When is a privacy button not a privacy button? When Google runs it, claims lawsuit

A recently released video deposition in long-running lawsuit over Google tracking its users has claimed that even the CEO Sundar Pichai isn't clear on what's going on below him. For the past three years, Google has been fighting a lawsuit that claims the company has a misleading menu that promises privacy but fails to provide …

[chuckufarley]

Who can you trust...

...When it comes to your privacy? Yourself.

"Two men can keep a secret if one of them is dead." -- by Unkown.

"You can trust everyone but the question is: What can you trust them to do?" -- by chuckufarley.

The lesson here isn't that Google wants you to think it's being good and trustworthy because anyone with an ounce of sense knows they just want to make money, which is why they had an IPO. The real lesson is that trust is based on patterns of behavior. I trust my neighbor to play loud music every weeknight for 8 to 9 P.M. If they didn't do it I would know something was not right. When someone says "Trust me with your valuables," then I know that the chances of them being trustworthy are very low.

[Alumoi]

Re: Who can you trust...

When someone says "Trust me with your valuables," then I know that the chances of them being trustworthy are very low.

Nice to know I'm not the only one who doesn't trust banks, corporations and governments.

[MrDamage]

Re: Who can you trust...

> When someone says "Trust me with your valuables," then I know that the chances of them being trustworthy are very low.

You can trust me with your secrets,

You can trust me with your gear,

But the worst mistake

That you can make

Is to trust me with your beer.

[parlei]

Re: Who can you trust...

In reasonably well regulated nations you can trust banks to skim a profit from your money, but that they will follow some basic rules in doing so, and not outright steal them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Who can you trust...

So, not in the US.

[Killfalcon]

Maybe I missed it, but the article could use a clearer explanation of what the WAA is alleged to do.

I think it's saying that if you turn it on, the data isn't saved to your google profile (the one where you can go in and see what adverts Google thinks you want, etc), but to an app-specific bucket that only the app in question can use. Since it's limited tot hat app, whatever data is in there doesn't appear in your Google profile.

However, that there are backdoors that let Google access that data anyway, even if it's not showing in your Google profile.

Is that right? For that to function, Big G would need to have some systems in place for secret profile data, otherwise bringing these two datasets (and any other hidden data sources) together for advertising but ensuring they never merge in a way that shows the user 'shadow' profile stuff.

[Dinanziame]

As far as I can tell, WAA is this:

https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity?hl=en-GB&utm_source=google-account&utm_medium=web

and this is what Google uses for personalizing your searches. If I understand correctly, the claim is that this Firebase thing which is used for Google Analytics is storing the same data even if you turn WAA off. Definitely Firebase would be storing some data, but I suppose Google's viewpoint is that they are not actually storing the same data and it's fine to store some data for analytics because users accept it in a different place (maybe with a message like "send analytics data to Google to help it make improvements to tools" or something). The lawsuit's viewpoint is that Google should have a master switch which prevents Google from storing any data whatsoever no matter where and how the user accepted it, including analytics data.

[Anonymous Coward]

The button is only a toggle for the user - if it's on the user can see their history, if off they can't.

In either case the data still gets collected.

[Anonymous Coward]

The quote from Google only specified that it wasn't stored in the user profile; not that it wasn't stored in a device profie, indexed to the user profile.

The appropriate follow-up question to Google's response would have been 'Where IS the data stored when the WAA setting is disabled?"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure I've seen Firebase cookies listed as 'essential' on one or 2 sites

[Anonymous Coward]

It's righ there in the article: IT DOES NOTHING FOR YOU!

[jake]

"even the CEO Sundar Pichai isn't clear on what's going on below him."

Who is surprised? His degrees are in materials engineering and an MBA ... Not exactly what I'd call fields well known for their in-depth knowledge of the Silly Con Valley technical world. Still, I guess he'll make a good scapegoat with well documented plausible deniability when the time comes for whoever is pulling his strings to sacrifice him.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "even the CEO Sundar Pichai isn't clear on what's going on below him."

Or he lied and will now use his lack of familiarity with what his own company does (aka incompetence) to get away with it.

[Pascal Monett]

"he testified in front of Congress"

Sure. He told them what they needed to hear to get off his back.

I'm sure Congress is really impressive, but it's not a judicial trial. El Zuck has lied his ass off there multiple times and he's still not in jail for it.

So Congress is just a nice little tea-time with barely any consequence, as far as I can see. But hey, it makes the Senators feel (even more) important, so . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "he testified in front of Congress"

Did he show them which tube on the Internet the button is connected to?

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: "he testified in front of Congress"

Lying to Congress is a federal crime. Takes all of 3 seconds to look that up on... ahem... Google.

Pinchar and Zuck should be on the hook for perjury. Trouble is you need to actually prove they lied, and that's where things get tricky. "I was led to believe that [X], but since the hearing I've discovered that it's [Y]" is probably enough to create reasonable doubt, so then you need to discover a paper trail disproving that statement.

Would be nice if Congress made them sqirm a bit though, even if it ultimately goes nowhere due to lack of evidence. They should at least try.

[Not Yb]

Re: "he testified in front of Congress"

Now look up how often that federal crime has been successfully prosecuted (the answer is "6 in the last 60 years according to a study by Quinnipiac University in 2007"). http://web.archive.org/web/20160409130016/https://www.qu.edu/prebuilt/pdf/SchoolLaw/LawReviewLibrary/24_25QLR547(2006-2007).pdf

As someone once mentioned, lying to Congress is a time-honored tradition in the US.

[Roland6]

Not heard of WikiLeaks?

>"As is common in such cases, Google has pushed for sensitive documents obtained during the discovery process to be redacted or sealed. This has become an issue in the US government's ongoing antitrust trial against Google"

Alternatively, there is an unsecured server on Azure/AWS/Google etc. or even the dark web - which allows for further distancing between leaker and finder...

[redwine]

Also, Chrome's incognito ...

... isn't private either - did it need saying?

[43300]

Re: Also, Chrome's incognito ...

Not to the readership on here, I'm sure, but many ordinary users will have no idea how much it's spying on them.

No other browser is as bad, although Edge is trying (and succeeding) in catching up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Also, Chrome's incognito ...

Wow, you must not understand what Edge is. It is a web browser all of Google's spying, plus all of the Microsoft spying, all wrapped up in an automatically updated, unremovable, bundle of shit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Also, Chrome's incognito ...

Yep, All corporations are mostly the same. And do not forget cloud services - say EU requires EU user data to be stored on servers in EU, but who/how one would check/ensure that they cannot forward that data to there own servers all over the world?

As of browsers - if one use Edge on Windows 11 it is most spyed things - google spies, Edge spies, microsoft spies, essentiely every mouse move... etc. And they talk that china is watching its users. But china is bad boy, and they are good guy. Very old story.

Google is ditching 3rd party cookies from chrome, also they say will introduce IP adress masking, but they make their own Privacy Sandbox (which is not privvacy nor sanbox - surprise!) which still has all this data and more about user and will use by themselves and will sell to 3rd parties for advertising. So again - disguise as good guy. As I said - very old story, just repeating with different names/characters. All poli tics are full of that. And those corps have more control than many countries/goverments. Not and easy fight - if thereis real fight... In US - I dought.

[Anonymous Coward]

Spaghetti code?

Good luck to the regulators, who have already failed with social media. Literally they have no clue. Unfortunately even most software engineers and scientists.

The problem is constantly increasing complexity and connectivity.

The connectivity increases the spread and impact of incidents. Similar to how fast travel increases the spread of flu.

[CJ_C]

The only way

The only way to deal with Google is not to deal with them. So it has to be Linux, Firefox, DuckDuckGo and on my phone UBports Ubuntu Touch.

I went this way, over 5 years ago, when I discovered that Google were so desperate for private data that the Chromecast Audio Streamer ceased playing local media files if the broadband went down. Google were not and are not playing nice. Will the legislators make them behave, eventually?

Sadly I have real solution for the (Android) TV except trying to set settings, not using YouTV, and using accounts dedicated to the device.

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Re: The only way

Android needs to be forked but not even the FOS community can do that without lots of money. It's sad that Cyanogen fell through. Their OS was years ahead of Google and they even had a little OEM backing.

I'm not one of those people who keeps checking to see if the A14 update is ready yet. I know it moves more Chrome spyware to the OS. I assume that everything not related to data harvesting will be crippled a little more. Non-Play Store apps can still bypass the extreme SAF bottleneck - gotta kill that some day.

[lnLog]

Cyanogen lives on in the form of LineageOS,

[Kevin McMurtrie]

LineageOS is the CyanogenMod project but Cyanogen Inc is gone.

I tried LineageOS recently and it was pretty much AOSP with a UX on some developer tools. Google has seriously broken AOSP and it's beyond what volunteers can fix. The OS and the ecosystem needs to be split from Google.

Samsung, Asus, and OPPO have put considerable work into reverting Google's broken Material Design. They'd be likely candidates for funding a deeper fork. Storage Area Framework being broken is probably a top complaint.

[Snake]

RE: Material Design

Samsung's UI experience is just as broken as Google's Material, at least based upon my experience in comparing it to a much more intuitive Android UI, LG's.

I have been forced to use someone else's Samsung for the past 2 months, alongside my LG. And whilst Samsung's UI is glossy it - like Apple's, Facebook's & Instagram's apps, and others - have no idea how to make the user's experience better, just...shinier. But you all have become so *used* to terrible UI design with the Facebook & Instagram apps that you've become accustomed to the abuse.

Why can't I adjust the Samsung's sound / volume directly from the drop-down panel and then a dedicated mini control panel, rather than being forced into accessing the full Sounds panel and *then* locating the volume subcontrol for all sounds?? Why does this Samsung not give me a emoji control on the keyboard, requiring me to first type in a emoji-associated word (like "heart") and then give me a *limited* choice of options that *it* decided that I should be happy with?? Why can't I drag & drop from the main apps menu to the Home screen? Why? Why?!

And those are just the ones that I can name off the top of my tiny, empty head. This Samsung just adds to my current level of despair and frustration, it feels like doesn't help in any way at all.

[HandleAlreadyTaken]

Re: The only way

>The only way to deal with Google is not to deal with them.

That doesn't help though. Even if you don't deal with Google directly, other pages will leak your info to Google (for example, this page on The Register calls google-analytics, doubleclick.net and also googletagmanager.com). Your ISP (or router) may use Google's DNS (8.8.8.8). Many phone applications may use Google services in the background and pass information (for example, your location). And Google also gets information about you even if you're not online at all.

[Pascal Monett]

This page on El Reg leaks nothing about me to Google thanks to NoScript.

And Google will not know where I am buying things because I do not have location and mobile data active all the time. I only activate those when I need them, and deactivate them afterwards.

But yeah, I get that most people who have their phones grafted to their eyeballs will not see that as a possibility. Google thanks them, undoubtedly.

[HandleAlreadyTaken]

>And Google will not know where I am buying things because I do not have location and mobile data active all the time.

You're missing the part where Google has been buying credit card information directly from the credit card companies and tracks your *offline* purchases. So, unless you're exclusively using cash, Google will know where you're buying things, and maybe what you're buying as well. They don't need your location and mobile data at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The only way

How much of your data is sent to the embedded links inside Firefox? Or are you even aware of them? I can't imagine that you compile it yourself because I tried that many, many years ago, and it wasn't possible from their source files, not without disabling most of the compiler's checks.

[martinusher]

Re: The only way

What's needed is some relatively deep pocketed third party to come along and develop a complete ecosystem that's entirely separate from the existing Android/Apple ecosystems. From a commercial perspective this was never going to happen but because our beloved governments saw fit to ban the use of Andriod on Huawei and similar manufacturers' products they created a demand for such a product. Enter HarmonyOS, which by the rules of development will be a better mousetrap (design rather than evolution and learning from all the mistakes and shortcomings of the existing systems). "What's to stop Huawei being just like Google?", you'd ask. I'd suggest that since Huawei's primary focus is to sell equipment rather than user information their OS is likely to be focused on functionality -- after all, one reason why you've always got to have "the latest" hardware is that anarchic systems like Andriod impose relatively huge processing burdens which if designed out could enable simpler, cheaper, product to still have outstanding performance and as a bonus improved battery life.

A lot of people -- especially politicians -- just don't think things through.

(Oh yes -- tell me that the CCP is hanging on every word I utter, the Chinese can't develop stuff, they have to steal it ....... the usual ....... )

[Red Sceptic]

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

[IceC0ld]

Google LIED ! are STILL lying, and will continue to lie, in pursuit of the almighty $$$$$

say it isn't so :o)

[Cincinnataroo]

The regulators fail on and on.

Most of the general public has no idea.

Many of those that do have an idea are surrender monkeys.

Much of mankind is a mess and gets what he deserves. Surveillance hell for most, most of the time.

[xpda]

Do No Evil?

Is this part of "Do No Evil?"

[jake]

Re: Do No Evil?

Go ogle dropped "Do No Evil" as a motto in 2015, when Alphabet decided "Do the right thing" was more appropriate. Following that, the old motto was vestigial, at best, a footnote in the CoC, before eventually being quietly removed entirely.

But "do the right thing" for whom? They don't say ... My guess is the shareholders. In their warped, fuzzy little brains it's OK that they are evil now, as long as they are making a profit.

Some of us have been shunning go ogle since the year dot ... not paranoid, pragmatic.