Doesn't Google Drive show the identity of someone reading the document to other people reading it, or at least the owner? That's worse than just collecting analytics internally at Google.

No. If you aren't authenticated, it shows your presence in a shared document as "anonymous [metastable animal designator]"

I should have made it clear I was assuming that people were authenticated to their Google account. I think most people who use GMail never log out, and might not check the URL and realize they were navigating to a Google doc.

Hit right-click > open in private window rather than left-click. I'm with the other poster, if you haven't de-googlified your digital life and you don't even bother opening this in private / firefox container, then I don't know what you expect.

Then you entirely missed the point of the comment you replied to: that if you willingly impose google surveillance on yourself you really don't have any space to complain about being reminded of it.

I think you're missing my point that even if you willingly impose Google surveillance on yourself, Google Drive is still worse than Google Analytics because your personally identifiable activity is visible to the author and/or other readers, not just Google.

> personally identifiable activity is visible to the author and/or other readers

View activity is not surfaced to users. View activity is tracked, and in a _GSuite domain_ (such as your job) an admin can audit that activity. For a standard Google account, a user cannot know whether another user has viewed that document, let alone which user. Is there a way you're seeing this that I'm missing? If so I'd like to know about it so I can raise it as an issue.

If you're thinking about docs/sheets/slides presence, unless you've been shared directly on the document the owner (and other users) only see "Anonymous <Animal>".

If the document is shared to you comment/edit access, that comment/edit activity _will_ show up in the document's activity stream, but at that point the owner of the document already knows you have access by virtue of sharing it to you.

I realize you probably don't have much incentive to believe me, but as an engineer on Drive I can say that we take privacy incredibly seriously.

Thanks for the response. I'm mostly familiar with Google Docs in the workplace, where it was apparent who was reading what document at a particular moment from a list of users at the upper-right.

Separately, on my personal account, at some point I viewed a publicly shared document from a well-known person, and that ended up in my "shared documents" (or "documents shared with you"?) for ages. I wasn't sure if that sharing was evident in both directions. I've avoided clicking on shared Google Drive documents since then.

If it's not the case that the owner of the doc can audit activity, I stand corrected.

EDITED TO ADD: I suppose the root of my confusion is that it's pretty hard to distinguish the behavior of Google Drive from Google Docs; and once the lack of privacy has been observed anywhere (e.g. using Docs the workplace), it's hard not to assume it's also happening with PDF's shared via Google Drive, simply because you can't know what the other person is seeing.

It's especially hard when there is an asymmetry (e.g. in a non-GSuite environment, I can see some publicly shared document in my "shared with me" list, but I guess the sharer can't see me).

> Thanks for the response. I'm mostly familiar with Google Docs in the workplace, where it was apparent who was reading what document at a particular moment from a list of users at the upper-right.

Right, which is the notion behind the Activity Dashboard in Docs too (GSuite only). If you left a doc open and watched who popped up, you can effectively know who views a document, so it was exposed as a panel instead. You can disable your own activity showing up for document editors (which applies retroactively) from that same pane. (https://i.imgur.com/AOGmj40.png)

Obviously, in GSuite especially, view activity is recorded and your GSuite admin can audit that activity, but that's kind of an obvious need for a business.

> Separately, on my personal account, at some point I viewed a publicly shared document from a well-known person, and that ended up in my "shared documents" (or "documents shared with you"?) for ages. I wasn't sure if that sharing was evident in both directions. I've avoided clicking on shared Google Drive documents since then.

If you open a link-shared document, it add it to your Shared With Me list (and Recent list), but none of that is visible to the sharer. If you're worried about even "Anonymous Fox" showing up, go to the /preview url, e.g. https://docs.google.com/document/d/<docid>/preview. This still adds it to Shared With Me/logs events on your account (it'll show up in your Quick Access results), but none of it is visible to the sharer and they won't even see your icon.

> it's hard not to assume it's also happening with PDF's shared via Google Drive, simply because you can't know what the other person is seeing.

This is a struggle, I agree. I work on it and sometimes I struggle to remember what applies on GSuite vs. consumer. It's a complicated product and therefore doesn't have one straightforward answer, especially in light of the myriad of policies that GSuite admins can enable/disable. For instance, whether we even record your search queries in Drive (for showing as recent searches in Drive) is controlled by a policy your admin can set.

> It's especially hard when there is an asymmetry (e.g. in a non-GSuite environment, I can see some publicly shared document in my "shared with me" list, but I guess the sharer can't see me).

Right. Consumer: shows up in SWM, GSuite: shows up in SWM & you show up in Activity Dashboard to editors (unless you turn it off as shown in https://i.imgur.com/AOGmj40.png -- it may default to off in your organization anyways).

Also if you sit near the Android people, let them know I'm going to be irritated if I find that my parents have been tricked into activating location tracking on their phones again! It seems like I have to shut off all the various Google privacy settings every time I visit them. They don't want to be tracked.

Presumably to be able to know where they themselves are, a gps circuit is only a passive receiver and a bit of compute.

There's nothing about GPS that says it should provide continuous information to others about one's location.

Privacy and convenience don't have to be trade-offs.

If you set up containers to quarantine all Google stuff in one container this is still going to open in that container.