Reminds me of how google moved maps.google.com to google.com/maps so that they can ask for location permission in your browser for the whole google domain.
Similarly Google (and Facebook) moved to a combined privacy policy - it effectively grants permission for all services to collect all types of data, including data you wouldn't expect each service to be collecting. All while using examples that mislead the user into thinking such data collection is limited.
For example, if one reads the Privacy clause regarding collection of financial/transactional information they might assume that this is due to Google Pay, what they'd be missing is that even services such as Gmail, Maps and Photos are also collecting financial data. As mentioned, where examples exist in the policy, they always paint a more obvious, narrower collection of data.
According to Google's own admissions on the App Store, their services such as Maps, Photos and Gmail each individually collect location, financial history, purchases, contacts, user content such as photos, videos, audio (and any others), search history, amongst other personal data. The majority of this data has no bearing on the apps functionality whatsoever and comparable services don't collect -any- of this information.
Maps and Photos let you enter your credit card info to buy stuff in the app (you can order food in Maps and prints in Photos).
This is not unusual. Every app that offers food delivery or prints lists "financial info" on their App Store privacy label. And if you drill down into the details, it's specifically payment information.
As far as I can tell, the Gmail app does not collect financial info (it's not in the App Store privacy label).
I believe this is why Amazon no longer includes what you bought in their order status (confirmation, shipped, delivered) emails (an annoying change, imo)
They also wanted to eliminate the receipt brokering businesses. A couple of companies were tracking purchases and allowing users to call for refunds when prices suddenly dropped after purchase.
This was a primary goal of Google Plus: empower cookie / fingerprint joining. Even if Plus were to fail they’d still be able to harvest gmail and youtube for everything else.
To me it didn't seem a co-incidence that Google Plus was canned once Apple implemented their enhanced privacy features in Safari.
Google can already track you website to website with Chrome (e.g. shared browser history, amongst other methods), but on Safari per-site tracking such as how the Like and +1 buttons worked was needed.
"Be profitable" is enough to explain everything, no need to go further than that. Every large company does similar things, because that is where "be profitable" takes you until regulations catches up.
Every large company does similar things, but essentially no company on Earth is capable of doing it at the scale that Google does. This makes Google being evil a much larger problem than other large companies like Nike.
Is that actually known as the reason for certain, or is that reason being assumed?
Because I've seen that presented as a hypothesis but never any actual evidence. I recall another hypothesis had something to do with better Maps integration on Search pages.
I'm sure there are lots of potential internal technical reasons for such a switch. Location permissions is just one possibility.
I dimly recall it being noticed at the time but I suspect it was really a convenient side effect ie a contributory factor and not the primary reason.
I think "branding" is far more likely. google.com is the brand and a single entry point landing on search which then points you at what you "need". Note how you search and can click on the buttons underneath the bar to move into images, maps etc. Maps is just another specialized form of search.
Of course this opinion is not based on reality in the slightest. HN looooves to come up with wild conspiracy theories like this and reiterate them as fact, especially when they prove a corporation is secretly doing something evil.
Things that are searches (like maps) moved onto the search domain (www), other stuff like docs and ads stayed on property specific subdomains. Anything not a core google service (experiments and projects built by outside vendors) moved to withgoogle.com.
They also did that for chat. When hangouts was replaced with "chat" chat moved to mail.google.com. Which means allowing notifications for email allows it for chat as well.
Huh? There has been chat in the Gmail web interface since before Google defederated from Jabber, although I believe it didn’t have notifications aside from changing the window title, for lack of browser APIs at the time.
Wait no. I'm thinking the other way around. It was chat could enable notifications for hangouts.google.com. But when it moved to mail.google.com now allowing chat notifications allows mail notifications, which I didn't want.
It makes a lot of sense to unify web and geographic search in a seamless way. Many users would prefer not to have to grant permissions twice when they do a search like "<product> near me".
But your browser tells you when your location is being used? It’s not like Google can secretly use your location without your browser alerting you to it?
So I guess they have gone a full 180° on that "Don't Be Evil" thing. For Google employees with a moral compass, that must be a little confusing/upsetting.
I'm not sure there are Google employees with a functioning moral compass. If there are, they must have learned to just ignore it.
Can you work directly for an evil company, knowing that it's doing evil, and still consider yourself moral? Especially when you're got the skills to easily get highly lucrative employment elsewhere?
Unironically this? It might violate gdpr to get consent for the purposes of maps but then use it in more contexts. I guess they might include all purposes when the user is asked, and at that point it boils down to whether the user is being asked consent for overly broad purposes or whether it is legitimate to bundle all the Google apps together.
You can't redirect sites like that with DNS. All of those domains resolve to the IP of a load balancer (probably the same one minus some anycast routing), which then decides whether to show the requested service based on the HTTP Host header, not the DNS record. You can quickly verify this by looking up mail.google.com via DNS and putting that IP into your browser bar, which will redirect to google.com instead of opening Gmail.
A CNAME record would just mean they use the same load balancer.
$ curl -H "Host: mail.google.com" 142.251.16.17
...gmail-specific html
$ curl -H "Host: maps.google.com" 142.251.16.17
...gmaps-specific html
$ curl -H "Host: www.google.com" 142.251.16.17
...google search-specific html
Ah, don't get me started about these dark patterns.
Google Maps, the native Android phone app, behaves like a crappy website in navigation mode.
Google really wants to push the assistant, there isn't a way to completely disable it in Android, disable all shortcuts, basically make it go away.
So, in Google Maps, there's a Assistant bar at the bottom. That only pops up when you're in navigation mode, and "conveniently", slides up when you switch apps.
So if you're in another app and decide to exit navigation using the X at the bottom left of Google Maps... the Assistant button slides up and you accidentally press it.
> there isn't a way to completely disable it in Android
This is not true, as there is... just disable the Google app.
You will need to replace the launcher with the Nova launcher in the process, and will likely replace the search box with Firefox search. But the Google app and Assistant will be totally disabled and unavailable anywhere in the Android experience. If you find a link to it, it will ask to enable which you can decline.
I found this out by Google having placed me in some experiment earlier this year where my Pixel 6 Pro went from 24h battery life down to about 3h battery life. The battery was being drained by the Google app exclusively, and so without any fix or published workaround I set about disabling the Google app.
Overall this has been a huge improvement, my battery under near identical usage is now closer to 36h... and the Assistant not being present I have since viewed as a bonus (at the time I thought it a negative). I believe the issue is probably now fixed, but why would I go back when this is a better experience with more battery, disabling the Google app was like upgrading my phone.
What's really odd is they support no app stores. Not GPlay or FDroid. So they expect users to continually download APK and update? Seems like a great pattern to keep their user base small - but maybe that's what they're after.
What do you mean? Lawnchair is on the playstore. The only thing is that it tells me it was built for an older version of android, so I cannot install it.
I think it's safe to assume most want a supported version of an app, not something that's been abandoned on the Play Store. From the Lawnchair site [0]:
"Do you still support the Play Store version?
Unfortunately not. We no longer support the play store version; issues about it won't be accepted. This is done to focus development on making Lawnchair 12.1 finished and making it similar to Lawnchair 2. Also, maintaining legacy code is not a focus of the developers."
Wait, Google lets you view it but just not download?
Android is perfectly capable of running that afaik; I'm sure that my current version (11 I think?) is at least backwards compatible back till Android 4, if not Android 2
You could try Aurora Store, which uses a pool of dummy Google accounts to pull apks from their servers. I doubt it has belittling restrictions like what you describe, and there's also a manual download option which can sometimes let you get old versions if the server still has them and you know the build number
I'm very happy with OLauncher :) Minimalistic, quasi text-based. Swipe up to show all apps and show keyboard by default for a fast search, swipe left to open firefox and swipe right for signal.
Almost every launcher has a built-in search feature. The difference with search-based launchers for me is having only widgets or even just plain nothing on the home screen, launching apps from a small favorites bar or by typing the first few letters of the apps name. It's honestly faster than looking at many screens full of folders of apps ever was.
https://sesame.ninja/ Sesame is cool, but not FOSS, and last time I tried it some years back it had some limitations for free users or didn't integrate into my launcher well or something like that.
Highly recommend the above. Moving to a launcher, defaulting to Firefox (yay adblocker), and replacing the default search with Kagi creates a near distraction free experience on Android.
Unfortunately the Reddit / X changes this year should remind us these sort of 3rd-party workarounds will only exist for so long.
I know it's a dream, but I'm looking forward to simple Linux phones. Moving to GNOME / arch on my Desktop lets me do what I want to do and somehow, magically plays any game from Steam without a hitch.
This is what Competition law is primarily about if I want/have to use App X, App Y should not be forced upon me. It was the problem in Windows/IE or Android/PlayStore ...
Google, Apple, MSFT are abusing "monopoly" in one area to extend their reach in other areas.
Since several months ago, disabling the Google app also disables camera functionality in Google Translate (?!..), which to an expat is absolutely crippling.
Yes, it's very simple. Just open the app info (by long holding the app icon and pressing the little "i"), then select "disable" and confirm the dialogue. Or did you mean something else?
> ”don't get me started about these dark patterns”
Here’s another dark pattern for you in a totally different context.
So Google use to have all of it various services on a separate subdomain (eg maps.google.com).
But they moved to having everything under www.google.com.
You know why, it’s because when you allow Google Maps to geolocate you (which is totally appropriate for a Maps use case) … now ALL of Google services get geolocation data about you from Search, Gmail, etc since they are all hosted in the same www root.
Used to love google maps, but I’ve switched to Apple Maps it’s been so bad lately. It’s taken me in literal circles, decides I need to do 2 uturns while sitting at a traffic light, gives instructions that are unclear or too late, etc. I noticed Waze got worse lately too, I guess they’re integrating them more :(
I've got no idea whether this still happens in more current Android versions or not, but on my phone I also discovered the weird phenomenon whereby force-stopping the Google app resets the selected assistant app back to Google instead of whatever else I might have chosen.
Little protip: if you sign your phone up with Google, it doesn't force the assistant on you at all. Don't remember having to disable it, you just have to not consent to their terms.
Side effect: you can kiss access to the monopoly on apk files goodbye unless you want to use third party hacky methods that use a pool of random people's accounts to talk to the google apk servers...
Using one monopoly to gain market share in another :) The pattern is everywhere with google. I keep wondering why the competitors like TomTom haven't gotten them banned from the country with antitrust suits. Instead, TomTom just cut their losses, threw in the towel for their own map (which has surprisingly good worldwide road coverage for a Dutch company from the noughties), and is starting to use OpenStreetMap as a base layer. I'm not complaining about OSM use, but they were in the prime position to force Google to open the data they funneled from their original monopoly
If you open setting in maps, you can disable driving mode, which gets rid of that bar at the bottom. I then couldn't figure out where to turn it back on. There's still an assistant button but in a less intrusive location.
I can on a Pixel 7 pro. Did for a while before deciding it was useful and wanted it but didn't like it trying to pop up, so I went from disabled, to off by default but callable by dragging from one of the bottom corners and requiring me to press the mic button for it to listen. Kind of the best of both worlds, it stays asleep until I need to change whats on the chromecast.
This complaint is one of the clearest, most concise pieces of legal drafting I've ever seen. It's only 7 pages! The small inline graphics in the pleading are innovative and effective. Great lawyering, kudos to the AG's office. This is likely a big reason behind the quick settlement.
According to the California OAG press release: $93 million, plus injunctions which seem to be more about disclosures to users and internal oversight than actually allowing users to opt out of (or requiring opt-in consent before) tracking location. Not the most user-respecting outcome to say the least, though it could certainly have been worse.
Disclosure: I worked for Google more than 8 years ago, but not in any role related to this news story. I have no relevant inside information and I am certainly not speaking for Google here.
No, they made an order of magnitude mistake. Fairly common, it happens.
However, in this case it has taken it from “ordering bacon and avocado on my burger” to “two tickets to my local sports team including beers and chili cheese fries”. So not enough to be exactly punitive, more like a mild inconvenience. The point still stands.
i read long time ago how many apps are NOT using play services for location, like OSMAND~ and some other apps but what does the user loose if the navigation app doesnt use play location services?
i was talking to a cab aggregator last time and i said "oh i dont use your app because using it makes me enable google location which enables location sharing and i am not keen in doing that and i hear, beyond its privacy implications, you can avoid it".....
As I said, I last worked at Google more than 8 years ago, and I didn’t have a role relevant to this news story.
Therefore I don’t have any more insight to add in response to your question than the general public, with one exception:
I’ll note that Google is generally at least more technically able to honor the privacy promises it makes than a lot of small startups, such as robustly deleting data it claims to delete and giving you a lot of controls to request deletion of various categories of data.
Many startups do just enough lip service toward these compliance obligations to avoid negative financial, regulatory, or reputation consequences but don’t actually uphold their end of whatever they’re supposed to do (especially in places like the EU where strong privacy laws exist). Google goes well beyond that.
Clearly Google is far from perfect in privacy matters. I wish Google made stronger privacy promises and didn’t do dark patterns or deceptive explanations like what this settlement is punishing. But it’s easy to forget how much of the industry is worse than Google in these regards and how little of it is better, just because Google is so big and so prominent.
You want text translations from 1 lang to next? Cool. It works.
You want an image text-> translated text? You MUST install and have Google app installed. No real reason other than to re-enable more spyware and garbage.
Google is a large corporation. Anyone who's worked at a company that large can assert that the left hand and right hand don't always talk, and in fact may be antagonistic.
> Why would the Google app have more spyware than the Translate app?
It's a different app on top of the first app? I don't understand the question.
> Regardless of what you think of Google, the reason a feature lives in one app and not another is not to increase spying...
That's why google has apps at all.... They're a spyware company. That—and depriving users of honest transactions—is much of their business model. Especially post transition to Alphabet.
>> Why would the Google app have more spyware than the Translate app?
> It's a different app on top of the first app? I don't understand the question.
It's irrelevant if it's a different app or a different tab in the same app as far as "spyware" would be concerned.
2 apps by the same company doesn't increase data collection compared to 1 app, if they're installed on the same phone. It's not like Google gets twice as much location data... the number of apps is entirely irrelevant.
> It's irrelevant if it's a different app or a different tab in the same app as far as "spyware" would be concerned.
It's only irrelevant in the technical sense of "could we collect this data if we had another app". It's not irrelevant in terms of hedging against uninstalling.
Has this perhaps changed recently? Tried navigating to translate.google.com on both Android and iOS and the image translation features appear without issue.
This truly sounds like a technical limitation and not some scheme to get more spyware onto the phone. Like in theory the Translate app could do it without the Google app, but that would've taken extra changes that they didn't consider worthwhile.
Because it was a slap on the wrist. Pretty sure big tech companies have their own people in power positions in the states they operate from. Especially California. You don't build a trillion-dollar empire and leave it to chance.
The power Google has over small, local businesses is ridiculous.
I work for a small local business. We've been struggling to get rid of the "lead generation" spam from the Google Maps listings. This is costing us on the order of thousands to tens-of-thousands a month in work. (That's significant for our business, on the ~10-15% of monthly revenue.)
I dug into these listings. I discovered the company behind them, a marketing firm in Hawaii. I uncovered a network of 80+ listings across the US they operate. I even discovered their recruiting websites where they pay people to create the listings for them and go on to pay people for 5-star reviews.
I provided all of this information to Google via their "business redressal form." Nothing. It's been months. I keep reporting the listings. Nothing.
We're losing work. Other local contractors are losing work. And Google twiddles its thumbs.
What good is it for Google to have a policy if they're not going to uphold it when their inaction is harming others?
I'm surprised at that level of loss you haven't just end-run around Google and the lead-gen firm and gotten together with your peers to blackball them. Those lead-gen companies can't actually deliver real service, they still need someone local to your community to pick up the lead and do the work.
I doubt it would take very long before they realized they can't fill any contracts and give up. And plus wouldn't it sound super cool to say you started a guild?
The most famous case is locksmiths.[0] Google recently went after another company using the "rank and rent" scheme.[1]
The company which is causing us issues is also using the "rank and rent" scheme. They're running listings for everything from pool resurfacing to concrete driveways to tree services.
The company recruits people via Craigslist with an offer to pay them $50-100 to setup a Google Business Profile and receive the post card with a code for verification. They also offer $20 for a 5-star review.[2]
I am thinking about going to the FTC and the media at this point. I've also discovered that there's a small community but poorly connected that goes after this type of spam.
Not OP but I may have experienced what they are describing. I saw a contractor on Google maps and made an inquiry for some work. They basically just forwarded my request to other, actual contractors, likely with the intention of taking a cut for providing a "successful lead". I basically ignored all of that nonsense and went to find actual local contractors myself. I think I just reported it for being misleading and I don't know what happened after, I don't think I've seen it again, but I could see how that poisons the well for a lot of people's livelihood.
But saying "Google has the power to shut down my business if I express the wrong opinions on social media sites like HN" is something they're totally fine with?
No, Google has the power to shut down your business for literally no reason!
How we square this circle without removing the 1st amendment right of free association isn't clear though. Maybe a cutoff of "if you have more than 50 employees" or something.
Note that Unicode has a lot of characters like this — compatibility forms which are present to allow lossless conversion to/from other character sets, but shouldn’t be used in any new text.
I didn't actually realise they're letters. To me it's distinct symbols just like 0 is a distinct ascii symbol from O.
Now that you mention it, I realise that I knew that five is V and M is a thousand or something, but the symbol for one/1, is that actually defined as a capital i and not just a line of some form? Since surely the digit for one came before the latin script
Latin (and ancient Greek) didn't have dedicated symbols for numbers, but at sone point the Romans started using a shorthand system based on existing alphabetic symbols, which we now call "Roman numerals".
It's quite possible the "I"s started out as just a line to mark one item before the shorthand was developed, but certainly over time it became identified to capital "I".
You have a bad browser/PDF viewer. The "spacing" issues are a result of using small caps as a title style, which is hardly unusual - especially in legal documents.
This is both visually accurate and not a forced download for me using Safari.
I blame the document format. No "bad" browser/viewer would put random spaces in in the middle of a word when using HTML, OpenDocument, LaTeX, or I imagine anything but the OCR-like processing that you have to do when trying to interpret a PDF file. If they wanted it to be accessible, they could have chosen a different format, or to make it compatible with the most popular freely available reader. Not sure what specifically they want me to use?
Because I don't want the file dialog asking me to manually choose save it or cancel the download...
Chrome iirc popularised automatic downloading for all file types but I'm using Firefox.
What browser do you use that has a "force inline viewing of downloads rather than downloading them" option? I'd like that
Edit: wait, this server doesn't actually send the content-disposition:attachment header. Why doesn't Firefox download this to /tmp/mozilla_${USER}0 and open the default viewer as it does for other files that aren't downloads?!
