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Comment by bbctol | Hacker News Reader

What I want mainly from Google is more and easier ways to customize my level of privacy. The article touches on the EFF's stance against incognito modes briefly, but it's an important one; I don't want lack of monitoring to be something I start a separate session for, with a logo of a creepy dude implying I should use this only for spying and pornography. I'd like to get as close as possible to an assistant that remembers relevant data on where I go and how long it takes, but ignores my browsing history to psychologically manipulate me into buying things--of course, that needs a different revenue model.

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Does https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols?pli=1 do what you're asking for? It's fairly fine-grained.

I love that this uses 'pause' vs 'stop', 'off', 'disable' 'deactivate'.

Your location history tracking is paused..

There is a difference between 'the user requested to deactivate the service', and 'the user paused the service', he may or may not wish to continue using it, gray area right?

It can probably save them from a legal mess if they 'resume' it in future updates.

As was mentioned below, in Google's case I'm particularly looking for ease of use and a UI that lets me turn things on and off quickly and intuitively. That might sound odd, as if I care deeply enough about my privacy to complain about it, but not enough to quickly switch the settings on my Google account, but I do think it matters.

The more specific work I need to go through to set up my privacy, the less inclined I am to do it. If I didn't think I was able to be manipulated psychologically in this way, well, I wouldn't worry about advertising at all! If I were to ever do something politically dissident/personally embarrassing on the internet (not that I ever have of course) I'd go to the trouble of ensuring encryption and being hard to track, but I think it's important that I'm able to say to Google "Hey, I'm cool with you telling me when I should check off work to hit the bar, but it's super weird that you know what I should get my Mom for Mother's Day."

Of course, the simplest way of making a system that's both fine-grained and intuitive might involve... more AI, so I'm not sure how to crack that issue.

Did you check that link? It looks fairly intuitive to me. Given that I'm having a hard time parsing your response. However if there's some specific setting in there that's not available, that would make sense.

I think each individual action is fine, but I don't understand how it's easy to manage privacy as a whole. Each aspect of privacy is separate, and can be finely customized in one particular way per session. There's no way to set different arrangements of settings for different times, or even just a button on mobile to whack that indicates "Ignore my data for the next few minutes."

Those are good ideas.

The link above is very intuitive. One toggle disables search history in all Google products, another one removes location history, etc. You can also click on "Manage activity" for more fine-grained details in some apps.

My experience is that Google app and system updates have a tendency to force/trick/nag you into giving up privacy.

As example, the old weather widget from Google's "News & Weather" was replaced by Google Now. That provided a similar experience for some time but then stopped working with another update that required search history to be enabled and/or some other setting in privacy control.

Also the launcher integrated Google with a system update(Moto G line of phones). I have since replaced launcher, browser, search app (all with open source replacements), weather app (with a paid service). Convenience has suffered...

Indeed; after a time they required search history to be turned on in order for commuting traffic information to be supplied, which was not initially the case.

At that point I turned it on but deleted* the search history each day, until such point as they changed the delete controls to be more of a nuisance.

I now use DuckDuckGo and an iPhone instead.

* Or so their site claims.

You shouldn't have to spend that much time managing your privacy.

I think eventually they add so many capabilities and so many fine-grained controls and it becomes impossible to manage the UI or to find the right options. Even looking at the settings for Android privacy / settings, it's pretty hard to find anything.

This is by design, so that the majority of users are confused and leave the defaults as is, enabling Google to do whatever they like.

> logo of a creepy dude implying I should use this only for spying

I never thought of that before. But, what a subtle way for Google to dissuade people from using a tool that could impact their revenue.

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