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by aaronarduino 2506 days ago
> To see your trips and travel research, turn on these settings: Private results, Web & app activity

This is the main reason why I will never be able to use www.google.com/travel. I used to use the Trips app with no search history, but Google is shutting down Trips in favor of forcing people to loosen privacy settings. It is very disappointing because Trips worked very well.

4 comments

Ah yes, same as my new Pixel. Apparently to be able to give me temperature in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, Google would like to know every app activity and usage as well as everywhere I have been. This sort of privacy bundling really should not be allowed.
That sounds like a GDPR violation.
As long as it's declared upfront, it's legit.
That's not strictly true. The GDPR contains language that potentially requires you to actually need the data you ask for to "enable" a feature. You could claim you need location to determine Temperature and Currency units for example, but not access to my contacts. Now, how all this holds up, I'm not sure

> Consent is presumed not to be freely given if it does not allow separate consent to be given to different personal data processing operations despite it being appropriate in the individual case, or if the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is dependent on the consent despite such consent not being necessary for such performance.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-43/

Agreed. Requiring consent for such a basic feeling feels like data extortion to me, there's stuff about that in various GDPR implementations.
How do you want Google to show you your trips and your travel research (e.g search queries) if you disable search history?

If you don't want to see your search history (since you seem adamant on disabling it), then just use the other features on google.com/travel (destination/hotel/flight search).

It's ridiculous because they don't need your location history to search for static content that they already have saved in their databases. The exact same behavior happens with maps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19809432

Google is shameless about gimping their services unless you hand over gross amounts of irrelevant personal information.

I think the answer is in your question:

Why would search history be related to travel history? Can't they be decoupled?

You realize that's a ridiculous framing of reasonable objection? The real question is why do they "need" things like your location and web search history to offer this for your past flight searches.
I use TripIt ever since Trips was shutdown. While it doesn't do everything, it does quite a lot (have all reservations etc in one place).
TripIt is a lifesaver for me. I'm sure I'd mess up a lot more than I do if I didn't have an app like TripIt.

My only material beef is that I think it could do a better job of flagging possible oversights in your itinerary. "Umm Dave, I'm afraid you don't seem to have anyplace to stay on Wednesday night."

On complicated trips, I actually print out a calendar grid and make notes by hand. It would be nice if TripIt had a month calendar view that let you look at things that way.

You can export your Tripit itinerary as an .ical and use it with your favorite calendaring app.
Ah thanks. I either didn't know that or I tried it and it didn't really help. I'll take a look at it again on my next long trip.

But basically I'd like TripIt to flag possible problems rather than have me depend on eyeballing it--even though that works OK most of the time.

The printing out of calendar pages is more for trip planning. TripIt doesn't (and isn't really intended to do) anything along those lines.

Based on this recommendation, I signed up, but gracious, the UI is bad.
Ah yah it’s a flashback and not in a good way.

I use and love TripIt but only like this:

0. Subscribe to my personal TripIt calendar feed.

1. Book flight, car, hotel, whatever.

2. Forward booking confirmation to plans@tripit.com.

3. Now all those details are in my calendar.

What’s particularly useful is how it handles time zones. Flights seem to ‘just work’, and in the notes for any appointment it’ll tell you the local arrival & departure times anyway.

You can try kayak trips. I used to use tripit and switched to kayak, the UI is way better.
I am getting close to a point where I think I just need to setup a separate gmail account for my relationship with Google.

Google flights, maps, search: Use this new gmail account My other communication: Use my existing gmail account

I could use two browsers, but it may be easier to just use 2 tabs in a single browser (I use firefox to access gmail).

Wonder if that will make life easier, or worse. Thoughts?