cross-posted from: https://fed.dyne.org/post/343234
Google Starts Fingerprint-Tracking All Your Devices In 8 Weeks
TL;DR - Google makes (arguably insane) claim that it previously acted responsibly with regards to fingerprinting, and says they will begin acting irresponsibility with fingerprinting in February.
Practical take-aways you probably already knew:
- Today’s Google may do or say anything to make an extra nickel.
- Today’s Google, while it employs some excellent privacy minded engineers, has not demonstrated an organizational commitment to user privacy.
- It is probably wise to assume that the next serious data breach at Google will end marriages, get politicians arrested, get famous people canceled, fuel successful scammers, and have every other privacy impact you can imagine. We know the Google data pool is massive, and we have reason to believe it is incredibly personal. I’m aware that Google has anonymozation solutions in play, and I do not believe those solutions will be effective in a breach scenario.
- I believe that the average person will likely be better off ten years from now if they interact less with Google services.
Like Google maps:
we anonymize your data before selling it. So it leaves your address every morning and goes to your office every morning but it’s completely anonymous.
So the e-mail I got with them claiming they will delete my location history is a lie?
To the best of my knowledge - from a spirited but doomed attempt to read Google’s privacy policies - Google is committed to deleting your location history after sharing it with 10,000 or so vendor partners.
Each of those vendor partners have pinky promised to comply with the rules outlined in the same privacy policy that I failed to read.
For context, I’m not convinced any living person has read the entirety of Google’s privacy policies.
Sadly, I’m quite confident - by the law of averages, human nature, and corporate corruption - that not all 10,000 trusted partners also deletes our location data history.
Google does take privacy preserving steps to anonymyze what it shares.
My educated opinion is that no amount of attempted anonymozation is sufficient for the breadth, scope and quantity of data that Google collects.
Shorter answer for you: yes, I believe that is a corporate lie. True only in technicality, but likely false by any reasonable persons expectation of what “delete” means.
For context, I’m not convinced any living person has read the entirety of Google’s privacy policies.
Their own lawyers, maybe.