
Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking - pcunite
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/10/22/008216/google-has-quietly-dropped-ban-on-personally-identifiable-web-tracking?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29
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joosters
Lots of older discussion in:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12760003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12760003)

What I don't understand is that the article says that the change was made in
the summer. So how come no-one spotted this until now?

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bogomipz
I thought about this as well, I think its just a symptom of "privacy policy
fatigue", how many of these notifications does the average person using a
handful of services receive in a year? The velocity of updates to them seems
to be increasing. Also quantifying the impact or intent of the changes is not
always obvious and clear.

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niftich
Can we crawl privacy policies and commit each change into a repo -- and
maintain this as a public resource?

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joosters
There was a website doing this a few years ago, it showed diffs for privacy
policies and terms of service. You could also get email notifications when a
site changed. However, it shut down some years ago.

Unfortunately I can't remember the site's name, or find it in my bookmarks,
sorry.

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eveningcoffee
Google has gradually become more and more aggressive. Boiling a frog alive
comes to my mind.

My general recommendation is: do not use Google products unless you really
have to. Do not recommend Google products to your friends and relatives.

This is minimum you can do.

Only thing that will really signal them that they are doing something wrong is
loosing the market share.

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dghughes
I reset Android on my Samsung S5 and was surprised Google's Gallery app
requires access to the Contacts app. I denied Gallery access to my Contacts
and now I can't see my pictures but I can take pictures.

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pcunite
I want a _personal_ mobile phone that I can use to communicate with my friends
and surf web pages with no history shared with anyone.

Who else wants this?

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peller
Certainly not the carriers or vendors.

Sadly, it seems "the public" just doesn't care all that much. (If they're even
aware of the implications of their complacency, which seems doubtful.)

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macawfish
People definitely care on a deep level, but how could a non-technical person
express their lack of consent? I hear people expressing their concerns in the
form of paranoid theories. But their theories are true. Many people I know
already censor themselves around phones, assuming the devices are listening
and sending personal conversations back to some server.

~~~
peller
OK, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. If the (ostensible) purpose of
laws is to keep people/corporations in check, and our representatives make the
laws, then the answer to your question, it seems to me, would be political
activism, would it not?

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Silhouette
There are reasonably well organised political advocacy groups around privacy,
"digital rights", and so on.

The trouble is, most of our elections are decided on a very small number of
very high profile and high impact policies: economics, education, healthcare,
and the like.

Technology raises many minor issues that affect lots of people, often for the
worse, but few are going to care about those issues more than their child's
education or putting food on plates.

Meanwhile, the tech firms getting insanely rich off these kinds of measures
have small armies of lobbyists "advising" the technologically naive political
classes on what they should be doing, backed by effectively unlimited war
chests.

Until we have political systems that aren't dominated by rare elections
decided by very few issues, this will unfortunately continue.

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peller
Oh sure, I agree. My point was that in order for our political systems to be
less dominated by "the standard issues," people need to literally get out
there, en masse, for anything to seriously change. (Think civil rights
movement scale, not OWS). But I think you've hinted at the larger issue when
you said "people care more about putting food on plates" \- too many people
simply do not have the freedom (time/resources) to care about anything other
than "keeping their heads above water", as it were.

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chirageminent
Google News: Google Updated Private Policy To Ban on Personally Identifiable
Web Tracking. How to Opt in/out Sharing Data?
[http://www.themobileupdates.com/news/google-news-google-
upda...](http://www.themobileupdates.com/news/google-news-google-updated-
private-policy-to-ban-on-personally-identifiable-web-tracking/)

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macawfish
This is ill. I suspect making this change allows unrestrained data analysis,
such as deep learning with _all_ the models, including those models that just
so happen to have encoded your identity somewhere in the hidden layers.

