Even Google engineers are confused about Google’s privacy settings

There&#x27;s a usability aspect to this.<p>If you disable location services for Yelp, it&#x27;s pretty unfriendly -- it chooses to make it as difficult as possible for you to use the app to get you to turn location back on. The Google approach for Maps is more pragmatic IMO -- lower resolution location data makes sure I don&#x27;t get a McDonald&#x27;s in Finland when I&#x27;m in Kentucky.<p>The hard thing is that I don&#x27;t want Yelp, Google, etc tracking my movements in a 10-meter radius forever, but I want location from a contextual perspective. I don&#x27;t think you can do that without meaningful policy controls outside of your local computer.

I noticed fairly recently that YouTube has undeniably started tracking my watch history even though I&#x27;ve had watch and search history turned off forever, and it&#x27;s still turned off with (apparently) no data in it.<p>On the front page, there are constantly recommendations of videos which I have just watched (not liked, commented, only watched). Old, new, whatever. Videos which would be quite random if I hadn&#x27;t just watched them.<p>I stopped using Chrome a long time ago after similar observations of how it tracks usage. Good thing I don&#x27;t really do anything sensitive with YouTube.

I&#x27;ve tried to follow the links from the article and eventually came across this document [0]<p>What the attorney general Brnovich references are emails which shows google engineers are aware that people are confused by the settings. The specific example in this case is that your location is still tracked if you enabled Web &amp; App Activity, but disabled Location.<p>The emails show the google engineers aren&#x27;t surprised why users would expect a different result. The main reason people are confused, the google engineers think, is because google doesn&#x27;t display they are still being tracked in their timeline (in this specific case).<p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;m biased against google, but hope I kept it factual.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beta.documentcloud.org&#x2F;documents&#x2F;20385394-arizona-v-google-exhibits-212-227#document&#x2F;p14&#x2F;a2001255" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;beta.documentcloud.org&#x2F;documents&#x2F;20385394-arizona-v-...</a>

This quote basically disproves the phrase Sundar repeatedly parroted to Congressional members about making it easy for people to configure their privacy settings. You can bet this quote is going to be read to his face if there&#x27;s another hearing.<p>The author of the statement was redacted in the public version, but my bet is if that is still a current employee, they won&#x27;t be for much longer. Because this quote is going to hang over Google for the rest of this process.<p>And as many Google people are probably being reminded this week: Assume all of your work emails may some day be public, and used against you or your employer in a court of law.

I used to be pretty much in favour of opt-out for stuff like this, but I think at this point the industry itself has managed to prove that it can’t be trusted with anything but legislation guaranteeing opt-in.

This isn&#x27;t a surprise. Google is a huge company with probably hundreds of teams working on these things. The fact that the privacy settings can be figured out at all is a bit of a miracle.<p>I doubt the privacy settings are &quot;designed&quot; as much as it is a bunch of disparate teams working on it together with maybe somebody coordinating it.

Some sensible government intervention would be nice. Into Google and most of these tech giants, actually. Who ever thought that our cyberpunk future would be such a lame and mundane dystopia.

These dark patterns around location tracking was what finally made me give up on Android. I knew Google tracked location even when the location setting was turned off, so I had App &amp; Web activity disabled.<p>As Google bricked more and more functionality to dis-incentivize disabling that setting, they dis-incentivized me right off the Android platform and off of the rest of their services.<p>They did me a favor, really. I was far too naive about them prior to that wake-up call.

To be frank, the entire thing around &quot;privacy checkup&quot;, and the way settings are presented to users to allow them to control what they want to share and what not to, is so damn confusing. I tried following my Privacy Settings, and every now and then, Google seems to revise&#x2F;change existing settings by introducing new sharing settings, which are turned on by default.<p>Honestly, all of this seems to be a false painting to calm down Congress folks and other legal entities alongside users who are either amateur or those that &quot;don&#x27;t care&quot; so that things don&#x27;t blatantly look evil.

Nothing is stupid, it works for someone. It&#x27;s called a &quot;dark pattern,&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;darkpatterns.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;darkpatterns.org&#x2F;</a>) and it&#x27;s by design.<p>Can pretty much guarantee the accountability for the design decisions goes to a &quot;consensus,&quot; from a series of informal meetings, with no individual ownership, because that&#x27;s also by design. I&#x27;m not involved with this at all, but having spent time in many different organizations as a consultant, this is very much a common strategy.

Hopefully Google is forced to follow Apple&#x27;s lead and implement consent dialogs into Android to allow&#x2F;deny tracking or usage of any form of identifier&#x2F;fingerprint.<p>I am surprised the EU haven&#x27;t investigated Android and found it breaches GDPR requirements, simply due to the fact it&#x27;s too easy to collect information that can later be used for analytical purposes without the users consent.<p>I imagine you can find instances of GDPR breaches in all modern OS&#x27; if you looked hard enough - something as simple as a HTTP POST request may be illegal depending on the payload.<p>Sadly, progress is often slow, but Apple&#x27;s progress in this area will hopefully inspire Googlers like the one in this article to make statements and drive progress forward.

After reading this article, I signed into my account. I found that even though I turned off tracking in Google years ago, it still kept my old history.<p>The article says that Google turned on auto-delete for new accounts by default as the result of a lawsuit. However, if your Google account is older than x years, then they still keep all of your location history unless you go in and manually choose to delete it. Even then, I no longer trust that Google will actually delete it.

As an ex-Googler it makes me sad that an internal discussion leaked like this.

&quot;The current UI &lt;cut&gt; is designed to make things possible, yet difficult enough that people won’t figure it out.&quot;<p>Let&#x27;s be honest. Don&#x27;t attribute it to the system complexity or interop failures — that&#x27;s bullshit. When they need to shove you an ads under your finger, the complexity suddenly vanishes.