Does location data even help with relevance?
During road trips in 2018, location relevant results were turrible. Too many times I'd have to manually add my current location. eg "dog parks albuquerque nm" Sorry, no, I don't care about Dog Park Pub and Office Supplies in Duluth MN. Absolutely enraging.
e.g. a search for "home depot" turning up the close ones with location turned on.
I vividly recall wanting to pick up some flowers while driving north of Phoenix. Google was useless. No local businesses. Just national chains and stuff from other time zones. Infuriating.
Wait, why do you say that? There's nothing inherent to the way that assistants work that mean that they need full access to everything in my life.
Human beings are "AI complete", but when I go to the library and ask them to help me find a book, they don't demand that I show them my phone contacts first. Data access and intelligence are separate concepts.
And Google's voice assistant could figure out what phone number I mean when I say "call mom" without doing anything involving AI at all, because I actually explicitly put that information into my address book in machine-readable, labeled fields. The assistant doesn't need to have an advanced AI to solve that problem, and it certainly doesn't need to look at my search history.
Also, none of that data is harmless.
> I think DDG is exaggerating here
Google shouldn't be basing advertising off of individualized browser histories in the first place, I don't think it's an exaggeration to call that a massive privacy issue. It's a single category, but one that encompasses basically everything you do online.
And while you can technically turn this off in Google settings, doing so will break a large number of Google products and features in other apps because Google ties access to browser histories and app data into other products in a way that is impossible to disentangle from normal functionality.
Back when I used to use Google Maps, turning off location-based advertising disabled my ability to save locations. Like, I couldn't mark a place on the map as my home on my local device unless I gave Google permission to advertise to me based on my location. Every time I wanted to navigate there, I needed to type in the full address. Even weirder, turning off web history took away my ability to use voice commands with my contact list on Android phones. I couldn't tell my phone "call mom", because that feature required access to my search history.
So this phrase "we're not that bad" creates this impression that Google isn't perfect but is still basically respecting privacy choices everywhere, and that any violations are just accidental -- when in reality trying to opt out of these systems is met with outright hostility from Google products, and giving an inch in any area is often interpreted by Google as permission to use that data in any way they see fit.
The system is a lot deeper and more deliberate than the parent comment suggests.