Received an email from Google Fi that their policy is to “opt you in” to sell your phone-call and purchase info to advertisers. They call the data your CPNI — “Customer Proprietary Network Information”. Making this an opt-out when it’s a combo of your shopping data plus phone-call data (including destination and location) plus Google identity seems pretty egregious to me.
Anyway, the emailed notice is easy to overlook as just another policy update that you wouldn’t do anything about. But you can opt out.
At https://fi.google.com/account, go to “Privacy & security”, and deselect “Allow CPNI sharing”. It’s not in the Fi app; you have to do it in a browser.
Damn, the setting isn’t even in the app settings. That’s sneaky. Fuckers.
Even more fun on Mobile Android, trying to login on the mobile site on browser…opens the Fi app because it was set up to handle links. You can remove the Fi app, change link handling for that domain, or use a computer, but yeah, some bullshit was afoot with that one
You can temporarily disable link handling for the Fi app (apps > default apps > opening links), make the privacy change in-browser, and then re-enable link handling after
I used private browsing to work around this on mobile. Annoying that the link gets handled that way though.
I was able to long press the link and open in chrome to get it on the web. However, I got this email a few weeks ago, and tried to opt out, and got distracted. It took this post pointing gout that it’s not in the app for me to get it done! This is outrageous.