take money for handing it over -- but that's between you and the third party, the user isn't part of that transaction.
Think of it this way: users can't sell you their data (they literally can't) so the data isn't your property. You can't sell what isn't yours, so the data you hand over to a third party is still owned by the user who gave it to you with the (GDPR-backed) expectation that you're retaining the control necessary to comply with their requests.
FWIW I'm not sure how this works for third-party tracking (e.g. Facebook widgets). Google Analytics avoids this by requiring compliant websites to enable IP anonymization (which supposedly should be sufficient) but liability still resides with the website owner (and the Data Protection Agreement makes this perfectly clear).
As you want sources, here's what a quick Google yields:
> Under the GDPR, EU citizens must be given the easy ability to withdraw their consent, often called "the right to be forgotten". If consent is withdrawn, those data subjects have the right to have their personal data erased and no longer used for processing by the data collector, and by any other entity who has ever used or purchased that data.
So in other words: "selling" user data is no different from handing the data to a data processor.
The point of the GDPR is that personal information is something that taints your product's data and therefore something you want to avoid. Selling it to dodgy companies that abuse the heck out of it is exactly what the GDPR is meant to combat.
Unfortunately none of your links referred to the actual legislation and only provide summaries and interpretations, but Article 17 (Right to erasure), Section 2 states:
Where the controller has made the personal data public and is obliged pursuant to paragraph 1 to erase the
personal data, the controller, taking account of available technology and the cost of implementation, shall take
reasonable steps, including technical measures, to inform controllers which are processing the personal data that the
data subject has requested the erasure by such controllers of any links to, or copy or replication of, those personal data.
So there's an obligation to inform. Which makes sense: Assume you (with consent of the user) sell data to some company, you have to forward them the request of said user to be forgotten. But you have no authority over that company. You can report them to any and every authority if they ignore or actively refuse your request, but you as a company have no authority over them. Particularly if they don't operate within the reach of the European authorities, there's little you can do. And that's what I mean with "You surrender control of the data once you sell it".
Agreed. I didn't mind ReCaptcha when it was helping digitise books because it felt like there was some kind of social benefit beyond padding Google's bottom line (even if that wasn't actually true).
But now when I'm asked to select all the squares containing road signs or storefronts or whatever it feels like I'm being forced to work for Google for free just so I can go about my day.
>Why on earth would you think Google would sell its most valuable asset?
It's such a simple concept, and yet I see people on Hacker News constantly making this mistake. It's as if people are too addicted to outrage culture to even consider the arguments anymore.
Perhaps because it's such verifiable information that makes it rather unique in value when you have people who are able to mathematically predict how those verified people might perform based on behavior history. If you then couple it with "spin" you end up encouraging large amounts of income to be created upon it. Much like predicting the future since you effectively are predicting the future.
"Sell your data" is the widely-accepted common term for the business model of a company that analyzes user data in unfathomable detail in order to charge advertiser Johns more money when that company pimps out their users' minds like sex traffickers pimp out the bodies of prostitutes.
Google sells user data. They profit amassing data. AI is a nascent technology that Google will happily lead. But until AI is ready, Google will continue to happily sell data - your data, my data, anyone who touches the internet in fact.
I'm not sure I'd call them desperate looking at the valuation, 20+% revenue growth, and the fact that EU keeps pushing legislation that increasingly cements their dominance against any potential competition in the region.
I want to be able to quickly input my home address into google map but don’t want to turn on google search history so I had to resort to an imperfect solution: use the “text replacement” feature to expand a unique short phrase like “hmad” to the full home address when typed into the google maps search bar.
This! They used to allow you to, but now I don't save my home address and can't use a lot of Google features because they want you to enable activity tracking. WTF... why do I need all my activity to be tracked to use basic features?
My favorite part has been them pretending they no longer store your address, but when search results on the web places a pin they somehow manage to suggest it's an "x minute drive" from home... Which is it Google? Do you have the address saved or not? You forget where my address is only when it's inconvenient and coercive?
I've had the same results when I've explicitly not shared location.
I will also use Google maps to find the route to some restaurant, turn off the GPS because I don't like being tracked and it's no too far, then head to the restaurant within 10-60 minutes of when I checked the GPS. If I have wifi on I will invariably get asked to rate the restaurant within 5 minutes of arriving there, regardless of how much time has passed since I checked the route.
I currently use a Pixel phone, but based on the experiences I've had, I will be switching to an iPhone in the hope that I get tracked less. After switching to Firefox and ddg as my daily drivers, I just need to get off of Gmail and I will be google free
The location option in the android quick menu. I was unaware there was any other way to even turn off the GPS. I assumed it was wifi since it seems to not happen when the wifi is turned off.
It would have at least been corporate speak to have an option called GPS that people assumed was location tracking and was not. Having an option called "Location" that does not stop your phone from tracking your location when turned off has crossed the line into fraudulent behavior for me
All they need to do is see what wifi connections I can reach on my phone. In any urban area you can easily reach 50+ wifi connections standing in one spot. If google knows X wifi connection corresponds to Y range of a physical location because of someone else left their location and wifi on, then they can tell that if I can reach 4 or 5 different wifi connections at once then I must be at a certain address.
It's like browser fingerprinting. It doesn't take very many bits of entropy before you are identifiable
Yeah, I know about using wifi for location. But I think turning the android location setting off disables that (in addition to disabling gps and bluetooth location). These pages indicate that:
I'd have given you that as a fair point if it hadn't said "x minute drive - home" next to the pin while I was checking a store's location on my work laptop at work (while signed in to my personal account)
Are you saying google's looking at your current location? That sounds to me like it's saying the store is an x minute drive from your home. It says nothing about your current location (work).
"Deleted the address, kept the coordinate pair" ;)
The true reason is probably a little less cheeky: keeping track of copies is hard. And here we end or digression into apologetics and return to criticism, ensuring correctness in keeping track of copies is surely not a very high priority.
If you download your maps data from Google you will see the address is still saved as it was before (in json format).
So the address is still there, they are just actively blocking you from making use of it in most of their apps (but evidently not all of them, as you noted above).
Yes, a simple take it or leave it situation. There are alternatives. I don't get people getting mad because a private corp is doing something with their own software.
Can you uninstall Google Maps from an android phone?
It's because that private corp is so big that it is starting to control much of the internet and devices so this is an issue very much in the public purview.
It's not as simple as take it or leave it. The corp in question spends billions to insinuate itself into your life, make you dependant, eat competition, and then you can take it, but you definitely can't leave it.
Yes, that starts with "leaving it". Though some found my comment above irritating, the more people use these apps or try to make it "their way", these corps won't go anywhere.
Yes, either you take it, or leave it. Imagine everyone leaving google today. They can't make money. People made them rich, people can take them down. If genpop doesn't understand, you have to find your own ways to navigate thru the internet because google won't go away anytime soon.
I would love to hear your opinion about how to take google down, without making people "leave it".
You're right, but the percentage of Google users aware of how evil they are is probably less than 0.5%.
An overwhelmingly large percentage of users won't care about what could happen as long as nothing happens directly affecting them. Mass surveillance companies like Google, Facebook know this and take advantage of it.
Technology activists aren't strong enough to start a wave that would lead to people abandoning these evil corps..
Also, as others mentioned, they eat up all competition.. so there aren't really any good options left apart from Google products in areas they compete.
"You're right, but the percentage of Google users aware of how evil they are is probably less than 0.5%."
Not unaware of, just don't care. Most people aren't persnickety, anal, border line autistic nerds so Google/Facebook knowing who they know or where they are, when they're using software to tell their friends where they are or are using maps to literally work out where they are right now is just not an issue.
If you really don't want to be tracked you shouldn't have a smartphone, not worry yourself with what Vn+0.1 of an app is doing which Vn wasn't.
> Most people aren't persnickety, anal, border line autistic nerds so Google/Facebook knowing who they know or where they are, when they're using software to tell their friends where they are or are using maps to literally work out where they are right now is just not an issue.
Please don't insult people for caring about privacy.
Not "caring about privacy"; having retarded notions that you can walk around with a tracking device like one might expect a criminal be forced to carry and somehow still have privacy by deleting this cookie or logging out of that service.
It depends on how the system is configured. IIRC custom roms need extra steps to get any official Google apps, so it's certainly possible to configure most phones to not have Maps installed. That said, I think most OEM phones do ship with Google's suite of apps configured as "system" apps that really a few more hope to jump through and could potentially result in instability if any OEM designed system on that phone has a built in assumption about the presence of Maps.
tl;dr: Yes, but you might have to jump through some hoops
> I don't get people getting mad because a private corp is doing something with their own software.
Maybe it's because they created a situation where it's nearly impossible to avoid "their" software because it's integrated into the product the user actually paid for.
If you buy an Android phone you don't buy bare metal. That's not how Android phones are marketed and it's not how Google wants Android phones to be perceived. An Android phone is a device with Google Play, Google Maps and Google Search integrated into the operating system and providing core services. That's how Google wants you to think about Android and it's in their best interest for you to do so.
From a customer point of view, Google Maps is part of the Android device's core functionality. From a marketer's point of view, it's the same. From Google's point of view, it's also the same.
But although Google Maps itself has great offline functionality and in theory only needs online access for map data, traffic information and optimised routing, Google plays bait and switch by demanding you consent to being spied on in order to actually use it.
Sure, it's their software and they can do what they want but customer rights exist, privacy rights exist and competition law exists. They're being intentionally deceitful and maliciously abuse their position to coerce users into giving consent for providing Google with far more data than they need to provide the service.
You are so right. I am just frustrated that they reached global ubiquity and treated user data as a for-profit product rather than a for-good application.
In the last 18 months, Google transitioned from being a 'build products people will use to enhance their daily lives' company (with Google profiting immensely but for the enhancement of humankind) to a company that is nonchalant in the sale of human data, often to the detriment of their users' experience
It’s not just the past 18 months. Let’s not forget the “force Google+ down everyone’s throats and make every Google product worse by needlessly rerouting important functionality through G+”
What choices? And I mean ones that people would actually use or know about? Apple Maps is basically it, and it's only one one platform. Bing Maps...maybe? But Google has an effective monopoly on consumer based maps.
Ask someone in the US who/what "HERE" is, or ask an app developer what mapping API they are using and if HERE is even remotely on the radar. Because, you'll quickly learn that brand penetration, despite operating for a long period of time, is basically 0 in the US. I have tried to implement Bing and OpenStreetMap but customers immediately complain that we're not using Google. Why? Because Google has brilliantly tied marketing of business/AdWords with their map bundle. There's no escape.
maps.me works pretty well, they use open street map data augmented with ad based reccomendations. You download maps so you don’t need wifi to navigate. Best for walking or biking directions, getting better for driving
> I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.
Kinda changes the whole context from "secrets are for bad people" to "you shouldn't use Google with anything really secret, because government".
I'm really dismayed that a lot of good people and orgs keep misrepresenting this quote for many years by cutting it out of the context. This doesn't mean that Google is automatically your friend, btw.
Thanks for posting the rest of the quote. I'd remove my comment, but I can't because there are replies. I still think that the company fundamentally doesn't believe in privacy. I will remove the quote at least.
The reality is that I don’t want a search engine in my phone.
Maybe it wasn’t the case when he said that quote, but the story here is they’re trying very hard to blur the line between their services and the device itself, in some very awkward ways that don’t make a lot of sense except except beyond their own business needs
> The reality is that I don’t want a search engine in my phone.
For what it's worth, I've disabled the 'Google' app on my Android phone for a few weeks now, and have experienced no problems. I don't use Google for search, and I already had Chrome disabled too, so all it did was take up some memory and battery, now freed up. All I lost was an extra screen on the mobile "desktop" (which I mostly only accidentally ended up in anyway), and some (generally useless) notifications about "things I might like".
They’re creating a need, but that doesn’t mean they’re creating a market opportunity. Google has taught everyone that all this stuff should be free, and that’s no accident: it’s a deliberate strategy to suck up all available oxygen away from potential competitors. Someone (Ben Thompson maybe?) described Google’s strategy as not just building a moat, but scorching the earth for hundreds of miles in every direction from their castle. It’s unbelievably difficult to build a direct competitor to Google unless you’re starting from a position of huge capitalization (and even that’s no guarantee... I don’t exactly see techies flocking to Bing after they complain about Google)
This is so fucking true. If anything you can see this in the real marketplace. Consumers have become so averse to paying for software because they see gmail, google maps, google keep, docs and photos as available for “free” - meaning they have to part with something from their life but not the cash, so why the hell pay for anything else?
Even worse than undermining expectations about the price of software, since google's general use apps (gmail, docs, etc.) are Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS[1]), Google is also undermining the basic concept of buying a copy of software. Even as an intangible good, it's easy to understand the value of owning a copy that you get to keep and use on your own terms. When the same software is only available as a service, availability issues and other risks that outside your control make the service less valuable.
Why should someone want to buy software when most of the software they see and use regularly are unreliable services?
I think the main barrier is that people are generally unwilling to pay for these products now so it's hard to fund things with anything besides ads. If someone finds other ways to fund it I could see it but for now even with them vulnerable it would be hard to compete with them if you also were funded via ads.
The thing is, you don't only need an alternative for the alarm app if you want to get rid of GApps.
The hidden costs of apps Google gives you for "free" is probably above $1,000. I guess the majority would give away their privacy for that amount these days.
Do you find it likely that Google is earning over $1,000 from each user? How are they getting that? I'd say the real cost is probably a couple of orders of magnitude lower.
This makes absolutely no sense. How is bunch of very basic userspace programs cost >$1000? Google doesn't even make its own kernel, they just make the userspace. For reference OSX and Windows are much cheaper than $1000 and most linux distros are for gratis and all these systems include more complex programs than a basic alarm app, calculator etc.
Alarm apps don't need tracking. Asking Google Assistant to set an alarm needs tracking.
I wish there was a SaaS application which provided assistant capabilities by a monthly subscription. You can see all the data stored, you own the data the service just creates models to enable use. And you could stop the subscription which wipes all the data including the models. Perhaps some startup founder is reading this?
Yes, snips is pretty well known in the maker community. They're adding blockchain tech to double down on the whole privacy aspect of it, it seems. Wonder if they can break through to the mainstream.
The problem is, how does the saas prove to you that you own the data and privacy is not violated? I see no way of doing it unless the customer owns the server.
TOS/Contract. Something like Dropbox. You do believe you own the data on Dropbox right? This is something Microsoft can do as an Azure service to counter Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant maybe.
They pay for similar services when they buy an Apple device. That’s why Apple Maps exists: to give people reasons to buy their hardware. iWork is free and not ad supported when you buy a Mac. Yet, when you buy a Chromebook, are Google Services ad-and-tracking free? Apple has proven that you can do “free” and respect privacy. Is ad-targeting/tracking happening when you use Google Services on a Pixel?
I don't defend Google long slide into hard-core-stalkerdom, but there is a slight price difference between a Macbook Air and a Chromebook. Apple uses hardware income to support software dev costs; Google uses tracking and ads to pay for same and keep device cost low.
I switched my assistant app to Cortana, if you can believe that.
It works well enough, and doesn't require every permission to be enabled. It'll work fine with whatever you give it. (Within reason. It can't give you information about your calendar unless you give it that permission, etc.)
Reminders and such get synced to my PC.
There are, of course, many holes in its functionality... hoping it gets better. Don't know if there's a better assistant app for Android at this point.
I agree. I'm not concerned with Google's vulnerability, but for most of my own usage, it's pretty low hanging fruit to recreate the basics. Will be interesting to see how things progress.
When I had my Pixel I remember not being able to save reminders or events with the assisstant unless I enabled Google Now Cards, which shoved advertisements and bullshit articles onto my home screen
I remember using Google now cards but stopped after they decided they needed my full history to make them work. I guess I was lucky I missed the advertisement phase.
The ridiculous part is if you had once had location tracking on before, and had previously set your Home/Work address - Android Auto will still occasionally offer you directions to Home/Work spontaneously, despite Android Auto refusing to let you "Navigate Home/Work" when you attempt to do so on demand?
Meaningful reform won’t happen until the wider industry looks at the CVs of ex-Google workers with suspicion that they may be smart but lack a moral compass.
There is nothing dark about this, they are doing this in plain sight, there is very little people (who wants to use Google services*) can do about it. Even GDPR looks more and more toothless as days go by and nothing happens to obvious violators and it only covers European users of course.
Dark patterns are misleading, like highlighting the opt-in box for GDPR. No one is tricking users here, there are no options, they are told to suck it up.
On Android there's also the constant nagging to turn on GPS every time you open the app just to check the opening hours of some business. Super frustrating.
The wording is also super coercive. It makes it sound as if the app doesn't work without location enabled and the options are "cancel" and "okay". Most users probably think cancel means to cancel the action they were originally attempting, but in fact the app works perfectly fine without it. It is a dark pattern, and it was probably the red flag that finally flipped me from "okay maybe they make some mistakes" to "clearly the culture and ethics of the company have changed".
I had uninstalled Apple Maps [1] from my iPhone after iOS 11 upgrade because it was useless. Apple put it back with iOS 12 upgrade and I have kept it around so far. It is still useless here in India [1]. Often I sadly have no alternative to Google apps. I have tried at least a dozen apps (online/offline) and nothing even comes close to Google Maps.
Of course other features like News etc are not even shown on the app except in some countries while the price of the device remains the same (or more after taxes). I think I am being too harsh. They can do only so much with the resources they have :-)
[1] Apparently they use TomTom for map data in India (and elsewhere too?).
Pretty bad in my experience. Also traffic scene is pathetic down here so that makes Google Maps even more indispensable. Add to fact that they did a good months long round of ads here on everything including Google Maps hoarding all around the city.
No. Most times I use a maps app it doesn't need my location. Let it ask only when I explicitly ask for directions from my location, or when I click on the "center on my location" button.
No. 95% of the times I use it it's for checking opening hours and phone numbers of restaurants and stores in the other end of town. The other 5% of the time it's to check the distance from a hotel to nearby airport and attractions before I even decide to book the trip.
My current location has no relevance whatsoever in any of these use cases. My last viewed location in the app is usually much more relevant than my current physical location. And if its not then the center my location button is just one click away (plus another click for consent)
Very very rarely I do actually use turn-by-turn navigation but those few times shouldn't have destroy the experience for the more used scenarios. It would be so easy to prompt for location when this is activated and that's how it used to work before. This is very clearly a dark UX just to collect more data because I haven't met anyone who likes this "feature".
Weird. I remember a time when maps were printed on paper and somehow worked as references without a satellite connection.
I also remember having used Google Maps to look up routes between two places while I was underground and GPS didn't work and my current location was indicated as being miles away from where I was.
It's almost like GPS is not actually required for anything other than indicating your current location.
> The stakes are high for the league's bid to tap the enormous potential of China's 1.4 billion people. NFL is pushing tie-ups with more than a dozen platforms on regular television and online to help reach viewers, even at rush hour, Richard Young, managing director for NFL China, told Reuters in recent interviews.
I'm NOT saying, "people shouldn't be surprised." By all means, be very outraged and surprised about it, maybe something will change. What I am saying is the fact that so many people are surprised on HN of all places means that very few people here have ever turned off Web & App Activity tracking, even just as a temporary experiment to see what would happen.
That makes me sad. Do it some time, you have no idea how many things on your phone will break. Google does not want you turning off that permission; there are a large number of other Google apps that exhibit behaviors just as outrageous as this.
Please go do some some first-hand research. You can turn off Web & App Activity temporarily. You can leave it off for even just a week, just to get a feel for what happens.
My personal favorite restriction: turn off Web & App Activity and then try to use a voice command to call/text another person. You can't use voice commands with contacts if you have the permission turned off.
I always forget that when I'm trying to do hands-free commands while driving. I have to pull over and manually click on the contact. I can't just use voice commands and put the phone on speaker.
It's outright vindictive, to the point of being legitimately dangerous. You can still add contacts, and their names still show up everywhere on the phone. You just don't get to hands-free dial any of them, because... somehow Google needs access to my search history to do that? It's one of the most straightforward examples of higher-ups in Google prioritizing user tracking over user safety.
Been annoyed about this for a long time. Google still knows about my home address as I have that label set in my Google Maps settings, it just won't let me use it unless I allow them to track all my search history. Wtf. Evil design pattern for sure.
I wonder what would happen if the world somehow managed to boycott Google, Facebook and Amazon as a protest against privacy issues and anti-competitive practices by these cos.
We already have the alternatives ready, network effects so strong smh
Seems like a pretty cool app, but what's their business model? App is free, there are no IAP. My default assumption is either they're selling some kind of personal location data, even if it's not live or they are running on funding and this app will be either gone or infested with ads within a few years.
If you're privacy conscious, why do you have a smart phone at all? Get a standalone GPS
Even in airplane mode, your phone is tracking where you go with the accelerometer. I don't have time to look up the video right now, but this has been tested.
> If you're privacy conscious, why do you have a smart phone at all? Get a standalone GPS
There are trade offs between privacy and security, it's not an all or nothing affair. Even a dumb phone can be tracked via cell tower pings... I think most people who say things like you did aren't effectively thread modeling.
For example, while I do own a smartphone, I turn it off and put it in a faraday bag during Defcon :)
>Even in airplane mode, your phone is tracking where you go with the accelerometer. I don't have time to look up the video right now, but this has been tested.
I'll acknowledge that's theoretically possible, but I'm selective about what apps I grant location privlidges to - I don't think most companies would want to risk fines etc by circumventing.
If I'm attending an especially sensitive meeting, I wouldn't bring any phone with me.
It's driving me crazy that I can't find this video. There was a defcon talk where they put a phone on airplane mode and stuck it in a faraday cage. They set up a box to see what it would transmit after they drove around for a while and connected to wifi and it transmitted location data based on the acceleratometer.
I set up a Shortcuts (formerly Workflow) to auto-map to my home address in Directions view, which is far more convenient anyway.
There isn’t much point in creating lists of important places within the app because Google can’t seem to figure out how to show these to you in fewer than 5 taps/screens. It’s crazy when the 3rd party solution can provide more direct access in an app than the app itself.
You also can't use Google Home to control iot devices (in my case just a wifi plug) without having that setting enabled. I know most folks concerned about this tracking wouldn't have a Google Home anyway, but it was annoying to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
they still know where you live. Your phone stops moving for 8 hours in the same spot every night. That's where you live. Unless you also leave your phone in a neighbor's letter box in which case you fooled 'em good.
Sure, they know but they're putting usability behind "accept us tracking everything" for anyone who has "opted out of tracking" several years ago. Basically they're turning off more and more usability so that they can get you to accept their tracking agreement.
They do this with btle as well, you have to turn on location services because they can't bother to randomize bluetooth tags (like apple) and want this setting on all the time.
And everything else. Each google maps client likely has an ID that is used to link each one back to your gmail. Regardless of whether you've signed in at time of map query.
This is not very least-privilege of them. I would measure a company's trust based on the error:
|whatTheyAskFor - whatTheyNeed|/whatTheyNeed.
This number should be << 1. Being error-prone doesn't make you look very good. Stop asking for more than you need, it shows that you don't really care about your customers. You look less competent when you require more permissions than you need to accomplish a task. Don't do that.
I stopped updating the 2 remaning Google applications on my phone - apart from the damned play services, let's not even go there -: maps and translate.
Maps is at 8.4.1[^1]. Before 9, it all worked reasonably, it wasn't giving me the creepy "Are you at ?" push notification, it all just worked. Yes, it's most probably still tracking me, but at least it not _that_ annoying as the new ones.
Translate is at 3.0.12[^2]. v4 was the "let's use AI". What happened in reality: offline translation, english to chinese, v3, 2014: people more or less understood after looking at it long enough. v4, 2016: blank stares at the text, then they gave us Baidu translate. Comparing the 3 things - v3, v4, baidu - v3 and baidu had some resemblance,
, v4 was something completely unrelated.
I've seen software "evolving" for 25+ years now, and I'm pretty certain each and every piece of it has a pinnacle, when functionality meets (learnable) usability. After that it's first too many functions, than dumped down interface with not enough functions, then "AI" and non-functioning functionality. There's nearly never a OK, let's take a step back, which is so desperately needed.
As a result, I decided to stop updating some of my software, because it won't get any better for a very long while.
What is your Google Maps alternative of choice for Android?
I wish OsmAnd (https://osmand.net/) would be more interactive on the map and complete regarding addresses. For example if I want to know which bus or subway to take to get from A to B in Hamburg I always have to resort to Maps.
I like Maps.me https://maps.me/ because it works offline and I can easily add markers to it, which are saved to a simple XML file on the phone (so it means even the app disappear, I can move them to another app). I also like that I can correct or add new places via my openstreetmap.com account.
It's based on OpenStreetMap and is reasonably accurate. The main disadvantage is that search is not that great but you get use to it once you know what it works and doesn't work with.
I realized all this when google made my android phone practically useless [ back in the day when play store was markets ], those days google maps worked like a charm on edge connection, only showed as much info needed and there was no such thing as google play services.
I had used that phone, and then google started pushing play services, play store into my phone.
the market app would not download any app without being transformed into the play store app which would require google play services.
These took space on my phone, and the phone did not have space to even save sms.
Installing, side loading apks and all is fine but you don't and can't tell your parents in a 3rd world country.
It became horrible one day when I wanted to just run android market on my phone and google forced to download play store, play services, and market transformed into play store and it took more than 100 MiB data. I was trying to show my parents as to how to download something from market, etc. whatsapp was becoming popular in my town.
It was horrible because 100Mib of data costs money and screen flashed twice.
Then I had to give up. I had not got much money at that time.
Now, what I do.
I make an obscure email account [not gmail] on yahoo or ms or any tuta and make a google account using that email [ not gmail ] and you can keep changing the google' account email.
Google tracks your location, but it also correlates your location against your emails [ it never stopped reading emails ], don't use gmail at all.
You cannot avoid tracking of location, but you can avoid cross check of tracking info with your gmail content.
The gmail which is use actually is never synced to any device [ have deleted all the my activity permissions ] and I have turned up forwarding from gmail to a certain address which I open using firefox klar once a day.
Summary :
DO NOT USE THE SAME GOOGLE ACCOUNT FOR GMAIL AND ALL OTHER GOOGLE SERVICES.
From my experience, multiple companies have caught on and are doing this.
- NVidia: Block their telemetry, and their driver installer will block, even if you downloaded that massive driver package.
- Microsoft: Block their telemetry and some aspects of XBox One will break, including the Windows-10 streaming of the XBox. I found this to not be consistently true, so I am not sure what is going on behind the scene.
- Occulus Rift: You can't even block this telemetry. It's in the same app flow as the headset. If you block the telemetry to Facebook, the headset won't even work.
I predict that more and more companies will move critical services to the same DNS name or IP that their telemetry are using.
For me, it was so that when I'm somewhere I don't know, I can type 'home' into the maps search box and get directions.
I turned off Google's activity tracking on iOS a couple of months ago, and only realised that Google Maps wasn't storing my home location when I used it for directions while stuck in traffic and it sent me to a nearby nursing home instead of my house.
I ended up turning activity tracking back on, because Apple maps still isn't fit for purpose where I live (Ireland). I often need directions down small rural roads, and four times out of five Apple Maps won't recognise the destination address, or will send me to a nearby but incorrect location.
I thought this was already the case for years. If you use android and have a google account setup, which is essential to downloading apps, it already tracks the user in the map app.
Another one is if you remove body sensor permission for Google play services. Once you do that, Maps will keep on showing an error notification every few minutes.
I've switched to the Vivaldi browser after all these privacy undermining "features" Google has been rolling out.
But I am happy Android now allows setting your own DNS - you are no longer restricted to Google DNS. I am waiting for X-Privacy to be made available for Android 9.
Apple products are not an option for me. It's Linux, Windows and Android in my world.
I noticed this a few weeks back, when I disabled all tracking. The easy solution on Android was to have two shortcuts, one to home and one to work. That's ignoring the fact that I am still using Android and probably I am still being tracked some way.
On Osmand, saving one's home address, or any place for that matter, is easily done by clicking on the star button. One can categorize places if they want to.
The big question for Google: What revenue stream lies beyond ads? What else could you make money off to inspire again? Rather then just selling out your users on a daily basis.
Their cloud business is tiny compared to Amazon and Microsoft. They are a little late to that party. Play store is interesting and not much competition at all.
Looks like google has hit a gold mine with some algorithm to better sell ads or is under pressure from competitors (Facebook) to gather more data than they have currently.
Their lack of presence in social media will hurt them in the long term. In Facebook you upload pictures, you like stuff, you spend more time on someone's profile, you hover more on an ad even if you don't click all these while you are logged in. Google doesn't have that graph unless they link gmail with search. No one logs into Google search and give their identity, but we do pretty much the same in Facebook.
>you upload pictures, you like stuff, you spend more time on someone's profile
>Google doesn't have that graph
Google has that information from the contacts of all Android phones, Google Photos, etc. Granted they don't probably have the information from iPhones, but then a lot of people don't have or use their FB account too.
> No one logs into Google search and give their identity
No one here. Most of the non-tech people (and some tech people) do log into Chrome and Google account, which means they are logged into Search too.
Between WhatsApp / Facebook Messenger, Facebook Marketplace, and Amazon wishlists, who uses free email to describe what they want to buy or are interested in?
Sincere question about activity controls: What stops Google from collecting my web and app activity anyway even if I explicitly turn it off on my dashboard?
Not even joking, I rear ended someone while trying to dismiss the "USE OUR APP" popup that comes when you navigate via maps.google.com instead of the phone app.
I have been using OsmAnd~ [0] lately and have been pretty happy with it as an alternative. Uses open street maps, works offline, pretty good and configurable app.
The big issue preventing me from using something like OsmAnd is my need for real-time traffic. Generally, I can figure out where a place is with only the address since the N-S streets in my city are numbered and the first digits of an address on a cross-street corresponds to the numbered Avenues. Traffic, OTOH, can easily vary by 30 minutes on a 15 mile trip day to day even without any crashes along the route.
Is there an open, or at least more private, app that can give me accurate traffic data?
If they're fiddling with the phone while moving, yes. That's an automatic loss of three stars from me. Missing an exit is not a tragedy; hitting someone might be.
Wait... What? You don't mind telling Google where your home is, but you mind it tracking your online activity? Shouldn't home address be more sensitive?
For many of us home address is not very sensitive information. What we do online can be.
It’s not just what Google knows about you. If your account is compromised, attacker may be able to download all historicsl information and share it with everybody.
Shouldn't we be able to set home address in a map to get directions without it tracking anything at all? The 24/7 of everyone's existence should not be a marketing opportunity. You know, like TomToms and other GPS maps used to before everything was always connected.
Is it really unreasonable to expect any company, or Google specifically to decide "you know, home address and travel is more sensitive, let's provide some options to leave that out of ad tracking"?
Can't you set your address to a made up address across the street from you (often they leave unused numbers) 1, 9, 15... 2, 8, 12.. and set it as your home address. You can even just use a street over, it's not going to affect the routing at all but the last block or so.
Of course, I don't think this does much since they can get your address by other means.
Anyhow, giving them your actual home address is like filling out those secret security questions truthfully.
This is exactly what I do. I rarely input my actual address online unless it's strictly necessary (like an online purchase). I'm not eager to get to know my neighbors since they probably get a fair amount of junk mail thanks to me. :-)
If someone knows my home address, they have to drag themselves all the way to Wyoming to do anything about it. High cost, low value. If somebody tracks everything I do online, they can start spamming me online on all the sites I visit. Low cost, high value.
In theory, there's microg, in reality, if you do a complete un-googling, most push notifications won't come through.
If you do want to try it:
- factory reset the phone to get rid of any google accounts
- root the phone
- get "System app remover (ROOT)"[^1]
- remove all google applications, except google play services and framework
- reboot
- remove remaining google applications
- reboot
- get xposed[^2] and fakegapps[^3] and hope it works
- get microG[^4], maybe through nanodroid[^5]
- pray for it to work
I managed to get this running once, not ever again on a marshmallow based devices, and even when it did, push notification were a lottery, they may or may not work.
Thanks, but I was more thinking along the lines of installing a new OS (Linux) and running Android apps (e.g. for banking) in a sandbox. Is that possible?
Their UX continues to g et worse. Google Voice on iOS has had 10-20 second lag (no joke) on older versions of iOS (used to be jus fine!) for 1-2 years now. One previous version of GV in particular froze for 10 seconds on your first key press, now I can't rely on it to open properly, or send messages. It seems intentionally sabotaged.
I heard employees quit when G merged the YT with "real name" accounts.
Personally I've had a real pain getting support for android development. Wrong and misleading documentation, rude forum moderators, no way to report a bug (they have a bug where Payments page will show errors -- in Incognito Chrome) -- on the admob site. Solution was to sign up for Adwords (how could I tell?) and check the page in Safari or sign into Adwords on Chrome. Shit documentation. Help your developers earn you money better, Google. And stop changing your UI. It looks like they have low-tier coders who get hired with not enough power to rock the boat so they roll out a UI re-vamp no one wants without bothering to fix systemic problems that repeatedly kill products, break products and have a completely INSULTING policy towards their developers. Admob: "You can't even complain to us without earning enough money.. here's a phone number.. it literally never connects." Why even bother? I interpret that they hate me. The feeling is mutual.
I know I am flogging a dead horse here, but the constant retiring of Google apps makes me reluctant to adopt anything beyond Gmail and Youtube. I am a heavy Google Keep user, but I worry I am going to be kicked off that eventually.
> And stop changing your UI. It
The Youtube UI just gets worse and worse. I can only imagine what it must be like for non-Youtube Red subscribers. The add playlist button now defaults to your last playlist, which for me 75% of the time is not the playlist I want. Then I have to wait a few seconds for a popup, click a button, then unselect the last playlist and tick a new playlist. Just to add a f'ing video to a playlist.
Im surprised you manage to be a heavy Keep user — i had a few thousand notes, and then they rolled out some update that meant they would all be re-downloaded every time i opened the web client, which made it unusable for me. Switched to apple notes because why not and havent had any problems since.
Google Keep is at least now a core G Suite service covered by their terms of service, SLA, etc for G Suite customers. It also just got integrated into the new Gmail UX. So that's unlikely to vanish too quickly.
Youtube is even more fun if you don't want to make a channel. They've made the website "add to playlist" button redirect to the channel creation page. I can't even put things on "watch later", the one playlist youtube has deigned to allow me to have.
im using newpipe on android and adding the rss feeds to newsblur so I can watch on desktop. its actually really good since you get away from their suggestions side bar and autoplay (and the UI).
newsblur let's you organise things into subfolders too which is helpful
the other thing in going to start using is youtube-dl to download my watch later videos and then use something like emby or plex to watch them. maybe do the same with videos that I want to keep so I don't have to worry about then disappearing every second day
So if I’m reading you right, “YouTube is great, provided you work around their UI, feature set and arbitrary limitations by replacing it all with 3rd party software.” Yeah google’s really nailing it. /s
Well youtube has a lot of everyday person content that nobody else does. This is mostly inertia - they got big years ago, and it is hard to switch. There are other good alternatives, but none have the users or mind share.
Movies are better served elsewhere, but there is a lot of things that you just can't find elsewhere.
Personally I like the suggestions (everyone complains about clickbait and such, but I'm lucky that I never get those), but Newpipe is definitively a better app than the official.
My ‘watch later’ seems to have a problem catching videos. I add videos and they are gone from there. I created my own ‘Watch Now’ playlist, which consistently works.
This might be due to the fact that corporate shitheads decided to take down one of the videos you added.
I've seen such videos transform into [video removed] in custom playlists (which is infuriating to no end, you can't even know what the video was about to look it up somewhere else), maybe it causes videos to disappear from Watch Later entirely.
Right, for normal playlists YouTube leaves a placeholder saying that there was a deleted video. The frustrating thing about how they do it is that there’s no indication what the video was, unless you remember.
Does it handle Watch Later differently? I do know that it seemed to have odd or buggy behavior which is why I stopped using it.
> The add playlist button now defaults to your last playlist, which for me 75% of the time is not the playlist I want.
You can hold the button down ("long press") to get the playlist list instead of waiting for the popup to appear and pressing the button. It is of course still worse than it was before.
Problem is that it defaults to the last playlist I added to, making it unpredictable and inconsistent. It might make more sense if it always defaulted to "Watch Later" but still prompted to change it.
I only have around 5 playlists anyway (basically variants of "Watch Later" but sorted into vague categories).
One “issue” I have with Keep is there is no way to list notes or search notes without a label. And it’s from a search company. It must be hard for them to implement:-) or there is no more resources on Keep, waiting to be out like Inbox.
The way to use YouTube is as nothing more than a video hosting site, watching videos and managing playlists through other (offline) means. I wrote some shell scripts to do this years ago on my HTPC.
Tracking for everything.. with Android 6 and upwards you now have to turn on location in order to (get this!) find your Chromecast dongle when you set it up. Positioning, to find a wi-fi source inside your own place?
Fortunately I still have an old screen-broken Android 5 tablet to use for such things. After that everything works.
FWIW, at least the official story is that that is because doing a scan on Bluetooth or Wi-Fi is in fact enough to locate you regardless, so it now requires the permission to do so.
A scan on Bluetooth (although N/A for this situation) can't possibly give away any position. A scan of wifi might, if the device happens to pick up a wi-fi source that Google has already collected (by some means). Still not very relevant though - it would mean that location permission would be needed in order to use wi-fi at all, because how would it otherwise find the hotspot or access point you want to connect to.. other than having to enter the SSID manually every time. But we don't have to enable location tracking to do that.
To configure Chromecast though, 'google home' (which replaced the 'chromecast' application or whatever it was), takes you to Settings and unless you turn on location tracking it refuses to look for the dongle.
You now have to have that location tracking permission to scan wifi SSIDs, and it came about because spammy data stealing apps were using SSID maps to get rough location.
Not to say Google isn't evil because they certainly seem to be headed to hell while holding us in a hand basket, but this one is legit.
Yeah, I get that.. it's not unreasonable. However, why does Google Home force you to turn on location tracking in general, that's what I don't get.
It sounds like apps scanning for SSIDs could easily be handled by a specific permission for that. No need to enable location tracking (turning 'Location' "on" in Settings) for this. It doesn't make any sense (except for what it looks like: Google wants to get your location, by any means).
Was there internal uproar? Did they say this was the only "practical" option? I have missed all of this if so, I thought this is how Maps worked since this feature first popped up.
Google is a fascinating test case for Elizabeth Warren's plan to create board representation for workers. Googlers have a very distinct culture that would advocate for very different positions from the ones Google is making right now. If Google employees had 40% of the board, they'd be able to do a lot more to stop decisions like this one.
Disclaimer: I myself am an employee of Google, but my opinions and views do not represent those of Google in any way.
Just to be completely fair, there's a balance to be had. I think Googlers are a very passionate group about many issues. That doesn't mean they know what's best for the company or the world.
If Googlers lead Google's business decisions, I think it would be a worse place. Firstly, developers are often very blind to privacy issues left on their own. Well-intentioned developers can cause a lot of trouble, as you can see from countless startups. Secondly, I think the realities of running a business are much more difficult than people want to believe, and sometimes you make tough decisions nobody wants but are truly in the best interest of the company.
To be fair I still do not agree with everything I've heard Google doing in the news, but those are outliers. The narrative given by blogs and media sometimes (maybe even unintentionally) makes everything feel like a giant scheme, but I'd advise you to apply Occam's razor as much as possible. The people making the decision you don't like could legitimately just not understand what the "big deal" is. We don't always have the necessary context to really judge something, and our inclination when filling in gaps rarely likes to be kind. The Chrome login fiasco is a great example of good intentions that went over poorly with people.
I try to stay neutral as much as possible when looking at issues, be they from Google or other entities. People make mistakes and misjudgements all the time, and people assume malice far too often it feels.
I think, personally that Product Owners at google should be empassioned, benevolent dictators that dictate some usage in their applications. As it stands, so many applications and areas are either incomplete, confusing or unusable. Groups in particular is one of the worst things I've had to use... yet the only way to get an internal email list allowing external contact for GSuite. Really? I can do single address forwards from domains, but not group.
Not to mention the crapstorm happening with YouTube, censorship in docs, drive and who knows what else.
In the end, I'm not sure it won't collapse, leaving MS and Apple to reign the way things are going. It seems Google's leadership has taken a "show me the money" shift in focus.
There is only uproar for war contracts... turns out "Do No Evil" isn't as important as "get a paycheck that allows you to live in the most expensive real estate in the known universe"
edit: full disclosure, ex-Googler. I am biased. Met a lot of people who look the other way until even the other way is salty. "I build Google Forms, I do not wrong" ... It is easy to believe you are doing good for the world when you forget your product helps the company take over the world. Again, biased and salty myself
Lol you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Googlers get into an uproar over _everything_. The flipside of which is that all of the issues that you're incensed about (like this one), you can pretty much guarantee that they're more incensed about. Not that leadership listens always or even often...
Most large companies have a "jump the shark" moment where business needs and biz dev take over the engineering/product side and starts running the show unilaterally. It becomes less of an equal affair and more dictating terms.
Microsoft's was in the 90s in the os/browser wars.
From the outside, it seems to have reached a tipping point in the past year that is now getting quite dramatic. A whole string of heavy-handed, anti-user, and privacy-hostile decisions. What just happened to the culture that would allow all this evil behavior? Or did we misunderstand it all along?
I think yes. Google has been considered "evil" by the tinfoil hat crowd for quite some time, and once again it has become apparent to the mainstream that they were right.
>Google has been considered "evil" by the tinfoil hat crowd for quite some time, and once again it has become apparent to the mainstream that they were right
it's almost as though the people with money benefit from marginalizing the people cynical enough to understand what they are doing.
You know, I used to think times like this when us conspiracy theorists could say "I told you so" would make people rethink some things, but that has proven to be false. I was ranting about NSA and other unconstitutional abuses before Snowden and was getting called "crazy", and then after Snowden the majority of comments around here became variations of "Well, are you surprised." and "If you have nothing to hide" and "Broken clocks are right twice a day"...
Google, like facebook, was from origins designed to end up this way. It was not some organic complication of motives due to massive growth.
From a mobile perspective, I used to be heavily invested in the Android ecosystem. Now I use an iPhone and and willingly hand over my Apple tax every few years and will continue to do so whilst I can afford it.
Google's direction is a pity really, as Apple needs a strong competitor in the mobile market to maintain innovation momentum.
Isn't Alphabet the clear "parent" of Google... I'm biased, but we are witnessing the beginning of a monopoly that wasn't imaginable pre-internet. Old rich white men are trembling in their shoes... The take-over game but played better, sexier, and immune. My G-ma loves the Google, so easy even the 90 year olds get it
I believe we are witnessing the result of a company offering not just a series of products but a whole lifestyle, and it is too hard for consumers to live without it. Best game plan you could ever imagine... Internet becomes connectivity, offer free search among connectivity, build products that promote connectivity, step 4: profit.
> From the outside, it seems to have reached a tipping point in the past year that is now getting quite dramatic.
There was no real tipping point - the media just noticed it's easy to get clicks if they repeatedly write about Google. Google was always Google and they had similar ethics for years now.
It's pretty much why you also see all the Google articles on this page (just like you saw all the FB bashing a few months ago which now disappeared). I believe Reddit community calls this group behaviour a "circlejerk". People posting same content to reinforce their opinion.
In a recent interaction with the Pixel support personel via the built-in chat, I was unabashedly lied to three times in a row, including direct contradictions of the previous support persons instructions.
When the support person didn't have a handy solution, they just started making up reasons why my issue wasn't supported, going so far as to tell me I was required to purchase non-existent, google-branded hardware in order to accomplish what the previous support person had already walked me through.
Unlock and commnd the google assistant via a bluetooth device. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes it would unlock but then be unable to respond to subsequent commands. Then every few days, the feature would disable itself and stop working entirely (via voice or bluetooth) and have to be set up again.
The first support person showed me how to clear the application cache, and then walked me through the process off testing the bluetooth. I was very impressed. I hadn't actually intended to request support - I was just using the device's help system.
Except - it happens again, two days later, and clearing the cache and setting up the voice assistant every couple of days isn't much of a solution. I didn't expect a fix - mainly wanted them to let them know the solution wasn't working.
The second support person had me walk through the basic diagnostics and then tried to give me reasons why what I was trying to do wasn't possible. First, it wasn't possible at all, then it became impossible to do with all my specific bluetooth devices and finally, it became impossible without using google bluetooth gear. (I misspoke previously - these actually do exist).
Pushy, inexperienced, untrained and unsupported. And very clearly miserable and under the gun.
It was discussed on HN a few days ago: the size of the company is inversely proportional to the quality of their support. After the company reaches a certain size, they can simply afford not to care. Also, in this case it makes more business sense for them. Therefore I prefer to deal with smaller companies.
Apple has absolutely fantastic support, and remain outrageously profitable regardless.
Years back I bought a Nexus and chose an engraving option. I got the phone and it wasn't engraved so I contacted Google mostly to make sure I wasn't going to be shipped multiple phones (after battling the various prevent you from contacting us bosses).
I mean, I bought the phone from them, from their site, with Google branding on it, paying Google, with a warranty theoretically provided by Google, etc. Eventually someone responded giving me the phone number for HTC. No, you contact HTC, Google.
That was the last voluntarily purchased Google device I bought. I did get a couple more Nexus phones for development purposes, but did so begrudgingly. The Pixel line of phones and tablets...not a chance in the world.
Wow, HTC. That must have been a while ago. Was it a Nexus One?
I think the relationship was similar for the LG and Huawei Nexuses, but Google is now the "manufacturer" for the Pixel line, so hopefully things have improved.
You say this, but I've had some great experiences with Microsoft support over the years, both on the hardware and software side. I hear good things about Apple's support too.
Agreed, even with a simple home license I've called Microsoft and been shocked at how competent they are. Pretty weird and complex issues too.
But doesn't Google in particular have a reputation for nonexistent or terrible support? It's not part of their culture, everything is a beta and it's no big deal if it doesn't work right?
An open phone cannot come fast enough. It may well be even buggier at first but if it's like my experience with Linux over the last 17 years it will only get steadily better since the developer's incentives are actually largely aligned with mine.
I must give Microsoft credit too actually. I've spoken with them 3 times over home licensing of windows. Each time they were very quick and thorough in sorting the issue.
In fact, during one of the last big windows 10 updates something failed for me in carrying the license over and they took time to investigate the incident in order to determine how to prevent it again for future updates.
the thing that surprised me was they _cared_ that something was wrong and were _interested_ in fixing to and preventing it happening again. Been a while since I dealt with a company that did that.
Actually, thinking about it I should probably switch to companies that do care about this stuff.
Apple support is spot on. While I'm disappointed by the decline in quality of their products (namely the macbook pro), when I had to return my MBP 2017 a year after I bought it, and 3 months after they replaced the faulty keyboard, they were very supportive and refunded me the full amount. They're also very easy to talk to and treat you with respect unlike Google support (from my experience).
Had an awesome experience with german Amazon support - he was very friendly and helpful, sent an e-mail afterwards where he explained how the problem occured in more detail and got in touch with their tech team, which fixed the problem in few hours and then send me a handwritten e-mail (not automated) apologizing for the problem.
Yeah, I read some posts from a former employee. The ad model was there from day 1 and people can't just act like Page and Brin are brilliant yet failed to see the potential for harm in their business model.
There's a difference between "serve ads next to web search results" and "harvest literally every data point we can befuddle or coerce people into giving up."
> The very fact that Google invented MapReduce, and Microsoft didn’t, says something about why Microsoft is still playing catch up trying to get basic search features to work, while Google has moved on to the next problem: building Skynet^H^H^H^H^H^H the world’s largest massively parallel supercomputer. I don’t think Microsoft completely understands just how far behind they are on that wave.
People were joking about Google ingesting all the data they could to build an AI, 12+ years ago.
You wrote an interesting blogpost, but I think its a stretch to say this relates. Your essay is about click tracking and ads, and social media tracking.
The prime issue under discussion here is that google demands you turn on location tracking to use a feature, not that they do any kind of clicktrails.
For instance, since Android 5, the standard contact app doesn't allow you to modify a contact which is not synced with an account. Why even do this? The list of tracking settings that can be turned permanently on, but only temporarily off is ever growing. At some point, you just give up because it's such a silly waste of time. Google knows this very well.
Almost all the google websites, except google search, work badly on anything except chrome. I mean, google groups is rotten already on chrome, but just try it on firefox for the full experience.
Maps (the website) used to be a game-changer in the past. It was insanely fast. Nowdays I hate it. The UI is just horrid. On Firefox it just misbehaves constantly. I only use it for streetview, and still I'm appalled at how badly it has evolved.
They are pushing still impressive libraries and tools. But there's not a single of their products I still like to use.
It is true that Google has done this several times over, but we shouldn't normalize it as nothing new, move on. We should still call it out each and every time we see it, even if we are repeating ourselves. Also, what might be obvious to our community is not to those outside, which in the end are the majority.
They're usually made so the authors feel better about themselves, but they have a very negative effect on the rest of the community reading them as it gives them a sense of powerlessness.
I always try to counteract such comments with 2 arguments:
1) it may not be news to you, but it's probably news for a lot of other people. Most people have their own real-world issues to think about, they don't wonder about for hours every day on what Google may be doing against them while utilizing Google's services. Most people are trusting and think company X (or their government) "wouldn't do evil thing Y" to them. Of course, they're usually wrong. Company X/government would absolutely do that evil thing Y to them if they are not vigilant or it benefits them monetarily or otherwise.
2) Something is still news if it happens again or it gets escalated to a higher degree of aggressiveness from that company X/government. Should we all hear about something evil Google has done once and be done with it? Then make our choice whether or not to trust them and use their services forever? Of course not. These things need a "build-up" period before a decision is made. This is why the expression "breaking the camel's back" exists, and it's what happened now with Chrome 69 and these new issues coming up. It's only now that people have said "Okay, are you f-king serious now, Google?! I've let your shit slide in the past, but no longer!"
Seems like the right response would be to stop using the problem products. If you think you can't afford to, I hope you like Google. This is in no way surprising.
Only YouTube is irreplaceable, and you need an account to save videos and subscribe to channels. Luckily a throwaway Google account with BS info and a temporary backup e-mail address is easily created every 3 months.
Sigh! Google makes phone verification compulsory when you try to create the Google account (mandatory to use Google products).
Here's how it should go:
Me: Hey support, feature X isn't working for me.
Google: What browser are you using?
Me: Firefox
Google: Ok, thanks for reporting a bug in our software. We'll address the issue with Firefox and get back to you.
What actually happens:
Me: Hey support, feature X isn't working for me.
Google: What browser are you using?
Me: Firefox
Google: Please use Google Chrome
Reminds me of when Microsoft used to optimize it's products for Windows and other OSs were an afterthought...
And while I have stopped trusting MS (again) after their recent browser failure it seems they are very much trying to sell software and services on all platforms.
I finally divested this Spring after giving Google six months to come out with something that would reawaken my old optimism. Besides coming out with a mean go engine, all the news out of Google in that time was depressing.
I'm frankly surprised at how easily a true believer like myself could do a one-eighty in their opinion of the company. I know there's a possibility that they turn this thing around and I look foolish, but they'd have to do that without my cheerleading.
1. Youtube comes out with the promise of revolutionizing video, I immediately love it because of its idiosyncrasy and unpredictability. Despite low production values, the videos are varied enough that I can always find something interesting and the algorithm is quite good at suggesting things I'll like. 2. Google acquires youtube, whether because of more money or improving the algorithm, the offerings get even better 3. Youtube merges with google+. 4. Youtube hires new management and begins modeling itself after the old cable companies whose lunch it had 'till now been happily eating. 5. Youtube's algorithms progressively play it safer with their recommendations, the youtube personalities I follow either become more mainstream (Joe Rogan) or increasingly complain of being arbitrarily demonetized (Phillip Defranco). 7. Present day
If you use Youtube as a substitute for television, it might not look like a decline. But I find television generally boring, and Youtube seemed to promise a general improvement. With a better algorithm for suggesting videos and a less hostile relationship to creators it still could be, but for years now it's been moving in the opposite direction on both counts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-po...
There are flaws in the algorithm - 1) for scaling reasons it doesn't run full deep learning over everything, but uses a simple popular-only algorithm first. 2) it is optimised for next video watch time, which is a very shallow measure of what the user really wants long term.
https://www.quora.com/How-does-YouTubes-recommendation-algor...
- The mobile page does not allow quality selection, and always selects quality options far below what would be supported by your connection (It sometimes drops to 240p, and I have not seen it select anything above 480p, yet can easily stream 1080p on the desktop site or other players).
- The mobile page does not respect the "Request Desktop Site" option, even in Chrome - and neither does their own "Desktop Site" link; Both still use the abysmal mobile player, and only by enabling both can you use a high-quality video player.
- Anything 60fps has issues on my mobile device, while other web players are fine - even 720p60 lags, while I can stream 1080p60 elsewhere.
I uninstalled the app years ago when it requested additional permissions with an update, and implemented a 30-second delay (with countdown!) before launching until I updated. YouTube is no longer the pinnacle of web video, and have not been for years.
If you know exactly what you want to watch it's fine, but the whole browsing/surfing experience sucks.
Videos are not enough to sustain, they're like apps; a part of a larger revenue model. This disincentivizes smaller, interesting producers and pushes the platform to be more like network television was, with handfuls of large, conventionally attractive people.
I don't find it terrible at all now, but i hope it doesn't keep going in this direction. It's currently a wonderful resource for people who want to do all kinds of things from home and garden improvements, to cooking, improve mental and physical health, etc. Far closer to the utopian dreams of early internet enthusiasts than most other sites.
There was a post on HN a while back which compares Google Maps with traditional paper maps. It had a lot of insights I wish I could find it.
No kidding there. If you leave it alone for a few minutes (that is, not scrolling, zooming, clicking anything), it will give you a Black Window of Death.
Does anyone know a decent alternative? (please don't say waze)
Edit: Maps (Offline OpenStreetMap maps) - https://f-droid.org/app/com.github.axet.maps
For the record OpenStreetMap doesn't have one official app. It doesn't even have any "official" apps. People use OSM data to make other maps.
What is it about privacy that bothers people so much more than the myriad of other violations that take place across the world, and what makes the fact that corporations are committing this sin so much worse than when individuals do it?
If you have your home and/or work address set in Gmaps, and you disable all tracking in myactivity.google.com. The address will disappear and GMaps will invite you to reactive App and Web tracking. If you do it, your saved addresses will reappear. This is slightly dodgy.
It is punitive. They are (and are within their rights to) withholding value because you aren't giving them what they want, which is mineable activity information.
I notice that there are always cartoons of happy users getting additional useful features from their services when tracking is enbled, but never cute cartoons of the other actors extracting value based upon advertising etc. Truth In Condescending Explain-o-Toons, now! etc.
However, once you disable the tracking, the UI no longer show the address and even say "Set location" under Home address and Work address. This let you think that Google doesn't have this information, which is false. This makes me feel like Google got info about me and I can't use it. I find this part dodgy. Once you disable a setting it should be clearer that data is not deleted.
Google Maps UI has a feature to display your set home address, once you turn off tracking or whatever it no longer has access to that home address in its UI so the default state is to ask you to set one.
If that's the case then the real problem would be that the address data is siloed off somewhere in your Google account under maps and isn't accessible to be changed/cleared from your general account settings.
This example shows that that most likely isn't true, since when you disable that setting, they keep all data anyway.
I think it's more of a UX dark pattern where they act like "we only track you if you specifically allow us", but if you don't allow them they will track you anyway, they just do it all behind the scenes.
Seems like a clear violation of GDPR which specifies that collection of additional data except as required to provide the service must be voluntarily.
And no - ads/tracking doesn't count, and no - it is not voluntarily if they punish you for not accepting it.
If data were kept in this fashion under a GDPR right to erasure request, Google would face some hefty fines.
What I don't understand is when we started expecting _anything other than this_ in a commercial transaction. Google's whole thing is they give out services in exchange for information.
Have you tried from another device or browser?
https://www.fastcompany.com/3058283/why-google-maps-shows-yo...
Looking back, when they announced they were going to become an AI-first company these sort of drastic data-grabs and privacy issues should have been apparent. But hindsight is 20/20...
You know what they meant. Google is milking users for all data they can derive from their activity and creating value from that. It's not so much the use of the data that's the problem as the lengths they go to to create that data.
I recall someone from one of the major tech companies talking about how their users "emit data", implying the data just happens and their role is purely passive with the users practically handing them that data. That's a perverse way of looking at it when you contrast it with e.g. the GDPR's premise that data belongs to the user and companies need (withdrawable) consent to collect and process it.
In the US tech companies don't collect user data, users "emit" it -- even if the only reason the data is "emitted" is because the tech is actively spying on its users' every move.
They provide a lot of value, but in the end, I think a lot of their products will eventually use market and mindshare.
As a user you expect a reasonable level of privacy unless the software explicitly requests your consent for providing certain information or explicitly asks you to provide that information manually. If the software then hands that information off to a third party you expect that only to happen with explicit consent.
The problem in this case is that Google isn't interested in consent. It tries to get as much information as it can without needing to ask for consent and when it does ask for consent it's through coercion by tying that consent request to actions that are not reflective of the scope of the request ("You want to save your home location? Okay but in order to do that we need to be able to track your every move forever").
That's arguably far more malicious than explicitly saying "please let us share this info with company XYZ so we can continue offering this service for free". That most companies selling data to third parties aren't so explicit about it is irrelevant -- this is just about the claim that "selling data" is inherently more malicious than what Google is doing.
That said, no, selling does not mean "surrendering any and every control over it". GDPR and friends specifically address that by stating that the human being the data is about continues to own that data and can withdraw consent at any time (at any depth of sharing).
If you can only explain why selling is worse by creating a scenario where the selling is done without consent or in an equally malicious/shady way, that doesn't demonstrate that selling is inherently worse.
Selling isn't worse. Selling without regard for a user's rights is bad. But Google is already engaging in abusive behavior as far as users' rights are concerned.
Also, I know this is hard to understand if you're not used to real privacy laws, but if a company sells your data and you invoke your rights against the company, it's the company's responsibility to go after whoever they sold the data to, not yours.
> if a company sells your data and you invoke your rights against the company, it's the company's responsibility to go after whoever they sold the data to, not yours.
Can you point me to more details on this? I have my doubts about it.
The GDPR treats personal information as property of the user. Even if access to and processing of that data is permitted by the user, it remains the property of the user. If the company is permitted to also pass that data on, they're still responsible for ensuring the data is handled appropriately.
I'm not sure what you are doubting. The GDPR is (in)famous for this.
This is why GDPR compliance makes it nearly impossible to hand over information to third parties who aren't GDPR compliant and why EU companies are nervous about working with Google and other US companies (because the Privacy Shield is not any more trustworthy than Safe Harbor which died an extremely swift death).
As far as the user concerned there's no difference between you "selling" their data and you handing it over to a third party as a data processor. You can't "sell" it because it's not yours, you can just take money for handing it over -- but that's between you and the third party, the user isn't part of that transaction.
Think of it this way: users can't sell you their data (they literally can't) so the data isn't your property. You can't sell what isn't yours, so the data you hand over to a third party is still owned by the user who gave it to you with the (GDPR-backed) expectation that you're retaining the control necessary to comply with their requests.
FWIW I'm not sure how this works for third-party tracking (e.g. Facebook widgets). Google Analytics avoids this by requiring compliant websites to enable IP anonymization (which supposedly should be sufficient) but liability still resides with the website owner (and the Data Protection Agreement makes this perfectly clear).
As you want sources, here's what a quick Google yields:
https://iapp.org/news/a/threes-a-crowd-third-party-risk-unde...
https://martechtoday.com/gdpr-mean-third-party-data-processo...
https://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2017/november/stricter-c...
And especially this:
http://www.infocore.com/insights/data-privacy-a-marketers-lo...
> Under the GDPR, EU citizens must be given the easy ability to withdraw their consent, often called "the right to be forgotten". If consent is withdrawn, those data subjects have the right to have their personal data erased and no longer used for processing by the data collector, and by any other entity who has ever used or purchased that data.
So in other words: "selling" user data is no different from handing the data to a data processor.
The point of the GDPR is that personal information is something that taints your product's data and therefore something you want to avoid. Selling it to dodgy companies that abuse the heck out of it is exactly what the GDPR is meant to combat.
Where the controller has made the personal data public and is obliged pursuant to paragraph 1 to erase the personal data, the controller, taking account of available technology and the cost of implementation, shall take reasonable steps, including technical measures, to inform controllers which are processing the personal data that the data subject has requested the erasure by such controllers of any links to, or copy or replication of, those personal data.
So there's an obligation to inform. Which makes sense: Assume you (with consent of the user) sell data to some company, you have to forward them the request of said user to be forgotten. But you have no authority over that company. You can report them to any and every authority if they ignore or actively refuse your request, but you as a company have no authority over them. Particularly if they don't operate within the reach of the European authorities, there's little you can do. And that's what I mean with "You surrender control of the data once you sell it".
I'm appalled every time I'm asked to train Google's object detection networks in the guise of solving a captcha.
But now when I'm asked to select all the squares containing road signs or storefronts or whatever it feels like I'm being forced to work for Google for free just so I can go about my day.
It's such a simple concept, and yet I see people on Hacker News constantly making this mistake. It's as if people are too addicted to outrage culture to even consider the arguments anymore.
Then can tell you to try to sell cycle headlamp to me because I have been looking for it in last fews days. I'd say that's selling my data.
They never were the good guy, but I guess they decided to finally stop pretending.
For my work address, email, and phone, I just append "w"
I will also use Google maps to find the route to some restaurant, turn off the GPS because I don't like being tracked and it's no too far, then head to the restaurant within 10-60 minutes of when I checked the GPS. If I have wifi on I will invariably get asked to rate the restaurant within 5 minutes of arriving there, regardless of how much time has passed since I checked the route.
I currently use a Pixel phone, but based on the experiences I've had, I will be switching to an iPhone in the hope that I get tracked less. After switching to Firefox and ddg as my daily drivers, I just need to get off of Gmail and I will be google free
It would have at least been corporate speak to have an option called GPS that people assumed was location tracking and was not. Having an option called "Location" that does not stop your phone from tracking your location when turned off has crossed the line into fraudulent behavior for me
It's like browser fingerprinting. It doesn't take very many bits of entropy before you are identifiable
https://support.google.com/android/answer/3467281
https://support.google.com/android/answer/6179507
The true reason is probably a little less cheeky: keeping track of copies is hard. And here we end or digression into apologetics and return to criticism, ensuring correctness in keeping track of copies is surely not a very high priority.
So the address is still there, they are just actively blocking you from making use of it in most of their apps (but evidently not all of them, as you noted above).
I get it, it's frustrating as hell, but I can understand their perspective.
It's because that private corp is so big that it is starting to control much of the internet and devices so this is an issue very much in the public purview.
It's not as simple as take it or leave it. The corp in question spends billions to insinuate itself into your life, make you dependant, eat competition, and then you can take it, but you definitely can't leave it.
Its time for google to be broken up.
Yes, either you take it, or leave it. Imagine everyone leaving google today. They can't make money. People made them rich, people can take them down. If genpop doesn't understand, you have to find your own ways to navigate thru the internet because google won't go away anytime soon.
I would love to hear your opinion about how to take google down, without making people "leave it".
You're right, but the percentage of Google users aware of how evil they are is probably less than 0.5%.
An overwhelmingly large percentage of users won't care about what could happen as long as nothing happens directly affecting them. Mass surveillance companies like Google, Facebook know this and take advantage of it.
Technology activists aren't strong enough to start a wave that would lead to people abandoning these evil corps..
Also, as others mentioned, they eat up all competition.. so there aren't really any good options left apart from Google products in areas they compete.
Not unaware of, just don't care. Most people aren't persnickety, anal, border line autistic nerds so Google/Facebook knowing who they know or where they are, when they're using software to tell their friends where they are or are using maps to literally work out where they are right now is just not an issue.
If you really don't want to be tracked you shouldn't have a smartphone, not worry yourself with what Vn+0.1 of an app is doing which Vn wasn't.
Please don't insult people for caring about privacy.
That is a false dilemma, because there are more than two choices. To many of us, the third option is the one we choose.
It's odd that Google Maps and Google Assistant both have different methods and rules for the storage of home and work locations.
tl;dr: Yes, but you might have to jump through some hoops
Maybe it's because they created a situation where it's nearly impossible to avoid "their" software because it's integrated into the product the user actually paid for.
If you buy an Android phone you don't buy bare metal. That's not how Android phones are marketed and it's not how Google wants Android phones to be perceived. An Android phone is a device with Google Play, Google Maps and Google Search integrated into the operating system and providing core services. That's how Google wants you to think about Android and it's in their best interest for you to do so.
From a customer point of view, Google Maps is part of the Android device's core functionality. From a marketer's point of view, it's the same. From Google's point of view, it's also the same.
But although Google Maps itself has great offline functionality and in theory only needs online access for map data, traffic information and optimised routing, Google plays bait and switch by demanding you consent to being spied on in order to actually use it.
Sure, it's their software and they can do what they want but customer rights exist, privacy rights exist and competition law exists. They're being intentionally deceitful and maliciously abuse their position to coerce users into giving consent for providing Google with far more data than they need to provide the service.
In the last 18 months, Google transitioned from being a 'build products people will use to enhance their daily lives' company (with Google profiting immensely but for the enhancement of humankind) to a company that is nonchalant in the sale of human data, often to the detriment of their users' experience
I do think Google Maps is the best, but the choices exist, and for some cases they work even better.
Edit: quote removed -- see child comments.
> I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.
Kinda changes the whole context from "secrets are for bad people" to "you shouldn't use Google with anything really secret, because government".
I'm really dismayed that a lot of good people and orgs keep misrepresenting this quote for many years by cutting it out of the context. This doesn't mean that Google is automatically your friend, btw.
Maybe it wasn’t the case when he said that quote, but the story here is they’re trying very hard to blur the line between their services and the device itself, in some very awkward ways that don’t make a lot of sense except except beyond their own business needs
For what it's worth, I've disabled the 'Google' app on my Android phone for a few weeks now, and have experienced no problems. I don't use Google for search, and I already had Chrome disabled too, so all it did was take up some memory and battery, now freed up. All I lost was an extra screen on the mobile "desktop" (which I mostly only accidentally ended up in anyway), and some (generally useless) notifications about "things I might like".
>"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users"
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Interesting. If I've submitted a comment within the last N hours, I'm not allowed to submit stories.
N seems to be at least 3.
Google is vulnerable here as they’re creating a very real need for basic alternatives
Why should someone want to buy software when most of the software they see and use regularly are unreliable services?
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
I flew to duckduckgo, don't know about flocking...
The hidden costs of apps Google gives you for "free" is probably above $1,000. I guess the majority would give away their privacy for that amount these days.
I wish there was a SaaS application which provided assistant capabilities by a monthly subscription. You can see all the data stored, you own the data the service just creates models to enable use. And you could stop the subscription which wipes all the data including the models. Perhaps some startup founder is reading this?
Making an Android frontend seems easy enough.
(You can also DIY by installing Home Assistant and Snips on a Raspberry Pi or other computer)
It works well enough, and doesn't require every permission to be enabled. It'll work fine with whatever you give it. (Within reason. It can't give you information about your calendar unless you give it that permission, etc.)
Reminders and such get synced to my PC.
There are, of course, many holes in its functionality... hoping it gets better. Don't know if there's a better assistant app for Android at this point.
Would love to see a gif/video of that with rage as a soundtrack :D
Of course other features like News etc are not even shown on the app except in some countries while the price of the device remains the same (or more after taxes). I think I am being too harsh. They can do only so much with the resources they have :-)
[1] Apparently they use TomTom for map data in India (and elsewhere too?).
[2] https://www.apple.com/in/ios/feature-availability/#maps-dire...
My current location has no relevance whatsoever in any of these use cases. My last viewed location in the app is usually much more relevant than my current physical location. And if its not then the center my location button is just one click away (plus another click for consent)
Very very rarely I do actually use turn-by-turn navigation but those few times shouldn't have destroy the experience for the more used scenarios. It would be so easy to prompt for location when this is activated and that's how it used to work before. This is very clearly a dark UX just to collect more data because I haven't met anyone who likes this "feature".
I also remember having used Google Maps to look up routes between two places while I was underground and GPS didn't work and my current location was indicated as being miles away from where I was.
It's almost like GPS is not actually required for anything other than indicating your current location.
> The stakes are high for the league's bid to tap the enormous potential of China's 1.4 billion people. NFL is pushing tie-ups with more than a dozen platforms on regular television and online to help reach viewers, even at rush hour, Richard Young, managing director for NFL China, told Reuters in recent interviews.
https://www.businessinsider.com/r-super-bowl-goes-social-as-...
I'm NOT saying, "people shouldn't be surprised." By all means, be very outraged and surprised about it, maybe something will change. What I am saying is the fact that so many people are surprised on HN of all places means that very few people here have ever turned off Web & App Activity tracking, even just as a temporary experiment to see what would happen.
That makes me sad. Do it some time, you have no idea how many things on your phone will break. Google does not want you turning off that permission; there are a large number of other Google apps that exhibit behaviors just as outrageous as this.
Please go do some some first-hand research. You can turn off Web & App Activity temporarily. You can leave it off for even just a week, just to get a feel for what happens.
https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols
I always forget that when I'm trying to do hands-free commands while driving. I have to pull over and manually click on the contact. I can't just use voice commands and put the phone on speaker.
It's outright vindictive, to the point of being legitimately dangerous. You can still add contacts, and their names still show up everywhere on the phone. You just don't get to hands-free dial any of them, because... somehow Google needs access to my search history to do that? It's one of the most straightforward examples of higher-ups in Google prioritizing user tracking over user safety.
We already have the alternatives ready, network effects so strong smh
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/here-wego-city-navigation/id...
It has very cool feature - offline maps. By downloading your state/country's maps, you don't have to query a server for every little mapping request.
Between this app and saved podcasts, I'm able to switch off my mobile large chunks of the day.
https://www.here.com/en/industries/media/advertising
Even in airplane mode, your phone is tracking where you go with the accelerometer. I don't have time to look up the video right now, but this has been tested.
There are trade offs between privacy and security, it's not an all or nothing affair. Even a dumb phone can be tracked via cell tower pings... I think most people who say things like you did aren't effectively thread modeling.
For example, while I do own a smartphone, I turn it off and put it in a faraday bag during Defcon :)
>Even in airplane mode, your phone is tracking where you go with the accelerometer. I don't have time to look up the video right now, but this has been tested.
I'll acknowledge that's theoretically possible, but I'm selective about what apps I grant location privlidges to - I don't think most companies would want to risk fines etc by circumventing.
If I'm attending an especially sensitive meeting, I wouldn't bring any phone with me.
https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/10389160047204311...
There isn’t much point in creating lists of important places within the app because Google can’t seem to figure out how to show these to you in fewer than 5 taps/screens. It’s crazy when the 3rd party solution can provide more direct access in an app than the app itself.
They do this with btle as well, you have to turn on location services because they can't bother to randomize bluetooth tags (like apple) and want this setting on all the time.
Maps is at 8.4.1[^1]. Before 9, it all worked reasonably, it wasn't giving me the creepy "Are you at ?" push notification, it all just worked. Yes, it's most probably still tracking me, but at least it not _that_ annoying as the new ones.
Translate is at 3.0.12[^2]. v4 was the "let's use AI". What happened in reality: offline translation, english to chinese, v3, 2014: people more or less understood after looking at it long enough. v4, 2016: blank stares at the text, then they gave us Baidu translate. Comparing the 3 things - v3, v4, baidu - v3 and baidu had some resemblance, , v4 was something completely unrelated.
I've seen software "evolving" for 25+ years now, and I'm pretty certain each and every piece of it has a pinnacle, when functionality meets (learnable) usability. After that it's first too many functions, than dumped down interface with not enough functions, then "AI" and non-functioning functionality. There's nearly never a OK, let's take a step back, which is so desperately needed.
As a result, I decided to stop updating some of my software, because it won't get any better for a very long while.
[^1]: https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/maps/maps-8-4-1-5-r... [^2]: https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/translate/translate...
I wish OsmAnd (https://osmand.net/) would be more interactive on the map and complete regarding addresses. For example if I want to know which bus or subway to take to get from A to B in Hamburg I always have to resort to Maps.
It's based on OpenStreetMap and is reasonably accurate. The main disadvantage is that search is not that great but you get use to it once you know what it works and doesn't work with.
I had used that phone, and then google started pushing play services, play store into my phone.
the market app would not download any app without being transformed into the play store app which would require google play services.
These took space on my phone, and the phone did not have space to even save sms.
Installing, side loading apks and all is fine but you don't and can't tell your parents in a 3rd world country.
It became horrible one day when I wanted to just run android market on my phone and google forced to download play store, play services, and market transformed into play store and it took more than 100 MiB data. I was trying to show my parents as to how to download something from market, etc. whatsapp was becoming popular in my town. It was horrible because 100Mib of data costs money and screen flashed twice.
Then I had to give up. I had not got much money at that time.
Now, what I do.
I make an obscure email account [not gmail] on yahoo or ms or any tuta and make a google account using that email [ not gmail ] and you can keep changing the google' account email.
Google tracks your location, but it also correlates your location against your emails [ it never stopped reading emails ], don't use gmail at all.
You cannot avoid tracking of location, but you can avoid cross check of tracking info with your gmail content.
The gmail which is use actually is never synced to any device [ have deleted all the my activity permissions ] and I have turned up forwarding from gmail to a certain address which I open using firefox klar once a day.
Summary :
DO NOT USE THE SAME GOOGLE ACCOUNT FOR GMAIL AND ALL OTHER GOOGLE SERVICES.
- NVidia: Block their telemetry, and their driver installer will block, even if you downloaded that massive driver package.
- Microsoft: Block their telemetry and some aspects of XBox One will break, including the Windows-10 streaming of the XBox. I found this to not be consistently true, so I am not sure what is going on behind the scene.
- Occulus Rift: You can't even block this telemetry. It's in the same app flow as the headset. If you block the telemetry to Facebook, the headset won't even work.
I predict that more and more companies will move critical services to the same DNS name or IP that their telemetry are using.
Just more incentive to move away from Google (which is sad, because the services are great; I'd even pay for them!)
I turned off Google's activity tracking on iOS a couple of months ago, and only realised that Google Maps wasn't storing my home location when I used it for directions while stuck in traffic and it sent me to a nearby nursing home instead of my house.
I ended up turning activity tracking back on, because Apple maps still isn't fit for purpose where I live (Ireland). I often need directions down small rural roads, and four times out of five Apple Maps won't recognise the destination address, or will send me to a nearby but incorrect location.
But I am happy Android now allows setting your own DNS - you are no longer restricted to Google DNS. I am waiting for X-Privacy to be made available for Android 9.
Apple products are not an option for me. It's Linux, Windows and Android in my world.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17779757
This is stored offline on the device.
Their lack of presence in social media will hurt them in the long term. In Facebook you upload pictures, you like stuff, you spend more time on someone's profile, you hover more on an ad even if you don't click all these while you are logged in. Google doesn't have that graph unless they link gmail with search. No one logs into Google search and give their identity, but we do pretty much the same in Facebook.
Google has that information from the contacts of all Android phones, Google Photos, etc. Granted they don't probably have the information from iPhones, but then a lot of people don't have or use their FB account too.
> No one logs into Google search and give their identity
No one here. Most of the non-tech people (and some tech people) do log into Chrome and Google account, which means they are logged into Search too.
Not really. Manufacturers like Xiaomi (and I believe Samsung) use their own cloud to sync stuff.
> "Most of the non-tech people (and some tech people) do log into Chrome and Google account"
That is the recent change right? Like said, google seems desperate to get into that information graph.
Or something.
[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/
Is there an open, or at least more private, app that can give me accurate traffic data?
A work around was to create a G Maps link on my phone with directions to an address (e.g., home).
But honestly, I took the plunge and carry around a feature phone now. Haven't missed the smartphone much.
It’s not just what Google knows about you. If your account is compromised, attacker may be able to download all historicsl information and share it with everybody.
Is it really unreasonable to expect any company, or Google specifically to decide "you know, home address and travel is more sensitive, let's provide some options to leave that out of ad tracking"?
Of course, I don't think this does much since they can get your address by other means.
Anyhow, giving them your actual home address is like filling out those secret security questions truthfully.
On the other hand, the data about online activity can be voluminous and private.
[1] https://www.whitepages.com/person
Besides Chrome 69, issues like this are not new, we are just taking a moment of "wait a minute, Google is bad? they also did X, Y, Z in the past"
In theory, there's microg, in reality, if you do a complete un-googling, most push notifications won't come through.
If you do want to try it:
- factory reset the phone to get rid of any google accounts
- root the phone
- get "System app remover (ROOT)"[^1]
- remove all google applications, except google play services and framework
- reboot
- remove remaining google applications
- reboot
- get xposed[^2] and fakegapps[^3] and hope it works
- get microG[^4], maybe through nanodroid[^5]
- pray for it to work
I managed to get this running once, not ever again on a marshmallow based devices, and even when it did, push notification were a lottery, they may or may not work.
[^1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jumobile.m... [^2]: http://repo.xposed.info/ [^3]: http://repo.xposed.info/module/com.thermatk.android.xf.fakeg... [^4]: https://microg.org/ [^5]: https://nanolx.org/nanolx/nanodroid
I've been trying to do this on my linux, so far, I failed; all the android emulators are extremely slow.
The company has rotted.
I heard employees quit when G merged the YT with "real name" accounts.
Personally I've had a real pain getting support for android development. Wrong and misleading documentation, rude forum moderators, no way to report a bug (they have a bug where Payments page will show errors -- in Incognito Chrome) -- on the admob site. Solution was to sign up for Adwords (how could I tell?) and check the page in Safari or sign into Adwords on Chrome. Shit documentation. Help your developers earn you money better, Google. And stop changing your UI. It looks like they have low-tier coders who get hired with not enough power to rock the boat so they roll out a UI re-vamp no one wants without bothering to fix systemic problems that repeatedly kill products, break products and have a completely INSULTING policy towards their developers. Admob: "You can't even complain to us without earning enough money.. here's a phone number.. it literally never connects." Why even bother? I interpret that they hate me. The feeling is mutual.
> And stop changing your UI. It
The Youtube UI just gets worse and worse. I can only imagine what it must be like for non-Youtube Red subscribers. The add playlist button now defaults to your last playlist, which for me 75% of the time is not the playlist I want. Then I have to wait a few seconds for a popup, click a button, then unselect the last playlist and tick a new playlist. Just to add a f'ing video to a playlist.
Its such a vile POS of a service.
Its hardly even worth my packets to type out all the ways its so bad. I feel like nobody in charge of YouTube actually even uses it for anything.
newsblur let's you organise things into subfolders too which is helpful
the other thing in going to start using is youtube-dl to download my watch later videos and then use something like emby or plex to watch them. maybe do the same with videos that I want to keep so I don't have to worry about then disappearing every second day
Movies are better served elsewhere, but there is a lot of things that you just can't find elsewhere.
But given that VLC can open a youtube link and yt-dl can grab most content, I'd love to build an app that has a proper UX.
I keep designing one in my mind - I should get around to at least proposing it to see what others think
I've seen such videos transform into [video removed] in custom playlists (which is infuriating to no end, you can't even know what the video was about to look it up somewhere else), maybe it causes videos to disappear from Watch Later entirely.
You can hold the button down ("long press") to get the playlist list instead of waiting for the popup to appear and pressing the button. It is of course still worse than it was before.
Problem is that it defaults to the last playlist I added to, making it unpredictable and inconsistent. It might make more sense if it always defaulted to "Watch Later" but still prompted to change it.
I only have around 5 playlists anyway (basically variants of "Watch Later" but sorted into vague categories).
There are a few glitches, but nothing you can't live with.
I'm not alone in this; others have made far more polished applications like https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube
Not to say Google isn't evil because they certainly seem to be headed to hell while holding us in a hand basket, but this one is legit.
Just to be completely fair, there's a balance to be had. I think Googlers are a very passionate group about many issues. That doesn't mean they know what's best for the company or the world.
If Googlers lead Google's business decisions, I think it would be a worse place. Firstly, developers are often very blind to privacy issues left on their own. Well-intentioned developers can cause a lot of trouble, as you can see from countless startups. Secondly, I think the realities of running a business are much more difficult than people want to believe, and sometimes you make tough decisions nobody wants but are truly in the best interest of the company.
To be fair I still do not agree with everything I've heard Google doing in the news, but those are outliers. The narrative given by blogs and media sometimes (maybe even unintentionally) makes everything feel like a giant scheme, but I'd advise you to apply Occam's razor as much as possible. The people making the decision you don't like could legitimately just not understand what the "big deal" is. We don't always have the necessary context to really judge something, and our inclination when filling in gaps rarely likes to be kind. The Chrome login fiasco is a great example of good intentions that went over poorly with people.
I try to stay neutral as much as possible when looking at issues, be they from Google or other entities. People make mistakes and misjudgements all the time, and people assume malice far too often it feels.
Not to mention the crapstorm happening with YouTube, censorship in docs, drive and who knows what else.
In the end, I'm not sure it won't collapse, leaving MS and Apple to reign the way things are going. It seems Google's leadership has taken a "show me the money" shift in focus.
Microsoft's was in the 90s in the os/browser wars.
Basically all those shops that never have any customers, yet pay thousands in rent.
(They are fronts for money laundering is the answer!)
I think yes. Google has been considered "evil" by the tinfoil hat crowd for quite some time, and once again it has become apparent to the mainstream that they were right.
[0] can't find actual quote, did I dream?
Quoth: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about”
https://www.eff.org/nl/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-sch...
I'm surprised that people keep being surprised about Google being just another company. Money first, money last.
it's almost as though the people with money benefit from marginalizing the people cynical enough to understand what they are doing.
Google, like facebook, was from origins designed to end up this way. It was not some organic complication of motives due to massive growth.
Relevant reading: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
I’m really curious, what did you think their business model was going to be given they have free services?
Surely the path they are on is the obvious one?
Google's direction is a pity really, as Apple needs a strong competitor in the mobile market to maintain innovation momentum.
There was no real tipping point - the media just noticed it's easy to get clicks if they repeatedly write about Google. Google was always Google and they had similar ethics for years now.
It's pretty much why you also see all the Google articles on this page (just like you saw all the FB bashing a few months ago which now disappeared). I believe Reddit community calls this group behaviour a "circlejerk". People posting same content to reinforce their opinion.
Now that Google's culture is focused on collective racial/gender justice, there's no oxygen left to put towards individual rights like privacy.
When the support person didn't have a handy solution, they just started making up reasons why my issue wasn't supported, going so far as to tell me I was required to purchase non-existent, google-branded hardware in order to accomplish what the previous support person had already walked me through.
The first support person showed me how to clear the application cache, and then walked me through the process off testing the bluetooth. I was very impressed. I hadn't actually intended to request support - I was just using the device's help system.
Except - it happens again, two days later, and clearing the cache and setting up the voice assistant every couple of days isn't much of a solution. I didn't expect a fix - mainly wanted them to let them know the solution wasn't working.
The second support person had me walk through the basic diagnostics and then tried to give me reasons why what I was trying to do wasn't possible. First, it wasn't possible at all, then it became impossible to do with all my specific bluetooth devices and finally, it became impossible without using google bluetooth gear. (I misspoke previously - these actually do exist).
Pushy, inexperienced, untrained and unsupported. And very clearly miserable and under the gun.
Years back I bought a Nexus and chose an engraving option. I got the phone and it wasn't engraved so I contacted Google mostly to make sure I wasn't going to be shipped multiple phones (after battling the various prevent you from contacting us bosses).
I mean, I bought the phone from them, from their site, with Google branding on it, paying Google, with a warranty theoretically provided by Google, etc. Eventually someone responded giving me the phone number for HTC. No, you contact HTC, Google.
That was the last voluntarily purchased Google device I bought. I did get a couple more Nexus phones for development purposes, but did so begrudgingly. The Pixel line of phones and tablets...not a chance in the world.
I think the relationship was similar for the LG and Huawei Nexuses, but Google is now the "manufacturer" for the Pixel line, so hopefully things have improved.
But doesn't Google in particular have a reputation for nonexistent or terrible support? It's not part of their culture, everything is a beta and it's no big deal if it doesn't work right?
An open phone cannot come fast enough. It may well be even buggier at first but if it's like my experience with Linux over the last 17 years it will only get steadily better since the developer's incentives are actually largely aligned with mine.
In fact, during one of the last big windows 10 updates something failed for me in carrying the license over and they took time to investigate the incident in order to determine how to prevent it again for future updates.
the thing that surprised me was they _cared_ that something was wrong and were _interested_ in fixing to and preventing it happening again. Been a while since I dealt with a company that did that.
Actually, thinking about it I should probably switch to companies that do care about this stuff.
The service felt nothing less than amazing. All for a US10 purchase on a single Windows 10 machine.
It has always been the plan, it's literally their business model.
More precisely:
> The very fact that Google invented MapReduce, and Microsoft didn’t, says something about why Microsoft is still playing catch up trying to get basic search features to work, while Google has moved on to the next problem: building Skynet^H^H^H^H^H^H the world’s largest massively parallel supercomputer. I don’t think Microsoft completely understands just how far behind they are on that wave.
People were joking about Google ingesting all the data they could to build an AI, 12+ years ago.
I read some essays by Paul Graham, started my own business, and never listened to some faceless entity above me making bad decisions again.
I hope you don't put up with this nonsense.
Are you able to elaborate more? Google' internal culture (specifically the whole internal mailing list argument culture) fascinates me.
yet nothing has changed due to all of the "internal uproar" we are constantly told about.
nothing at all.
The prime issue under discussion here is that google demands you turn on location tracking to use a feature, not that they do any kind of clicktrails.