Honestly I'm mostly fine with Google providing me services and skimming a bit of info on me in exchange, but I do find it annoying that after a recent update to Photos, my phone asks me every time I take a photo if Google can "have it" for Maps. Fuck you Google, no you can't.
Somehow it's quite different to know they want to take something from my phone and make it public, vs. just using some metadata for their statistics. At least they ask first. But it really does feel rather "stalky" after the 5th time or so it's happened.
Is it really a "bit of info" though? Or is it your complete physical movements made with your phone, every web address you type in, every website you travel to (and search for) from Google search, every site you are are shown an adsense ad upon, your detailed browsing habits via Google Analytics, the entire contents of messages transcribed by Google Now, every app you purchase and use...
They appear to have controls to limit how this data is used today - a very good thing. However, we also have to trust every employee at Google now and in the future, as well as any company which Google subcontracts out to now and in the future, and any company which may eventually acquire Google, (not even thinking about Governments) to also respect our privacy with regards to this data.
if thats the price for all of googles services, I'm down with it! the data collection, or rather the advertisment it enables, is what is paying for all that android development and searchengine servers etc.
That said it would be a cool idea to have a "google premium" where you pay a fee every month to keep all your data to yourself and don't recieve any ads
> if thats the price for all of googles services, I'm down with it! the data collection, or rather the advertisment it enables, is what is paying for all that android development and searchengine servers etc.
That not only completely destroys some of your fundamental rights, but also creates a selective pressure to force others to do the same.
meh, still better than developing a OS and a searchengine by myself! if I thought otherwise I wouldn't use any of google's services. neither should you if you are so concerned by the data they collect. checkout pwniephone, duckduckgo and hushmail: your data will no longer belong to google!
Can they connect my google searches on my PC with those on my phone? Are they able to identify maps stuff coming from the same phone as my searches? Are they also able to collate incognito searches?
I'm not exactly hugely bothered - but I assume not being signed into google limits them to cookie based aggregation?
Yes and yes, respectively. They openly correlate your physical presence in retail shops with your web browsing, so as to count web-to-physical conversions for that shop's advertising.
The latter two (piercing the Incognito veil) are technically straightforward, but I doubt they do it. Google is pretty tightly bound by a certain set of ethics. By their lights, that creepy McDonalds experience is totally OK, but ignoring explicit privacy settings is not legit.
This is why they bother with dark patterns like making it inconvenient - but not impossible - to turn off Google Play's access to location data. They could just ignore you, but they won't. I'd bet they do collect and keep the information for some time [eg for anti-abuse], but deliberately don't use it. (And consequently feel very proud of how ethical they're being, compared with others in their industry, and how terribly unfair it is when people complain about them but not the sleazier ad networks.)
As I see it, the "advertising creepiness" problem has two factors. One is black-hats explicitly extracting information you're not sharing (eg Evercookie, canvas fingerprinting and friends). The other is grey-hats like Google, Facebook and MS, whose access to that data is perfectly legitimate in that you gave them permission (what, you didn't click through the three small buttons within 30 days to withold your WhatsApp contacts from Facebook? Too bad!), but whose market dominance and dark patterns make giving them that data less and less of a free choice. Conflating the two is easy but unhelpful.
If you're not signed in, the connection may not be explicit. But with a minimal amount of effort, they could easily connect the two. If you've ever used your phone on your home's WiFi, at a minimum they'll have a high degree of correlation via the IPs.
I'm of the opinion that if they can extrapolate your age, ethnicity, gender, location, health, and "interests", then they can easily join two "disconnected" profiles.
I've disabled GPS on my Android device, but there is no way to turn off all location tracking on a cell-based device. Google may still have a strong indication of location information based on IP data and cell tower geocoding databases, particularly in conjunction with known WiFi location maps.
But on the other side: you cannot turn off requests for location information to be requested repeatedly on browsers or devices. Firefox (my primary mobile browser) surfaces dialogs for this information repeatedly. Every last fucking update of Google Maps, until I deleted and disabled the application in frustration, demanded location information.
So you'll still be bombarded with requests, and you've only got to fuck up once for the direct link to be re-enabled.
And despite that, you can be tracked to within a fraction of a km, and often to within meters, by other means.
They still track what IP you connect from, and can correlate this to a physical address. I can connect to google and get search results tailored to my physical location, even if location services is not allowed for their site.
Interestingly, that prompt has made me more likely to take pictures of the outside of a location to share. I think that suggests it is likely that it is working for their purpose, which is to add tons of photos of obscure locations.
I understand the prompt I get from Maps that I'm visiting a location and adding a shot could be helpful, especially when volunteering as a "Local Guide", but IIUC the GP is talking about taking private shots in the Photos app and being prodded into putting it online? That's a bridge too far on the intent because the process is just not the same.
Spot on. And they don't provide a "never ask me again" button, as far as I can remember. (I can't check without driving off into the country side and taking a photo to verify...)
To be clear though it is when I take a photo with the Camera app, and I think it's Maps that detects this and asks me. But it's automatic, amounts to the same thing. It may be because I live in a country with relatively fewer tourists so perhaps their photo count around here is lower. (Chile. There are definitely tourists, but it's just not Europe.)
Maps --> Hamburger menu --> Settings --> Notifications --> Your contributions --> Turn off the slider for "Adding your photos" and/or "Adding the first photo"
I think I've managed to switch it off now but my phone started prompting me to tag and share every photo I took at home with the name of a business that used to be based in a building nearby. Highly annoying, especially as there is no business there and hasn't been for several years AFAICT.
But also yah - my photos, in my home, get out of it.
What a lot of people don't realize is that commercial use of the Google Maps API is super expensive. $10,000/month even for something pretty simple and small scale. I was pretty unhappy to come across that price tag on a recent project knowing that all of these street view captchas for Google are just free labor for them to profit from.
It's similar to Waze (another Google owned company). On my iphone, most apps allow you to give location permission with three tiers of access: 1) Always, 2) Only when I'm using the app, 3) Never. I'm ok with them using my data when I'm using their app. It's a trade. But Waze went and limited the options to 1) Always or 3) Never. Letting some app know where I am at all times is unbelievable. This was the point I was most thankful for the my phone's permissions granularity. None of that opt-out BS.
Furthermore, the Maps TOS is one that demands the sort of indefinite total picture use rights that everyone complained about to have changed for fb, Flickr etc.
Probably. One day I'll have to spend half an hour digging in to the settings in Camera, Photos and Maps to disable it. I tend not to take the time when I'm out in the countryside on vacation, which is when it happens.
Somehow it's quite different to know they want to take something from my phone and make it public, vs. just using some metadata for their statistics. At least they ask first. But it really does feel rather "stalky" after the 5th time or so it's happened.