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by jankey 3313 days ago
Sure, you can review and delete everything here: https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?restrict=vaa&utm_so...

(I work for Google)

4 comments

Right. opt-out vs opt-in. http://danariely.com/2008/05/05/3-main-lessons-of-psychology

PS. Kindly explain why Google Maps really wants to stalk my location even when not using it actively. It's been forced down Android users a few years ago via a "Yes/Not now" dark pattern, it's coming on iPhone under the guise of "share location with your friends".

PS2. Kindly explain why anyone would ever trust Google to not expand their data acquisition behavior once the sensors are in place. For example, GPS, but always on mics and cameras in the future.

explain why Google Maps really wants to stalk my location even when not using it actively

Turn by turn navigation. It's called out as a use-case for this on the Apple docs for this service. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...

(I don't need or use that; so I turned it off)

Did you knew Chromecast refuses to register in your network unless Google has your exact GPS coordinates?

Try setting up one from a phone with GPS turned off and see what happens (assuming the wifi AP you are using is not already in their location mapping database)

The obvious answer is to target location based features in Google Now and ads.
Sure, but is it actually deleted? Or is this still stored somewhere in Google ready to be retrieved if needed?
It's actually deleted, though it can take some time for deletions to propagate through various Google systems and backups - we can't violate the speed of light and​ we wouldn't want a bug in the deletion code to result in a catastrophic loss of things users wanted us to keep.
But what if my data has already been used somehow. For example to train next generation speech recognition AI.

What will happen to that information?

Note that if you opt out of Google keeping this history, I believe Google still keeps all your voice recordings, you just lose the ability to review and "delete" them, and they aren't tied to your account anymore.

This is one of the crazier notions I've seen in a privacy dark pattern: "Let us track you or we'll keep your data forever".

Source?
Google.

"When Voice & Audio Activity is off, voice inputs won't be saved to your Google Account, even if you're signed in. Instead, they may only be saved using anonymous identifiers."

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/6030020?p=accoun...

Ergo, Google is going to collect your voice data no matter what you do, the only question is whether or not it's connected to your account, where you can manually go in and delete it.

So the question now is, if you opt in and later delete your data, does the data actually get deleted, or just disconnected from your account and left only with "anonymous identifiers"?
That is the big question.

I actually had this argument out with a former Googler who expressed with incredible strength how importantly Google addressed deletion of data users said to delete. And so his argument was that if you deleted it from your history, it'd be deleted, but if you turned off your history, you'd have no way of telling them to delete it.

jankey, if Google had any respect for my privacy this information would never have left my phone in the first place.