Google account activity
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
The icing on the cake is that the whole thing takes a bit of time to load (showing you a gear much reminiscent of the old "Flash intro" days)--all to load some sort of header with ugly colored balls that move around when you move the mouse.
It's 1997 all over again, folks. Only I would have never expected Google, of all companies, to fall into the eye candy trap.
I'm sure some of these came about organically, but they all contribute to moving from a publishing model (web 'pages') to an application model. Basically Google is making the web into an application, but like modern DRM in games, you have to be 'online' signed into google all the time to use it.
Make it personal 1:1 with google by killing proxies (require TLS like in Spdy), kill pages by requiring scripting. Result is a Ubisoft for the web. This is I think pretty clearly the destination that Google is pushing towards.
Also, proxying works fine for SPDY: http://dev.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-proxy.
"It's because people like interactive content". And Google put '+' into everything because 'people like social', not some plan to compete with Facebook.
"some conspiracy to DRM their corporate advertising blog." Because clearly I was talking about a single blog.
"proxying works fine for SPDY" A SPDY -> HTTP proxy. When there's a SPDY-to-SPDY caching proxy and no man-in-the-middle you might say it works fine.
...that's a lot of spin from a Google employee. Maybe I hit pretty close to the mark.
(As for SPDY proxies, I use one every day at work. I'm not sure why you are so concerned about the ability to proxy, but I assure you it works fine.)
I think you mean prestige.
(Actually, the design is pretty minimal. Big block of text that fits on the page without scrolling, and a few pieces of miscellaneous info on the right hand side. There, but not distracting. I can't really complain about the aesthetics of this design.
Balls that bounce around is not exactly the end of the world. Yes, you don't like it. Some other people apparently do. You read the article and discussed it anyway :)
You can say a lot of things about Google but they've got balls. :-)
The irony is even stronger than you realize, Google has been on a kick 'make the web fast' for a while, when they first kicked it off in 2010 I pointed out that most of my pageloads were hung waiting for doubleclick to load (which got fixed by the way, they are a lot faster now). So the notion of pushing a bunch of non-useful eye candy is kinda antithetical to that theme, but they do it anyway.
Perhaps their release process is broken, I have wondered what would change if they could make it a corporate priority that no Google generated page should take longer than 500mS to load on a 1Mbit connection. They could at least lead by showing best practices for fast loading web pages. Perhaps a current employee reading this will pass it along.
As far as best practices, I agree we need to do a better job of advertising this material. It is available:
https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-practices/rule... https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/rules
In fact, this entire site is worth spending some time one: https://developers.google.com/speed/
As for a blog software where you need JS to read a simple text, well... facepalm.
I'm not necessarily saying that this data is already compiled somewhere - but Google being a data-oriented company, they could most likely do all this if they really wanted to.
http://www.google.com/s2/search/social
https://www.google.com/settings/ads/onweb/
(not sure the links work, you get there through the dashboard)
In other words given all their options and incentive they don't seem to get any benefits from really exposing all the data they have about you. One can argue that is really they most precious resource.
They have some incentive to expose some to make you feel like you are somewhat in control and they are somewhat open and transparent.
"Data deletion at the data source, e.g. in your Web History will have no impact on issued reports, however reports can be deleted at any time"
As in - if you didn't know already, GOOG's Web History is a superficial front-facing report, all your personal data is happily sitting in GOOG's databases, is tracked, related, and available to whomever has the appropriate power to access it.
The question is what they mean with "issued reports". Are these reports that are being issued or reports that have been issued? It's a bit ambiguous, I think. But then again, English isn't my native language, so maybe I am just confusing some Grammar rules.
I signed up (my web history has been disabled for months) and I only have data about my OSes/emails/locations, nothing about search "Web History No activity found."
It can be easily extended to allow storing ~everything~ ('The idea is that we can rollback any damage done to your account' or 'We can help you identify everything potentially malicious a 3rd party did by storing every detail').
How do you differentiate between legit (my account, my data) deletion requests and the bad ones? Right. Not at all.
(Remember: most people are worried about protecting their information from their friends and family, not from some future Orwellian society. Google gives you tools to do both.)
Regarding the following statement: Your take seems a lot more sensible now. Still, I still don't feel that the matter's settled. If you claim that most people are worried about their petty problems of hiding their embarrassing search items from friends and family then I'd like to counter with the argument that the same 'most people' don't understand that removing one (the history listing) wouldn't remove the other (the data Google has).
Claiming that this wasn't the _intention_ is kind of hard. I'd say any layperson can expect that 'forget about X' or 'delete X' really purges the relevant data. That's what you're trained to believe. Even if the intention wasn't explicitly "I'm afraid of Google and want them to forget about my history":
Separating the data management like this is really just borderline abusive for casual users. Ask mom and dad if they expect that something is still stored and connected to their account if they remove it from the (browsing/web) history.
Ignore the "this".
When I was att CCC this winter I noticed that a russian ip had logged into my gmail. Turns out it was CCC who had rented a russian ip. Scared me quite a bit for a few hours and resulted in me changing my password.
I already re-checked that I have no forwarding addresses set; the addresses do not show up as autocomplete if I begin to type a message to one.
Could it just be a bug? The numbers are "14 emails sent", so not a huge amount, but I'm slightly disturbed by this and can't find any other clues yet.
One month, 1338 searches. That I was not expecting. I didn't realize I searched 50 times a day on average. I suppose it's not that high when I think about it but it caught me by surprise.
It's interesting that they map all of my IP addresses that I logged in from to the companies that own the IP blocks and show that to me when I mouse over the countries in the list.
OP link is returning a blank page.
Why do Google hate the web?
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...
Here's the relevant bit:
Today we’re introducing Account Activity, a new feature in your Google Account. If you sign up, each month we’ll send you a link to a password-protected report with insights into your signed-in use of Google services.