New privacy tools and policies to help you stay safe and in control online

https://blog.google/products/search/new-privacy-tools/

by bookofjoe • 3 years ago

88 68 3 years ago

blog.google

helph67• 3 years ago

https://www.techradar.com/news/nearly-half-of-all-online-tra...

ssss11• 3 years ago

Can’t upvote this enough. The doublespeak out of corporations like Google is outrageous.

hbcondo714• 3 years ago

All in all, a shocking 93.7% of all online trackers are either from Google, Facebook, or Microsoft

throwaway290• 3 years ago

This whole thread is horrible and puts HN in a totally different light for me

Google blogs how they try to make it easier for people remove revenge porn (and other bad stuff like doxxing) about themselves from search and help kids not randomly see porn online

Yet here we have techbros complain about omg those bad trackers

I hate google's evil tech stance, especially after they gave themselves permission to scrape the entire web to train their AI (and btw HN is totally silent about it) but revenge porn and doxxing are serious life-altering traumatizing things and happen to people who often have no recourse to deal with it

The nice explanation is zero people bothered to click and read, the less nice explanation is that techbro crowd probably has not as many victims of it than perpetrators, statistically

BestGuess• 3 years ago

that right there is what they call a conflict of interest. or what we says down here "speakin out both sides o'yer yap"

Vortigaunt• 3 years ago

Yeah as long as they get to control the narrative around how to stay "safe" online stuff like this will be swept under the rug.

lijok• 3 years ago

Last year, we launched the Results about you tool to make it easy for you to request the removal of search results that contain your personal phone number, home address or email, right from the Google app or however you access Search

Why would you be indexing this information in the first place?

f_allwein• 3 years ago

Because it might be on a public website not blocked by an appropriate robots.txt

ehnto4• 3 years ago

It sounds like it is a worthwhile step to make it Google and friends problem to not store that information. Similar to how they blur faces in Google Maps.

I don't think it's unreasonable, Google knows and we all know that private information ends up online without our permission, but Google is the only one in the conversation hoovering that data up and showing it to anyone who asks nicely.

I don't get to do that, laws apply to me that say I can't even collect that information without consent let alone display it.

peddling-brink• 3 years ago

Think peoplefinder type websites. It's valid to question why they don't exclude this category of site.

GhostWhisperer• 3 years ago

maybe don't index peoplefinder?

account-5• 3 years ago

Read title: sounds interesting. See it's Google blog: lol.

quyleanh• 3 years ago

You can access this tool in the Google app by clicking on your Google account photo and selecting “Results about you”, or by visiting goo.gle/resultsaboutyou. This tool is available in the U.S. in English to start, and we're working to bring it to new languages and locations soon.

Have to wait again

krono• 3 years ago

There are several countries where Google is required to offer something along these lines by law rather than as a marketing stunt. Wikipedia has some info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

c_prompt2• 3 years ago

Still doesn't work (since 9 months ago [1]): "Something went wrong and your request wasn't submitted. Check your internet connection and try again."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33338188

signed0• 3 years ago

I got this too until I disabled my adblocker, then it worked fine.

c_prompt2• 3 years ago

Silly me... I forgot this is Google we're talking about. Thanks.

vorpalhex• 3 years ago

I wonder if this will harm Google as a search engine even further. It's not as if they are removing the content, merely the index entry. Others will still return the result.

NotYourLawyer• 3 years ago

The wolf is in the henhouse giving advice to the hens.

Havoc• 3 years ago

When the punchline of the joke is in the domain name…

TheRealSteel• 3 years ago

OP should've used a link shortener to avoid the spoiler

philsnow• 3 years ago

The article itself includes a link [0] to yet another gTLD that I guess Google owns now, .gle . I have never seen this gTLD used before and had to double-check that the site I was looking at was indeed on the legit blog.google domain.

A while back there used to be advice from security folks to use a consistent set of domains for all communication from your company, so that when attackers/scammers/spammers try to impersonate your domains, users are more suspicious. A partial list of Google's gTLDs from https://ntldstats.com/registry/Charleston-Road-Registry-Inc :

.goog .google .gle .youtube .gmail .android .chrome .gbiz

I don't know how many of these are being used to host user-facing sites like [0], but they also have used at least g.co as a URL shortening service.

When you scatter-shot official communication like this, it trains users to believe that your comms can and will come from just about anywhere.

[0] https://goo.gle/resultsaboutyou

ldoughty• 3 years ago

I agree on the .goog, .gle, etc.. but not on Android, YouTube, Gmail....

If companies consolidated at that level, you'd get notified by pepsi for a recall of tostitos... Or Aquafina bottled water.

I think if the general public can identify it as a specific product line, it's fine to have that as a communication domain (and that domain should be the source of news for that product)

38• 3 years ago

privacy tools
blog.google

LOL

barbazoo• 3 years ago

Last year, we launched the Results about you tool to make it easy for you to request the removal of search results that contain your personal phone number

Might be because I'm not in the US but I'm getting a 404 there.

exitheone2• 3 years ago

Since when have comments become so obnoxious on HN?

A very large portion of the population willingly and happily uses Google products. These new tools make it easier to remove unwanted data about yourself from search. That's a good thing.

Please stop it with the "Google bad" circle jerk and realize that the majority of non-nerds has a very different perspective on this.

kelnos• 3 years ago

Circle jerk or not, Google is bad, and there's no reason why we shouldn't talk about that fact. Doesn't really matter if tons of people use Google products with whatever level of happiness they have.

Google is the perpetrator of serious privacy abuses, and we should rightly be skeptical any time they write about improving people's privacy online.

exitheone2• 3 years ago

Reasonable discussion of this would be fine. 90% of comments being snarky and adding absolutely nothing to the topic is not.

BLKNSLVR2• 3 years ago

Let us have our non-non-nerd whinge about companies that are, legitimately, bad in terms of individual privacy, especially when they're publishing a blog article about protecting privacy.

You're not wrong about the non-nerds, but that's the same about anyone who doesn't possess the knowledge to know better.

If we didn't call it out, it would become normalised even faster. I can't live with that.

qup• 3 years ago

Why do we care what non-nerds think? This board is full of subject matter experts.

shapefrog• 3 years ago

This board is full of people who think they are subject matter experts.

Dunning and Kruger have some notes on the matter.

RadixDLT2• 3 years ago

funny, I cannot reach the site... "This site can’t be reached"

I am using quad9 DNS

RadixDLT2• 3 years ago

if you missed a payment or end up at the collection agency, your private info get leaked online immediately

iinnPP5• 3 years ago

Thank you Google. I have your phone still and this gaslighting episode is what has helped me finally decide to get rid of Android. Meaning I will no longer be using anything from Google by choice. I hope I can browse the web with their traffic blocked.

fsflover2• 3 years ago

Apple is collecting a lot of data on you, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261

iinnPP5• 3 years ago

I will use GrapheneOS.

ikekkdcjkfke2• 3 years ago

We don't Sell your data, we give it away for free in the ad bidding process :D

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