[Hitton]

>they don't have my Google account in the upper right corner

I don't understand how can someone who doesn't even bother to logout out of his google account or use something like firefox containers care about privacy. The document has to be hosted somewhere no matter what and google drive isn't any worse than random web page which uses google analytics.

[semiotagonal]

Doesn't Google Drive show the identity of someone reading the document to other people reading it, or at least the owner? That's worse than just collecting analytics internally at Google.

[shadowgovt]

No. If you aren't authenticated, it shows your presence in a shared document as "anonymous [metastable animal designator]"

[semiotagonal]

I should have made it clear I was assuming that people were authenticated to their Google account. I think most people who use GMail never log out, and might not check the URL and realize they were navigating to a Google doc.

[andrepd]

Hit right-click > open in private window rather than left-click. I'm with the other poster, if you haven't de-googlified your digital life and you don't even bother opening this in private / firefox container, then I don't know what you expect.

[SiempreViernes]

Then you entirely missed the point of the comment you replied to: that if you willingly impose google surveillance on yourself you really don't have any space to complain about being reminded of it.

[semiotagonal]

I think you're missing my point that even if you willingly impose Google surveillance on yourself, Google Drive is still worse than Google Analytics because your personally identifiable activity is visible to the author and/or other readers, not just Google.

[Xorlev]

> personally identifiable activity is visible to the author and/or other readers

View activity is not surfaced to users. View activity is tracked, and in a _GSuite domain_ (such as your job) an admin can audit that activity. For a standard Google account, a user cannot know whether another user has viewed that document, let alone which user. Is there a way you're seeing this that I'm missing? If so I'd like to know about it so I can raise it as an issue.

If you're thinking about docs/sheets/slides presence, unless you've been shared directly on the document the owner (and other users) only see "Anonymous <Animal>".

If the document is shared to you comment/edit access, that comment/edit activity _will_ show up in the document's activity stream, but at that point the owner of the document already knows you have access by virtue of sharing it to you.

I realize you probably don't have much incentive to believe me, but as an engineer on Drive I can say that we take privacy incredibly seriously.

[soup10]

Privacy and convenience don't have to be trade-offs.

[dsfyu404ed]

If you set up containers to quarantine all Google stuff in one container this is still going to open in that container.