
Google account activity - Uncle_Sam
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/giving-you-more-insight-into-your.html
======
ericabiz
Pretty ironic that Google--a company that gained notoriety for its minimalist
search engine--has a "company blog" full of ridiculous eye candy. On my laptop
screen, the top bar (which stays as you scroll down) takes up a ridiculous
amount of space. Then I accidentally moused over the bottom part of the page
as I was reading the end of the article, triggering yet another bar popping up
from the bottom and telling me about other Google sites.

The icing on the cake is that the whole thing takes a bit of time to load
(showing you a gear much reminiscent of the old "Flash intro" days)--all to
load some sort of header with ugly colored balls that move around when you
move the mouse.

It's 1997 all over again, folks. Only I would have never expected _Google_ ,
of all companies, to fall into the eye candy trap.

~~~
ChuckMcM
_"The icing on the cake is that the whole thing takes a bit of time to load
(showing you a gear much reminiscent of the old "Flash intro" days)--all to
load some sort of header with ugly colored balls that move around when you
move the mouse."_

You can say a lot of things about Google but they've got balls. :-)

The irony is even stronger than you realize, Google has been on a kick 'make
the web fast' for a while, when they first kicked it off in 2010 I pointed out
that most of my pageloads were hung waiting for doubleclick to load (which got
fixed by the way, they are a lot faster now). So the notion of pushing a bunch
of non-useful eye candy is kinda antithetical to that theme, but they do it
anyway.

Perhaps their release process is broken, I have wondered what would change if
they could make it a corporate priority that no Google generated page should
take longer than 500mS to load on a 1Mbit connection. They could at least lead
by showing best practices for fast loading web pages. Perhaps a current
employee reading this will pass it along.

~~~
pavanky
Perhaps, that is what you get by putting ex microsoft employees in charge.

~~~
samstave
Who are you referring to, specifically?

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eslachance
This doesn't even scratch the surface of what Google _could_ show you. If they
showed us the extent of what they can actually infer from our activity, some
people would probably shoot their computer, burn their router and modem, and
never look at a screen again.

~~~
0x006A
What additional information do you think Google has available about its users
that they are not showing?

~~~
nextstep
One thing that Google knows: other accounts you have with non-Google services.
For example, when you setup your G+ profile, they offer to link a Twitter
account that they suspect is yours.

~~~
0x006A
Twitter used to offer an api to lookup a user by email. So this does not have
to be something they figured out by parsing your Inbox for Twitter signups.

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aresant
I love the unintentional creepiness of this quote:

"Data deletion at the data source, e.g. in your Web History will have no
impact on issued reports, however reports can be deleted at any time"

As in - if you didn't know already, GOOG's Web History is a superficial front-
facing report, all your personal data is happily sitting in GOOG's databases,
is tracked, related, and available to whomever has the appropriate power to
access it.

~~~
jannes
I don't think the quoted sentence says that. It rather says that Web History
is the source of the data, and even if you delete it there, it will not affect
reports that have already been issued in the past.

The question is what they mean with "issued reports". Are these reports that
are being issued or reports that have been issued? It's a bit ambiguous, I
think. But then again, English isn't my native language, so maybe I am just
confusing some Grammar rules.

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oskarth
> For example, if you notice sign-ins from countries where you haven’t been or
> devices you’ve never owned, you can change your password immediately

When I was att CCC this winter I noticed that a russian ip had logged into my
gmail. Turns out it was CCC who had rented a russian ip. Scared me quite a bit
for a few hours and resulted in me changing my password.

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joshuahedlund
My report says my 3 of my 'most contacted' emails are gmail accounts I've
never heard of. Googling these email addresses returns lists of known
spammers. However clicking on the emails in the report itself shows no known
results in my gmail. Has anyone else seen this? Should I be concerned? What
should I check for?

I already re-checked that I have no forwarding addresses set; the addresses do
not show up as autocomplete if I begin to type a message to one.

Could it just be a bug? The numbers are "14 emails sent", so not a huge
amount, but I'm slightly disturbed by this and can't find any other clues yet.

~~~
Estragon
Pretty sure this means the spammers "contacted" you. I had the same thing.

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nextstep
Has anyone opted in and received their first report yet?

~~~
eslachance
I opted in, and I get a notice that it can take a couple of the days for the
data to appear. An email notification should be sent to me at that point.

~~~
abraham
It took lest then 30 minutes to get my first email.

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holdupadam
I don't live in America and haven't been for years. Noticed I have logins with
"tch network services" and have no idea why that would be the case. I don't
use any VPN services (esp. not to login into my accounts). Anyone have any
ideas?

~~~
docjaq
I have the same issues. Any ideas yet?

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jemka
Mirror: [http://www.businessinsider.com/giving-you-more-insight-
into-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/giving-you-more-insight-into-your-
google-account-activity-2012-3)

OP link is returning a blank page.

~~~
jedc
Not for me. Do you have Javascript turned off?

~~~
spindritf
Amazing, it loads scripts from three domains to display six paragraphs of text
and an image.

~~~
simonw
... and the fallback for browsers with JS turned off is a completely blank
page.

Why do Google hate the web?

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Drbble
Nice feature. Next, please let me delete activity from my history, so Google
forgets they saw it.

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zmanian
I would love to see a similar visualization for the entire Google Apps Domain
for admins

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zengr
Is this an indirect way of (re)activating Goolgle history for our accounts?

