You will be surprised to see how much Google tracks about you | Hacker News Reader

You will be surprised to see how much Google tracks about you

myactivity.google.com

135 pointsssahoo88 comments

This submission breaks the site guidelines egregiously by injecting pure clickbait into the title. We take aubmission privileges away from accounts that do that, so please don't do that again. Instead, (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, which includes: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

The idea is to take linkbait out. Adding it in is going the wrong way down a one-way street.

While I don't like clickbait I don't actually find this to be a very offensive case. It ties into the "oh wait, Facebook sells my data?" discussion pretty well. Also there are many other articles on HN that break the rule far worse, imo.

... though the actual page is disappointing. Better title would be See what data Google has about you. Preferably mentioning that it's just a link to "My Activity".

The solution is not to have more articles that break the rules; the solution is to tell us, by flagging or emailing hn@ycombinator.com, when there's a case we haven't seen. We change all the ones we see, or at least post an explanation like I did this time.

No, I won't. I've seen this page before and I've disabled a lot of the stuff that I'm uncomfortable with having them track. Google does a lot of shady creepy stuff, but I think just linking to your activity timeline doesn't add much value. How about writing a blog post about which items you found most surprising instead?

I do wish we had was better controls. For example, if you disable location tracking, Google Maps won't remember any address you visit. Why can't it be cached locally? If I regularly visit an address on my phone, it should be included in my autocomplete. I don't need cross-device history or tracking, I just want my damn phone to remember places I've visited previously without uploading it to the cloud. Taking an all-or-nothing approach seriously harms the user experience.

Despite it taking years, I've gradually been migrating away from my hard dependency on Google services. With that being said, if I were locked out of my gmail account I'd be seriously fucked. Maybe some day I'll reach the point where that's not the case.

What would alleviate your dependence on gmail? Maybe there's a product out there.

I'd be interested to hear how eg fastmail is or isn't an alternative for someone who feel locked-in to Gmail.

In my mind it's mostly a creepy and half-assed webmail provider with crappy imap support. But I've never really used Gmail all that much (because: creepy evil ad company and email is an obvious bad combination).

I've been working on webmail that only receives messages, doesn't send any. And I've been using it to signup on websites with, it works really well for the purpose because anything that ever arrives was sent by a computer.

I bring it up because it feels like that's a primary reason why people might be trapped on gmail is just that all the websites they are signed up on are linked to it.

I think the Google Maps annoyance after activity tracking is disabled is designed intensionally. To force users to give up the control with easy to click buttons.

I too dislike how many of Google's consumer services are being increasingly gated on the location history permission, which I too have disabled and which therefore means I can't use those services.

However, having worked at other parts of Google (not on Maps or location stuff), I'd guess at a much more prosaic explanation than that kind of conspiracy: the product managers / engineers / tech writers / UI designers don't want to maintain the complexity of both code paths and UX flows indefinitely if most users are happy to share their location server-side in exchange for the conveniences and features that enables.

You and I aren't happy to do that, but we on Hacker News aren't representative of most consumer-product Google users.

I find it interesting that the engineers' laziness may just happen to translate to an "evil" win for the company.

> I too dislike how many of Google's consumer services are being increasingly gated on the location history permission, which I too have disabled and which therefore means I can't use those services.

Huh? Google Maps works fine for me despite having disabled location services. It nags me nearly everytime I open the app to "enable location services to proceed", making it sound as though it is required, but I just click "No" and get on with it. Haven't noticed any missing features.

One example of a Google consumer service that needs location history is the Google Assistant. on my Google Pixel phone, that has fully replaced the older non-Assistant OK Google system which didn't require location history.

I kinda want to move away from Google Services but wow, some of them will be hard to replace.

Google search has been awesome for me when logged in, Maps is irreplaceable; as well as Inbox :/

Maps is the only thing I rely on - I would be welcome for a replacement.

On Android there is OSMand and Openstreetmap in general. The only problem being that address search is not great and there is no context search. You can get an app called AddresstoGPS, which anonymously queries Google's search and let's you output GPS coordinates to OSMand or similar.

As for Google Mail - There are many great E-Mail hosters like ProtonMail, coupled with your favorite E-Mail client it has no downsides, unless you miss tight Google Products integration.

I have just installed OSMAnd to give it a try but well; there is a lot of features to cover :

- navigation

- address search (not the first time I hear it is awful in OSM)

- pictures of places

- live traffic data, both streets and public transportation

- great search (like gyms near me)

- colored points of interest on the map. Kind of an hidden feature but that's immensely useful when you know it is there and you don't know the city you are in.

- reviews

It might take 5 or 6 apps to replace it entirely.

As for inbox, their spam filter is top notch and I like the automatic tagging system.

edit : just started trying OSMAnd, wow it is extremely laggy on my high end phone.

Ye, it is not as smooth in scrolling as GMaps, though more feature rich. If this bothers you, there is an app called Maps.Me. it is minimalistic, has smooth scrolling like Gmaps but not as feature rich as OSMand and has a non-free (as in freedom) map data service behind it.

But if performance of osmand bothers you, this is the place to go.

First I've heard of Maps.Me, did a quick test of the adverts+binaries removed fork on F-Droid ('Maps') and it looks good.

>non-free (as in freedom) map data service

As in, it's all OSM data but not directly from their servers? Or is maps.me adding extra some extra info to the displayed map?

When you download map data from Maps.me, it loads them from the maps.me servers. But that's to be expected. openstreetmap.org isn't going to be hosting those files. Maps.me also includes some hotels from booking.com

Thanks, I see the hotels now - they're also the first thing on the discover page (binoculars icon).

I wonder if OSMand could make use of maps.me code to speed up their rendering - or perhaps it's not possible without cutting out information/features.

For gmail, what you really need is to own your own domain. Not every expensive, and once you do, you can move your mailbox wherever you want.

Not surprising at all. I've been actively logging into Google and confirming my visits at various restaurants. I've been using it to track my past activities, and I hope it can provide more accurate restaurant recommendations for me. It has been quite useful. Video recommendations on Youtube are also way more accurate than any other service I've ever seen. If you don't mind sharing your personal data, you do get better service over time.

>you do get better service over time.

Awesome, now you're stuck in a bubble where serendipity will no longer play a role in you stumbling upon interesting videos you NEVER thought you'd like, same for restaurants, websites and who nows what more?

On a more serious note, I'd argue that you do not get a better service, your profile becomes near to perfect and your experience online, and increasingly offline, will stagnate.

I think Google is doing this right. Yes they're not showing you everything they know and yes the UI could be a lot better but fundamentally I feel like I'm in control here. I know Googles business model means selling me as a product to advertisers but they give me a lot of value in return with search and maps, and they're allowing me here to control on what basis advertisers can target me.

The only thing missing is Google paying me something for this data - as I'm the "head of a family" and the main earner, I believe the ability to influence me is worth more than the value I'm getting back from Google. I choose whether my kids get Android phones or iPhones for example...

I actually think they deserve some credit for putting this page together. It helps you understand what they’re collecting and gives you an easy way to turn the tracking off.

If you clicked the link and found the amount of information they have on your surprising, and now feel a bit violated, then good; you should.

You'll probably try to do a bit of research and try to figure out how to opt out of all this and protect yourself. And you should. But you shouldn't just stop there.

Many of the people who are reading this right now are responsible for designing and implementing systems that collect massive amounts of data. I implore you to not just think about your own privacy moving forward, but the privacy of your users. Security and privacy should be two of your top level concerns when designing systems, not just tack-ons.

Simply hating of Google/Facebook/$$$Corp for invading your privacy and not doing anything to rememdy the general poor state of privacy in the modern connected world when you have the power to do so is hypocritical.

Next time you're given a project that has PII and the security user story gets deprioritized, raise it as an issue. Aside from being the right thing to do, many places, such as Canada and California, are looking at GDPR-like regulations. So it makes sense to do it now instead of later.

And if you're going to argue that it's hard, and it's time consuming, and you're a startup just trying to get on their feet so you can't be bothered, then consider that you may be part of the reason we find ourselves in this sorry state.

/rant

They're also excluding vastly more information than they know about you - they're only showing your activity on Google properties, but not your activity on sites which use Google Analytics or Google Ads.. which is most of them.

Blocking Google Analytics is a good antidote against it collecting any data on you. Block it at the router, in the hosts file and by using adblockers (which also block other analytics "services").

I was shocked the first time I realised that Google stores all you search queries by default. Typing things in a website seemed like a private activity, and all of a sudden, it wasn‘t. Years of history, mostly mundane, some queries mildly embarrassing, and a few that I really wanted to keep to myself.

I deleted all the data, immediately, logged out of Google, and started to reduce my reliance on Google. I switched to Fastmail for Email, use Duckduckgo for searches, and I try to use a variety of routing apps, even though none are as good as Google Maps.

I‘ve become paranoid with regard to form fields on the web. I stopped trusting websites. I use an incognito tab for Facebook, hoping that‘ll stop them from correlating my day to day browsing with my profile. I stop myself before I type a name into the search box, worrying that the algorithm would draw conclusions...

> they store my search history

by default they also remember every time you open what app and where exactly you go.

i know because they can show me where i've been and which apps i've used. I let them collect the data because those are things I am interested in as well.

I'm not surprised. But then again does Google give that data to some shady app a friend of me has installed? I don't think so.

As an iPhone user I’m really not surprised by any of the data “in my file” – google maps queries, google queries, and YouTube videos.

It makes sense that Facebook gets all your call data and Google knows things like what apps you have when your operating system allows it.

If I were in charge of Hacker News I'd occasionally make posts like this and quietly ban users who up-voted them. The post title effectively translates to "You are an idiot that doesn't belong here."

I think upvotes should more resemble "let's discuss this" rather than "I agree with this".

Interesting. Any idea if the significance of the up-vote is explained somewhere officially?

Do any other big tech companies offer interfaces like this?

Hopefully it'll become more common with GDPR...

The most frightening thing about the data Google collects is location history. It was a real wake-up when I realised they use that data to map real life social networks. They know everyone you've bumped into every day, how long you talked to them for, who you've had a one night stand with. Your daily routines, who your friends are, and more, which all can be discovered just by analysing location history.

Them knowing what your favourite coffee shop is or where you work and live is just the tip of the iceberg.

I used to be a very heavy and trusting Google user. It started to get a little bit uncomfortable when I noticed an alert on my phone notifying me that there was a restaurant nearby that I might like to try. It occurred when I had 30-40 minutes to spare, it was a restaurant that indeed looked interesting to me, and was within a 5 minute walk. Yes that's useful but my conclusion was that this company knows way too much about me. It didn't make me comfortable when Google alerted me about flights I never explicitly told it that I was taking, and offered suggestions about how to get to the Airport that suited my routine.

How did you minimize your usage of Google? Most of the smart phones are juggle between Apple and google? Where do you go for research questions and topics?

Google is not making it easy to avoid Google but I've done what I can to cut them out of my life. My smartphone is a custom build of Lineageos, clear of any closed source Google code, I don't use gmail or any other Google services and block Google cookies.

There are alternative mobile OS options, such as LineageOS or Plasma Mobile.

There is also NextCloud, which has an impressive number of apps that could help make getting off of Google easier.. mail, calendar, contacts, notes, drive, xmpp chat, video chat, trello clone, password manager, music player....

Collabora can also be installed to give an alternative to Docs / Sheets / etc..

Most of spying comes on behalf od google framework, that comes with google play. LineageOS wont solve that (actually they refused changes that would allow replacing google framework with microg) but a fork of it will. They are reimplementing oss, google compatible framework, also your battery will last ~30% longer (no battery drain due to google spying).

https://lineage.microg.org/

To use google play store, find yalp explorer.

Why google framework is a problem and why bother with microg? Android developers are using calls to it and without it, half or even more apps would break. Microg implements those calls and fakes electronic signatures of google binaries to keep them working.

That’s funny, I just enabled location sharing with friends in gmaps, and I enjoy the timeline view where I can click a day on the calendar and it shows everywhere I have been.

1. Open chrome settings

2. Go to content settings add domain encrypted.google.com

3. disable javascript & cookie on this domain.

4. Search exclusively on encrypted.google.com

5. Download adblocker and disable all google ads.

Google can't track no shit. I reviewed https://myactivity.google.com/item and all I can see is youtube browsing history.

I see Google have a business case for turning Google.com into an SPA...

That would only trap up the arms race. It would also rob Google of one of its advantages being its "simple" interface (although this is something they've been doing to themselves already by adding all sorts of unnecessary scripting to the search page - at least it still works with JS disabled, this in contrast to many other sites).

The core functionality of encrypted.google.com has been incorporated into the Google search homepage. Those visiting this URL after April 30, 2018 will be redirected to https://www.google.com.

ipv6.google.com then.

I am pretty sure google has some more subdomains to block.

You don't think Google doesn't link searches from the same IP address and user agent strings together even without a cookie?

Adblocker is great though.

Is there surprising or troubling stuff on others’ feeds that I’m not seeing on mine? Mine is just a list of searches I’ve made while logged in on Google products: maps, search, etc.

I was expecting to see something less obvious, like location data that I didn’t explicitly or knowingly share with Google.

If you go to "Other Google activity" via the sidebar you can find Location History, Device Information, Google Play Sound Search History and some other stuff.

All three are empty, at least in the last 2 weeks. I would expect there to be some location history, since I use google maps logged in all the time, but nope.

I'm guessing you've turned the collection off. They'll be at least smart enough not to show you if they still collect it.

Based on my tracking of what google services does on your phone, what google shows to you is far from all what google knows about you, they have set those pages as a PR, to calm down users and only throwed in some peanuts. After GDPR kicks in, I will officialy request the infomation from them and compare those data with the data I know were sent to their servers. Next thing is article and official complain to EU authorities. This madness must stop.

Btw, my profile exported few kilobytes of data. Beat that ;)

I'll look out for the HN submission.

I was surprised to see that they track every app I open on my phone. Anyone know if that can be disabled?

Same here. WTF! That's some next level bullshit. How does even Apple allow that? They must be leveraging a phone API because it's tracking the name of the binary. So not only Google has access to this data but virtually any app installed in my phone.

It's not an Android phone?

No. iPhone.

As a follow up, it's pretty easy to disable. Just click the blue slider on the site linked under app and web.

I find it devious that they bundle Web and App activity. I get value from tracking my Web activity on all devices. But tracking every time I click on app launcher, every app I use-this is creepy. You can't turn off app tracking separately

Its funny how I regularly have to visit this page and delete new stuff.

This time it shows my activity on the Google Play developer console all the way back to a couple of years ago. That wasn't there last time I went to empty their spy machine trashcan.

Have you tried just pausing history instead? https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols

That's what I've done. Someone recently mocked me for using DDG instead of google and I explained that I did it to keep my data store shown by this link empty. I check regularly to make sure nothings new is turned on. Happy to always find it empty.

No searches, no location, no device data, no Youtube history, no suggestions, no synchronised data... ghee, it is almost as if not using that Google account other than for accessing a Gmail account (which I only use for backup purposes) and blocking those cookies works...

It might be interesting to know that I use many Android devices, phones and tablets both. As those things all run without proprietary Google bits, Google does not have anything interesting to show me. I might miss out on some potentially handy services but that is a small price to pay for keeping my devices and my data under my control.

I tend to not be logged in for the times I use their search engine. This is easily achieved by using the tab containers in Firefox. So for my mail, I'm logged in in a tab container. So when I go searching at their search engine, I just press Ctrl-t to open a tab (which isn't the same container as I'm logged in) and search.

I was surprised of how little data they had just by doing this.

What surprises me the most is how much stuff on there - while maybe factually true - is actually wrong. "1 card in your feed; Sports - viewed" No I didn't, at least not knowingly. "Viewed Gmail ads ", I checked my mail, yes, but I couldn't tell if there were ads or whether I looked at them.

The "okey google" while screen of had some very funny recordings of me there from my former pixel. I did turn it off but for some reason it had snippets of me saying "fucking frying pan shit" and "no the hot dogs there suck" in Swedish. That's not really close to "okey google" at all...

Hello

By using something like this: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

I have effectived block lots of analytic service. I can see how well it works when I open Chrome Dev Tool aand see bunch of console error due to js tracking fail to load.

I recently started actively using profiles feature in Chrome. At first because it was convenient to keep each profile on each own KDE activity, but after awhile I started to use separate profiles for anonymous browsing, testing various chrome extension testing, throwaway-ish social accounts, etc.

Highly recommend it - super convenient.

I disabled most of it 12 months ago, not just because of privacy but because they were continually in my face attempting to make the data useful through google now. Through no prompting google worked out where I lived and would "notify" me of my commute time every morning, except it didn't realize I was taking PT and traffic didn't affect me. Every time I had lunch at the train station it would notify me of train delays, even though I wasn't catching the train and had already left the station. More than once it notified me of a delayed flight that wasn't really delayed. So all the data I was giving to google was a net negative to me.

Disabling everything is only the start though because google does a really poor job of actually respecting this. The maps app is constantly prompting me to re-enable the tracking. I'm forever one dark pattern or one urgent "just f-ing work" instance away from re-enabling this tracking. For most cases It's easier to give up google products entirely rather than be eternally and infallibly vigilant when I use my phone.

I found this summary of what they track (or what you can export) pretty succinct. https://twitter.com/iamdylancurran/status/977559925680467968

Huh, I guess I was surprised.

It's exclusively Youtube, which I use logged in to get the benefit of history tracking. Every so often I clear my history, but apparently searches (again... Youtube searches, there's nothing else here) don't get cleared when you do that.

I see no real problems here.

I use gmail and search for stuff. That is about it. And because of that, I only log in like once a day into gmail, check mails and log out. Why would I want to stay logged in after that? This site only showed me that it knows nothing about me which is intended.

I see my Youtube views. Shortly after getting my first Android phone, I got creeped out by a link like this (and the phone's "helpful" suggestions for products and services) and asked them to stop tracking everything that I could find an option for.

I delete my Google activity every few weeks. This allows usage of features which they require you to enable tracking for, but keeps your information relatively private in the long term. It'd be nice to have this done automatically somehow.

I remember stumbling upon a grey background google menu on my... droid whatever and disabling all of this. Very creepy. Looks like it's still holding the preference after at least two new phones. I like that part.

Stop using sites that collect and/or sell your data. Good email replacement is TutaNota or ProtonMail. Good search engine replacement is DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo may be the best non-Google search engine but it's nowhere near anything even remotely resembling a "good" Google replacement. There is no such thing.

Given that I have no Google account, they won't say.

But that's actually protecting my privacy, so hey.

I find it amusing to trawl through all the .wav files of me activating the google assistant.

Isn't the real question: how much data does Google sell about you?

Tracking each area of Google maps I look at was surprising.

What's that supposed to be? A pitch ala "But LOOK, Google is collecting data, too, not just me, Facebook!"

Facebook has nothing on Google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com