I guess I'll be the lone voice chiming in that I find this pretty useful. There's been a number of times I've been like "oh, what's that song I asked Google to identify a month ago?" or "what was that page I managed to find last year by searching about [x]?" that I've been able to remember via this tool.<p>Yeah, Google knows everything about me. C'est la vie. At least it's useful. What exactly is the threat model that everyone is operating under which prompts all the comments here?
On this subject <a href="https://myaccount.google.com/purchases" rel="nofollow">https://myaccount.google.com/purchases</a><p>Turning off all of the controls under myactivity won't stop Google from scanning your emails to track any purchases you make. The only way to stop that is to switch off of Gmail.
My new Pixel tracks songs that I've "listened to".<p>I saw a few odd ones that I had never heard of was sure I didn't listened to.<p>Until I realized ... it identified and logged songs in a movie my kids watched on a rainy day recently.
I'm not the most tin foil hat kind of person. I don't mind some of the tracking Google does as long as I know about it.<p>This url shocked me.<p>They apparently track every app I open and use on my Pixel phone. They had individual entries for when I skip a song in Google Music. I feel physically sick. I went through and deleted most of what I could and turned off tracking where I could.
Looks like they've removed the summary statistics in favor of a timeline. Still, it's nice to have it all searchable in one place. It also provides a nice place to check that I have all of the handy features turned on.
For a supposedly tech related group, I'm more surprised that you guys are surprised on whats being tracked. Yes Google has the ability to track A LOT because of the severvices most people use, but don't most people have an abundance of tracking and user metrics across their own product. I know every company I've worked at does the same.
<a href="https://www.google.com/maps/timeline" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/timeline</a> is a similar tool that I've used to recall the name of places I've been to. In particular, one really good taqueria in San Diego.
Pulled from the other thread, a way to delete all of your activity.<p><a href="https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity" rel="nofollow">https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity</a>
Arguments & discussions about google tracking you and how some products are crippled if you disable it (looking at you Maps!!) aside, they at least recently introduced a way for you to delete all the information here:<p><a href="https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity" rel="nofollow">https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity</a><p>Not many people know about this so spread the word!
The only real solution is to fill your history and your Gmail purchases with fake emails and fake clicks and fake purchases. If you add so much random data then there's no way Google can pick up anything useful.<p>I think the other tactic to defeat Google is to click on EVERY SINGLE AD you see. It will destroy their ad tracking capabilities and it will also destroy their business since they won't be able to tell what is a good click and what isn't. I've started doing this and I don't think there's anything else that can get them to stop actively violating our privacy.<p>Let me pay for my Gmail account. Let me pay for good support instead of automated decisions and getting kicked off the platform with no recourse. Otherwise I will render myself useless to your algorithms by changing my behavior so that algorithms won't be able to make sense of it.
while we are on that subject..<a href="https://www.google.com/maps/timeline" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/timeline</a>
Why do you guys care so much that google is tracking your purchases? They will just that use your own habits to give you more personalized ads or recommendations which is better than random ads not related to your own habits. How does it hurt you as a consumer?
This is great. Now I can see in a single place how YouTube mixes other people's history with mine. It seems I watched "Funny Dinosaurs in Poop Fight", "Poop Cartoon 04: Fried Sh*t" and "Pirate Pete's Potty: Potty Training Video for Toddlers" yesterday. Fun.<p>(I've been getting some other kid's watched videos in my history, and Google doesn't care about this kind of history mixing, my reports got me nowhere).
This goes deep. I see not only when I have used Instagram, but it knows which instagram profiles and direct messages I opened.<p>I'm using Android at the moment, of course.
I've been disabling JS and cookie for<p><pre><code> *.google.*/search
</code></pre>
and it worked really well. All this page shows is my youtube activity.
The recordings of my voice here from google home are rather scary.<p>There's a good second or two of recording time before I say the words "Hey, Google"... which means it's just always recording?!<p>I know practically speaking I should have known this, but I somehow assumed that nothing was being recorded until after the trigger word.
search history is useful. google should provide me "query suggestion" based on my social circle.<p>without collecting user data, google,/FB etc can't exist, they can't improve their services. As a user, I don't care much on the data they collect, as long as they follow law system in the country they operate. if these huge companies went beyond the control of the governments, then only the real problem starts.
This looks like fb comment page than a hacker news one.<p>So I just downloaded all of my search activity into nice JSON files, and now I am going to apply a bit of data science and magic stuff using Python and Node.JS and I will have a nice profile of myself for the past 11 years:<p>1) What kind of questions did I ask google? (beginning with how, when, where etc) - how do these questions connect to my personal and career development?
2) Apply some sentiment analysis using sentiment.js on the search terms and find out if the particular search term was positive, negative or neutral (this will give me a nice overview of my mood for each day I searched for the last one decade)
3) do some filtering and data massaging to pick out the exceptions (ok just a cursory look at the file helped me discovered a forgotten website project I did 10 years ago as part of college summer project - a work I am extremely proud of during that time and even now.) - which days, months, the year I searched the most (or what events triggered the searches - a breakup, a job search or a side project)
4) discover interesting patterns of my search profile (what I searched most during college time, after college when searching for a job, before marriage, after marriage etc.)
5) make a video on the lines of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU</a><p>so many f<i>cking brilliant things I can do with my data. But what? Google has a copy of the same too? </i><i>baby cry</i>* What am gonna do? In a larger scheme of things, my data profile is just too insignificant.<p>To quote from the front page of Hacker News post, "The second volume of “My Struggle”, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s enormous, maddening, brilliant autobiographical novels, contains some depressing life advice. “If I have learned one thing,” he sighs, “it is the following: don’t believe you are anybody. Don’t bloody believe you are somebody…Do not believe that you’re anything special. Do not believe that you’re worth anything, because you aren’t.”<p>Not worried if Google tracks a skipped song history or an irrelevant app install on the gazillionth device I own. More worried about google's anticompetitive behaviour (blocking youtube on edge chromium and more recently making jobs of ad blockers even difficult) and even more larger questions such as what if Google starts to non exists tomorrow? Life after Google?
Totally irresponsible. What if another person (colleague, family member, friend, spouse) opens this on <i>your</i> computer?<p>This should be opt-in, not opt-out!
It's honestly hilarious and sad to see so many commenters here defending and excusing Google because the services they provide are "free." Somehow Hacker News thinks this argument isn't applicable to Facebook. The truth of the matter is that both companies are committing huge privacy violations, but Google has managed to convince Hacker News and the US media (NYT in particular) that they aren't evil still. Good riddance to all of these companies.
"Visited YouTube Music
Served location-based recommendations
Temperature: Warm
Weather: Overcast"<p>Really? No wonder my recommendations suck so bad, why on earth would where I'm located impact what music I want to listen to?<p>Edit: extremely curious why this is being downvoted. Anyone care to comment?