>> ...with the hope that more people will feel comfortable getting the benefits of better search in Workspace without having to opt-into search history being tracked for all Google services.
This is unacceptable. People have already opted out or been opted out by their admin. If they want to opt back in now that the setting is more granular, they can, but this choice should not be made for them.
Let's be honest, the real reason for making this opt-out again is that you hope lots of people won't notice and you can start collecting their data. Please reconsider.
I'm keen on seeing if there's any legal code or case law that addresses opting someone back in who's already opted out.
And I'm hoping there's personal culpability for the change, too. Not just corporate fines. But this is probably just wishful thinking on my part.
> Custom Experience is a rebrand/spinoff of Verizon Selects, which customers were automatically enrolled into when they used the Verizon Up rewards program. Verizon Selects is being rebranded Custom Experience Plus (and anyone who was previously a member of Verizon Selects automatically gets moved to the new Plus program) and the standard Custom Experience program is being branched off of it, which allows the company to track many of its customers’ data use who do not actively opt-out.
Google's move feels similar. At least do a prompt of the user if you think they would want to opt in. Don't just opt them in automatically on your own.
Don't ever change a users opt-out preference, instead give them information so they can decide on their own.
But Google knows very well what happens if they do this - almost nobody will opt-in.
I also hope Google gets sued in Europe over this. I live in the US and work for a European company and I'm reasonably sure they're going to be super pissed off about this.
or
B. All those things were considered and in the end the executives though it was worth the backlash and the risk of paying a fine.
Isn't the point of Google's current valuation that they are stealing as much data as they can to feed their nascent AI in the hopes of spawning the best masses manipulator? Why would they reconsider their overarching business model?
Users do not want this. Engineers, PMs, and executives want this. Google's 23% YoY revenue growth wants this. To Google, users who don't subject to dystopian tracking, who don't consent to Google knowing everything about them, who just want to go about their own lives while not being studied like a lab rat, or pestered to let an all-powerful force in the sky wring their lives of all digital value, are a round-off error. Google has shifted from its default modes of putting the user first, offering them services and information at their request, of being uninteresting in who or why is asking...that it has become one of the leading forces eroding user privacy, agency, and trust.
Inside of Google, the reality distortion field is intense. It doesn't feel intense, it feels rational and right. Google sees itself as an infinitely benevolent force for good in this world that occasionally makes mistakes. It literally cannot fathom what an abusive, creepy, and unfeeling machine it's become. It sees itself as being made of very moral people. It cannot understand that its enormous size, its market position, and its list of priorities have created a configuration of people that can do nothing but eat the world, and at this point it is doing so, despite what those people have in their heads.
One would hope that there will be an effort to shame these engineers for their role in normalizing mass surveillance, and for their shallow attempts to play down the damage they cause to society.
A year ago I've seen a Google engineer boasting here about his occasional donations to charities, while he works on ads and regularily defends his employer in public, dismissing some of the illegal activities that are taking place at Google.
I'd understand working for your own selfish reasons on something harmful to other people out of necessity, but I doubt most Google and Facebook engineers are only designing and writing the code that intrudes on our personal lives because they just could not find an engineering job at a less scummy company.
2. There is no need for any tracking to implement this. It can be done on the client.
2. True but it's somewhat useful to be able to use your account on different devices and retain your history.
No, we're talking about accounts who already had it (as part of broader setting) disabled for them, in a context where the data in question can (contractually) only be used to provide the service anyhow.
> 2. There is no need for any tracking to implement this. It can be done on the client.
Pray tell me how you can do client side search history recommendation for the first query I make after logging in.
That doesn’t contradict that it was switched off intentionally.
> Pray tell me how you can do client side search history recommendation for the first query I make after logging in.
Logging in to what? Are you saying you want your search history synced between your browsers? If so, that’s a solved problem that doesn’t require Google to track you.
And the corollary equally applies: it's a trivial feature with no privacy impact, why require opt-in. I don't want to be spammed with opt-ins every time every app I use adds a trivial new feature. I'd be clicking a dozen boxes a day.
Keep in mind all the user data collected is still under the workspace data use agreement which is very strict and disallows using the data for pretty much anything that isn't directly providing that service to that user/organization.
(Web browsers store previously visited websites)
What? Yes they are! Browser history includes every page you navigate to, including the "search results for 'tps report'" page of a cloud storage service.
This distinction doesn't matter too much though, because having the browser be responsible for this fails in at least two ways:
1. The browser shouldn't need knowlege of how to parse every query language of every webapp you use.
2. The browser can't actually give you the results of those queries. If I search for "tps reports", the browser knows I entered that query string, but it doesn't know what the 15 results were, and so can't, for example take my prior search into account when I search for "12/17/2022" to uprank the TPS report for that date, as opposed to some other report. Nor can it even do the weaker bit and assume that since I searched TPS yesterday, when I search "reports" today, it should consider upranking tps reports.
Smart systems which sometimes work and sometimes don't are vastly more frustrating than dumb systems which do exactly what they're told, every time.
The reason is because the reason given is perfectly sound. “We have to split this out because of perfect reasonable reasons like laws, data retention policies, etc etc”.
And everything afterwards is pure unadulterated propaganda.
I don’t know if the commenter knows how patronizing they sound. “We did this for you because even though you’ve previously explicitly opted out, we think we know better than you and we’re doing you a favor to enhance your experience”.
Imagine going into a restaurant and saying “I really don’t enjoy a medium rare steak please make it medium well” and having the chef say “ok fine but medium rare steak is the best way to enjoy it so I made it medium rare despite what you previously explicitly told me enjoy”
I really wouldn’t expect this sort of borderline gaslighting from a company like Google. I really can’t tell how many PMs and engineers on this team either a) whole heartedly believe in this or b) have convinced themselves this is a user friendly change or c) knows that something feels off but their paycheck depends on it so let’s not fight too much about it, d) feels some reservations and have voiced up but have bills to pay so didnt rock the boat
At which point I would walk out and go to another cafe. The same experience, "I want coffee in a certain way", "we know better than you and will only serve you coffee how we like to make coffee"
Surely this is a singular experience you had and not the commonality you're implying it to be?
> 9. Market Lane Coffee: Queen Victoria Market
> The only milk baristas serve is full fat cow’s milk, the coffee only comes in one size, you have to put your own lid on your takeaway, a cappuccino or latte costs $4.80, and there is always, always a line. The seasonal blend offers a full-bodied, hazelnut-heavy cup with apple undertones.[1]
That is not the one I remember it happening at, but it serves to illustrate. The other thing that used to happen sometimes is "We only use full-fat milk". I hadn't remembered that until I tried finding a reference for the cup sizes.
[1]: https://www.timeout.com/melbourne/restaurants/the-best-coffe...
If they want to run their businesses like that, that's fine. No objection. I'm sure they'll find plenty of customers. It might even be me depending on how desperate I am. But it's accepting that it's not going to work for a segment of their potential market.
Another example is cash-only/card-only, the former of which I now find much more obnoxious. That's a decision they're allowed to take, but it removes a segment of customers (it's different to the "Google knowing better" in the original post). I will likely not go back to a place that's cash only, because I don't usually carry cash any more.
Depending on the country you can walk into an office supply store and walk out with a cheap terminal (Square, SumUp, etc) that will allow you to take payments so it's nowhere near the "6 weeks wait and a merchant bank account" that it was when card payments were in their early years. Which means it's just lazy. It's lazy and it's pushing that laziness onto your customers, who have to go to the ATM.
Disclaimer: This varies country to country. In germany it's much more common to have to pay cash, because they have some long term, anti-tracking hang-up that go back to the cold war (at least that's my understanding).
Is this really "knowing better"? I mean, if you want a bigger coffee, and are taking your own cup: just ask them for two, and put it in the same cup.
The card issue has another aspect you're not considering: credit card networks charge fees. There is no inherent fee to accept cash.
This is issue industry wide not just in google, and it is not only privacy settings, but applies to general GUI of some applications and operating systems.
Well considering it’s a felony to cook or consume some steaks above medium rare I may do the same.
Kidding of course :P
The changes going on recently mean, that I'm finally eliminating my use of the G. I've dropped paid services. I'm dropping (paid) GSuite/Workspace/whatever it's now called for my family, and for a couple of businesses. I've embraced other search engines again - and they're surprisingly good enough, finally. I've suggested others do the same - and I can only assume that slowly, this will pick up.
Google has finally embraced being an evil data sponge - whether people want to hear it or not. Many of us have used your services, frequently pay for them - but want control over their use, and our data.
Stop changing the game along the way, stop making us the product.
Or perhaps Google is crap enough. I no longer find anything useful when the search term overlaps with something for sale.
Even Wikipedia search is better in that case, and I skip directly to it.
Google maps is just as bad - other than street names and a few "public" places, the only locations that show up seem to be those paying to appear. Given how many (most) businesses google has details on, it's obvious that maps is filtering out non-advertisers.
So google is no longer a search engine, or a maps provider - it's degraded to be a small-time "yellow-pages" advertising directory. Sad really.
I searched for ‘low more guitar sound’ and top result was an awesome YouTube video recreating the guitar sound of Low - More (song with amazing guitar tone)
Went to my other computer that defaults to google, searched the same thing
Pages of irrelevant crap, searched for ‘low more %nameofyoutubechanbel’
Nothing
Searched for exact title of YouTube video
Nothing
Had to manually go to the YouTube channel and find the video myself
Why does google serve up so much irrelevant crap nowadays?
I just tried this and the first result I got was "Why does my guitar sound low?" on Quora and the only youtube result on page one was titled "How To Fix Annoying String Buzz On Your Guitar"
The results on Google were just as useless and still arguably worse than DDG, but I was disappointed that our results should be so different considering DDG says they don't buy into the whole search bubble thing. I'd have thought they'd be more consistent
What are you switching to? I'm in the same situation of a couple of family groups and a couple of small businesses on GSuite and looking for alternatives.
For the record, I don't think I trust Apple either - but nowadays they're clearly less evil than the big G. Heck, I'm thinking of trying out the first iPhone I'll have used since 2010. That's my level of upset.
It's not OK.
If you split a control into two, more granular, controls, the default should be whatever I, the user, set the original control to be.
Having the default be a more privacy protecting setting is better than the default being the best for ad tracking, but really it should be what I wanted.
You've just identified that the Google Search operator is not Google's primary user, it is the advertisers that Google's entire existence is geared of appease, the search function is just how they collect our desires to feed back to their real users, the advertising industry.
By all means do your job, and hit your metrics. But this is just a dark pattern, which comes up with some new product boundaries so you can default these settings back to on.
There's a certain arrogance to coming into HN of all places and offering a sales explanation that it's actually in our benefit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Case in point, the subject at hand: people who said they did not want to be tracked, now have to find a setting and say it again. That does not inspire confidence in the company, and as a proxy, it doesn't give me much hope that I can trust what you say.
0. Use Firefox, not Chrome
1. Install an ad-blocker (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...)
2. Install ghostery (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghostery/)
3. Install Cookie Auto-Delete (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...)
4. Use Google Container (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...)
Then start advocating using https://plausible.io/ over Google Analytics in your own sites where possible, and use https://search.brave.com/ or https://duckduckgo.com/ for search.
For e-mail there are many options besides gmail.
Sure, easy to say…
GAFA is everywhere, and most people can't escape them. For example: there are a lot of websites that allow register only by FB / Google account.
The benefits are not misunderstood, but the ramifications of being held by a company that is getting progressively more oblique and whose actions more obfuscated by marketing speak and sleight of hand PR don't make the ROI better for 'the actual product' when put under scrutiny.
Apologies, but this line is so formulaic it just triggers PTSD for me. In five quarters, management and TLs turn over and suddenly someone plugs this hose into that one, sometimes by accident, but usually deliberately. It will all end up in the giant Google smorgasbord, parts of it draped with a fig leaf that calls it "anonymous" and offered up as a data source to be raided by dozens of internal Google services to feed on.
> we can't create machine learning models from your data to improve the experience for other customers, for example, without your prior consent
Somehow "anonymized" data is constantly up for grabs, without consent required. As a PM you should have interacted with legal by now, and if it hasn't dawned on you yet, the organization will eventually do whatever it deems is not explicitly illegal or is within an acceptable envelope of risk. "Anonymized" is a particularly import legal blessing, however technically inadequate the actual process turns out to be.
You are in a particularly difficult position to be responsible for this, so I don't envy you, and don't take my comments as a personal attack. But yeah, we've heard all these lines before.
What is a double-edged sword is how this history is being used.
If it's just about offering search history for each individual user, then it's not a privacy issue and strictly an improvement in convenience. Turning it on offers the convenience, turning it off, removes it.
This is of course different if this history is used for other profiling and for ad sales, but we just learned that the data is not used this way. Now we can either trust them that this is true, or we don't.
But if we don't, what good is a setting then because if we don't trust them to begin with, why would we trust them that disabling the feature also disables tracking?
So tell me: Why do you believe that anybody in their right mind would want this functionality turned off?
> Why do you believe that anybody in their right mind would want this functionality turned off?
Because they want to. We don't need to give you a reason. (I know you're not GP)
I keep browsing history in Firefox turned off. Not out of privacy concerns or anything like that - it's not leaving my computer and nobody else inspects what sites I've been visiting - but just because I don't like having it. If I find something useful I bookmark it.
I do the same in Drive and Gmail. Because I just don't like having the history suggestions pop up when I'm trying to search. It's annoying and obnoxious and frankly quite useless IMO. I can type the query again.
I'm in the middle of trying to create a taxonomy of our unwieldly internal documentation (which exists, to my despair, mostly in Google Workspace Apps). Part of this is recreating how other employees find and access things, including search.
And oftentimes when I'm searching in this capacity, I'm looking specifically for documents that are hard to find or that I've never had to touch before. My history is not only not helpful, I don't want it on because I don't want it influencing my thinking or searching.
My kid did a single search and play for a Taylor Swift song on my phone and now she shadows me all across the internet.
I understand this is slightly different as this is in "workspace" but I now assume that is irrelevant.
What for? I fail to see the convenience of it at all. If I'm searching for something I was already searching for, my browser will already prompt me with suggestion to fill the phrase for me based on local history which is synchronized between my devices on my terms - which isn't all that useful anyway since I already know what I'm looking for!
Which if added as a new privacy setting to workspaces later on would seem to imply that this change of removing the org wide opt-out is really how Google could build the right conditions necessary to get users to “opt-in” when they really have not expressed any interest in doing so while making it a large enough task for admins to fail to achieve 100% enforcement of the organization’s actual desired configuration state… and hides the real intent of the change.
Sorry but “we are opting all your users into this and removing your ability to stop us” is an odd change that is being driven by something other than the feedback org admins. I have a hard time believing that normal users will see enough of an improvement to warrant even mentioning their email search to their boss but do find it probable that admins will mention being forcibly overruled by Google to others that help influence renewal… just seems like something else is the driver and the end goal.
imo believing that this change is being driven by good intent wouldn’t be so difficult if the change to make workplace privacy settings a user-only controlled setting if it inherited the current organization stance. Some users would enable it and if it really does improve the user experience so much then others will adopt it when they see it’s effects in action or get the “well I don’t have that problem” comment from a coworker(this is how Google search, Chrome and Gmail got to their levels of adoption after all). As of right now though it sounds like all the other messaging that we have to put up with which after awhile is to take as anything other than “you are trying to steal something from me”.
At least it’s not a setting that can only be saved in the browser’s local storage and not at the account level like so many other annoying things that get pushed(looking at you YouTube).
But when you do its there ready and waiting.
I find it staggering how normalised privacy abuse has become with big tech.
I think it's misleading for other reasons. Namely, I can't be 100% sure that if I turn it off, I won't be tracked - or if you just stop display the tracking data you gather anyway.
As recent court finding revealed this is most likely a lie, and even Googlers themselves don't know how to turn off pervasive tracking across apps.
If that setting was off it must remain off even if you "change product boundaries". Is this such a hard concept to understand?
You can of course link to this court finding, right?
When you say you cant use the data to create machine learning models, is that you talking about this (workspace) use-case, or is that a principle that Google uses in general?
How does one give consent? Is it you have to voluntarily go into the settings and turn that feature on? Or is it agreeing to a pop-up ToS agreement?
And in general for features where doing an ML model isn't necessary for basic benefit to the user, are those consent options separate?
This is a blatant lie. Google will share this data with law enforcement, also on request by evil and/or totalitarian regimes.
---------
And even for use within a Google:
It is as believable as FB promising to not use 2FA for other purposes.
And malicious tracking of users who explicitly demanded to stop doing this is just another proof that noone should trust it.
It is likely that Google sooner or later WILL use search history for own purposes.
I am not even really trusting that Google is not saving my location in real-time despite that I switched this off.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Which parts are a problem? Would following substitutions be enough to fix the problem? (I cannot edit it anymore, checking for future)
"This is a blatant lie." -> "This is clearly untrue."
"malicious tracking of users who explicitly demanded to stop doing this" - drop "malicious"
I think that "evil and/or totalitarian regimes" is OK there.
This is true of one's employer in general, no? "this data" is theoretically all related to one's work.*
If a gov't approached your employer and asked for whatever they have on file, they could/would be compelled to provide it.
* My spouse has done employment law in the past and likes to remind me _never_ to use work email for personal matters because the can and _will_ pull up a log of my activity should the need ever arise.
Which is why people don't want Google to keep it on file.
(1) some companies simply to not start storing data that users explicitly requested to stop collecting (so it cannot be leaked)
(2) some companies are not operating for example in China so there is lower risk of forwarding your data to their government
(3) some companies operate in places where police/intelligence agencies at least pretend to not have direct access to private data without order from a proper court. Not some "allow all" like USA has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
Somewhere between paternalism and conniving. For those working at Big Tech it seems there can be no such thing as a conflict of interest between the company and a user (ad target).
Google workers spend their time devising ways to collect more user data. If some users spend their time devising ways to minimise the data they are sharing, how can the company's interests and the user's interests be aligned. They cannot. Google workers can try to convince users that there no harm in sharing more data with Google, even claiming it will benefit them to do so. They are basically downplaying the user's interests. There is no negotiation. Google will never contemplate the notion of collecting less data.
After that they can attempt to avoid any additional tracking on top of the necessary one that comes with the choice someone else made for them.
Yes, we do re-run prior searches, but they're not "immensely useful" because you have no feedback if we found what we were looking for or not. Using basic trigger detection like clicks, timings or back button is not enough, as I could have been sent into a rabbit hole that wasn't what I was looking for.
So, before you work on search history collection, you should probably focus on getting these search result relevant. Today, they're mostly garbage.
I also believe that your mission is not incompatible with everyone's feeling about data collection. Maybe a _simple_ approach would benefit both ?
Back to your point, let's keeps the mailbox example. I currently have 7470 unread notification emails from github in a folder in my work inbox. Let's say I was looking for some team invite email from a few months ago. Unless I remember the team, the date or the wording in github's email, everything I'll get will basically under a ton of gargabe email about comments people made in PRs. It's quite useless to remind me of previous search queries if they didn't get the feedback when I found the email I was looking for. Moreover, even if they managed to find back the team invite in that pile, have validated my goal and saved the query<=>result association, I went there for a specific purpose that may/should be completed by now. Giving useless hints is worse than giving me nothing.
How is sending everyone an email about it being "sneaky"?
Because they sent the email months before users can adjust the new setting to match their old setting, placing a burden to remember on the user.
Because they didn't default the new value to the existing value.
> Search history can be immensely useful for our users
See the various comments spread across all HN articles stating that Google Search has become useless.
That being said, there's an important note that wasn't communicated in the email since it was sent to (paid offering) admins: consumer (non-paid) users who have Web and App Activity disabled will have their Workspace search history setting _also_ disabled as part of the migration. That's because we recognize a user who has turned Web and App Activity off explicitly likely won't feel the need to benefit from Workspace search history either.
That's a very elaborate way to say "because we don't want to".
It is off if the related setting is currently off if you're a non paid user. However if you're a paid user it is currently on.
That’s not an answer as to WHY the behavior is that way.
Shocking, right?
I remember, as a youngster, a Google advertisement that was in the form of a math quizz. One of the questions was about how many colors are needed to paint the sides of an icosahedron. The next question was: "which colors would you choose? Why?" I was utterly fascinated by the, so far unknown, company that wrote this funny ad that appealed so personally to me!
Twenty years later, the mouth of Google uses wooden language with terms like "product experience". This is not only useless, but also sad and stupid. Damn, Google, what the hell happened to you? Your ass used to be beautiful!
Managing an application for 4B ppl is not something to sneeze at. There's a lot of different user profiles involved, and it's difficult to keep all of them happy.
What are you, the etiquette police?
when people behave that way in live conversations, i'm equally unimpressed.
In general, there is nothing wrong with detracting from someone's point (though there can be in specific instances). The point may be ridiculous and need detracting!
There is also nothing wrong with being derogatory when appropriate. Some speech is indeed bad and should be called out -- were you not doing just that? (Though I, of course disagree that the speech you were objecting was in any way bad).
google might be a giant corporation these days, but even so, it's pretty ridiculous to belittle their reps in their own threads.
as i said before, i've seen this behavior in person before (with no interruptions used in delivery, no less!) and i've seen it online. in all cases it's impressive, but not in a good way.
This seems reasonable for new customers, maybe? but for existing customers this is pretty heavy handed.
I get that you want users to experience the benefits of this feature, but I personally would prefer to be informed of the feature and its value, and guided to opt in. I’d prefer to make that choice. Especially considering the potential downsides of accidentally preserving all of one’s search history.
Just because your company has a product named Android, doesn't mean you _need_ to talk like one, you know.
> That being said, there's an important note that wasn't communicated in the email since it was sent to (paid offering) admins: consumer (non-paid) users who have Web and App Activity disabled will have their Workspace search history setting _also_ disabled as part of the migration. That's because we recognize a user who has turned Web and App Activity off explicitly likely won't feel the need to benefit from Workspace search history either
This is actually (at a first read) GOOD news for individuals' privacy, and you bury it like this? I know there many be a bonus or two on the line here, but what the hell, you almost didn't get the message across. Please communicate like humans, at least as long as you still have humans as an audience.
Do users have the ability to disable the setting when they receive the first e-mail, or do they have to wait until the setting is enabled then go back and disable it?
Are the users being notified, or just the admins? (The e-mail in the pastebin sounds like it went only to admins).
Will users be reminded when the setting changed, or is that left to the admin/do they have to remember that and disable it once the change happened?
Why is this? The company should have control over how employees use the company assets.
The proper way to do this is:
Admin level:
- default to off
- options
- enable
- disable
- allow the user to set this
- default to off
- default to onObviously bad for business when 90% of your revenue is from ads.
Then make a case for them to turn it on, don’t use a dark pattern.
> Great question
This is exactly how politicians (or whoever is doing something nasty) will start the answer on sensitive question. Shady business.
Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? Note these guidelines:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."
Some background on why this is particularly important in this sort of thread:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
That’s also true of most people who aren’t doing something nasty.
P(doing something nasty | "Great question") > P(doing something nasty)Another content here says that they'd say "great question" genuinely, which I don't doubt. And that's the problem, fakers have hijacked such phrases and mannerisms.
I also suspect it's a mannerism that's more common in some nations than others. In the US, conversations often seem overly polite to me e.g. the infamous "have a nice day", particularly in corporate settings. There's nothing exactly _wrong_ with that, it just comes across to me as insincere sometimes. I'd rather have an honest conversation, which can of course still be polite, while avoiding apparent insincerity. Cultural differences are subtle and profound! :)
Hmm.... thinking aloud... I don't speak Japanese, but if I could, I wonder if I'd find their famously uber-polite business-speak mannerisms jarring too?
It's also how people will answer bad or a bit silly questions, and then try to turn it into a great question by rooting around in it and pulling something great out so as not to hurt people's feelings. Because of the whole there are no stupid questions thing. (just listing other reasons why people answer with Great Question, not insinuating anything here)
It is also how someone might be expected to reply to a Great Question.
You are drawing the product manager for this website feature(!) up to be some sort of corrupt politician or big tech conspiracy mastermind. Really absurd.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
thanks for jumping into the room to answer questions.
Personally I am not a fan of this idea. But that is currently not my point.
Sitting in Germany, I have not received this mail (I am a workspace admin for my private stuff and a workspace user for my employer). So maybe we are exempt. Not sure.
But - as a user for a workspace account that is being managed by our parent company in the US, I am wary of this change. In Germany some employees are represented by works councils.
Changes such as these could fall under the works councils' right of co-determination and should/could therefore not be rolled out so easily and promptly across the board for all users. At least not for employees who are represented by works councils.
Have you put into place the possibility for admins to exempt specific user groups from these default on setting?
Refining a search I just did does not require storing a complete search history.
But, being able to better help users find recent files or emails does require storing _a_ history, which we can't do if the setting is off.
You're effectively enabling the ease of search warrants of journalists and activists' search history, where they think this sort of thing is turned off. It's fucking shameful.
Look at the retention schedules of any government agency and you'll see that 18 months is an eternity, and that's for information in the public domain.
The point is that if you are hosting your data on Google services this setting makes little difference to your privacy footprint.
This change is dishonest and gives little notice to people who have no choice in using these services for their work.
I think any google employee that comes in here and starts agreeing with the complaints would quickly find themselves out of a massively overpaid job the next day.
Whether from a lack of experience with how these things can go badly, or from a lack of good faith in trying to understand others' concerns, it sounds like you simply don't understand why people would have issues with this. But you haven't clarified what your comments that, from my perspective, appear to be even more reactionary than the people you're accusing of being reactionary.
> This is a bad feature that should not be turned on by default.
Opine. Stating it matter-of-factly doesn't make it fact.
> You're effectively enabling the ease of search warrants of journalists and activists' search history
Here you pull the "think of the children!" card. All those poor journalists and activists using Workspaces. Your response is to bring up politically vulnerable outlier groups and parade them around to satisfy your own need to express moral outrage.
> it sounds like you simply don't understand why people would have issues with this
I don't understand why people want to be outraged for the sake of being outraged. It's becoming exhausting.
What's exhausting is having to keep up to date with how to continue turning off these awful "features" and arguing about how we don't want these features for the billionth time.
Again you take the worst-case interpretation, with a dash of ad hominem, to help you climb that moral high ground you seem fond of.
> about how we don't want these features
So you speak for the whole of Google's customer base?
Best, friend.
If you work at Google, and think you're doing something good for humanity, please take a step back, look yourself in the mirror, and consider doing any other job instead. Arguably, even becoming a mercenary would have less negative impact overall than working for Google, because Google is not responsible for killing a few people but rather for bringing technological armaments (surveillance/AI/hosting) to governments and corporations killing millions.
For the survival of humankind and millions of other species, we need to dismantle all corporations and governments before they're done destroying earth and its ecosystems.
Something is really wrong at Google right now. I feel like my best friend is making a drunken pass at my wife or something.
Wanting to make more fine grained permissions is fine. But if you are going to do so you must respect the wishes of anyone who previously disabled them and set the new one to disabled if the previous one it was part of is.
Or better yet just disable it all by default, but we all know Google will never do this. Adding new permissions and automatically opting people into things they previously disabled is why data harvesting companies like Google have lost all trust.
Respect the opportunity.
Neither are being done here. An email explaining the setting is one thing. Enabling the setting for the users is blatant disrespect. You and your team of PMs are destroying Google's opportunities with our users by forcing changes like this and pushing them over the edge.
I think this change is good. It seems to take away the decision from the admin and put it solely in the hand of the user which is great.
More granular user control is also good (although that UI for deciding what gets recorded is getting messy).
Default ON is reasonable imo. Especially given that the data is only used to improve the product. In my experience CTR on autosuggestions is huge, hopefully this will improve workspace experience for quite a few people.
You don't need courage if you simply don't care, as evident from the responses.
Opting in what was previously explicitly opted out without asking for an affirmative should be illegal.
I plan on complaining to the FTC.
What happens to data of searches of users that were in a Workspace and no longer are, by being fired or by no longer paying for the service themselves? What happens if they move to a new organization?
It's not automatically solely owned by the company.
1. Google seems to want to put me into that workspace whenever I go to chrome and login despite not being at the company anymore.
2. I saw some search results in normal gmail / google search and vice versa that made me suspect there could be data shared between the workspace searches and my non workspace searches. Which would make some sense because I, like many people, don't zealously make sure work searches are never done when logged in to my private account. Example of search results improved - searched privately chose stackoverflow down page, searched workspace some days later, stackoverflow answer first result (not scientific, maybe I improved my search second time to get the stackoverflow result I was looking for) I noticed it and thought, huh, probably they merge this stuff.
So what I mean is does this happen:
Search private - switch workplace account - private searches enrich relevance of results in workplace account search - search workplace - switch to private - workplace searches enrich relevance of results in private account - quit job, start new job without company account all searches in private, quit job - start job with company account - private search history enrich relevance of results in workplace account search.
So sure, presumably not, but I'm not sure that we should presume without also confirming.
I’m glad that you confirmed that you don’t care about your paying users anymore. Of course you will change their settings since you know better they want to be tracked even if they say they don’t.
I was under impression that, being a paid customer, I would not be a product and you would not try to scam me into being a data source for you. Looks like I was wrong and this move is the last straw that will kick me out of Google as soon as I’m done with transition. You lost my money and my goodwill. I will never ever use any Google service, nor will companies where I work or consult.
Looking forward to a Google free world.
The fact that we can't disable this feature for our workspace is also pretty messed up. Yes disabling the feature could remove some functionality- but that's a choice the users should make.
You can't disable it on a workspace level, each user has to do it individually now.
This is imminently true, but the real context here is maybe more of a Freudian slip, and perhaps forgotten by some people.
Remember kids: Google's "users" are the people buying ad spots. People looking at *.google.com are just the eyeballs they charge to get access to.
Local storage exists, let me use it. Otherwise the only thing you are committed to is never giving users autonomy.
Nope.
What you are doing is illegitimate spying on people. People who managed to find obfuscated setting and explicitly requested to stop logging private data.
I hope that this action will result in yet another fine for Google, this time measured in billions of euro.
What's going on lately? First Google Maps refusing to navigate unless the user consents to Google using their phone to wardrive and now this? Can it really be coincidence?
End of discussion.
> Now you can exercise your legal privacy rights in one step via Global Privacy Control (GPC), required under the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) and Europe’s Global Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
I don't think this is consistent with GDPR. GDPR require opt-out by default - no data can be sent without person consent.
You probably meant to write either "optED-out by default" or "opt-in default", right?
Sometimes I wonder if people like you really believe their own lies to sleep better at night.
I encourage everyone to make the leap to DDG or some other search engine that doesn't just treat you as a data cow to be milked for your precious, precious "insights."
Even GMail is no longer an attractive proposition - the risk of being locked out (perhaps, even automatically!) of an account that serves as your primary mode of recovery / identification to other websites, with little to no chance of getting an actual human on the line to address your issue, is too great. I would rather not have my finances and other important accounts be subject to the whims of the big algorithm in the clouds.
Yandex services are pretty nice (they have an equivalent to most Google things), but even more important for me is that - even on the lowest plan - you can talk to a real human in support within minutes, 24/7.
No, thanks. Google may be evil but moving my data from Google to the Russian government spooks is really not a solution.
But, although China could monitor me, why would they care about some random guy out of 300 million Americans? And even if they cared, what could they do that might actually affect my life?
In contrast, we know that many US companies have an open wire to American law enforcement and surveillance agencies. And these people do have an interest in monitoring me (even if I'm not doing anything wrong), and they do have the power to harm me.
China might be eviller in many respects, but the products of a Chinese company are harmless to me, especially in comparison to domestic ones.
(And I also use Kaspersky for security on my home computers.)
In some ways it's worse because Australia is five-eyes, so they can do a, I'll spy on your citizens you spy on mine kind of thing (which we know from Snowden was exactly what they were doing)[1][2].
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-d... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jun/10/nsa-offers-...
Search is for sure hit or miss, but I pay for it and feel... a bit better.
For my "professional" email I use Amazon Workmail with a custom domain.
Of course there may be other reasons why you want professional email separate, such as not having it at risk should Apple decide you've broken their T&Cs because poor AI/ML says so, and they close your account.
It isn't really anything sensitive, really more just when I am interviewing and related activities.
But I also want it to be a separate email instead of just an alias which I assume iClouds is. Could be wrong though.
Amazon's is just $5 a month so not really a huge drive to change it.
Why does that matter? Doesn't anything after the domain stay between your browser and the server you're communicating with, assuming https?
This is at best extremely disingenuous and at worst could be illegal in the GDPR countries. Par for the course for Google though. The only good move here would be to have everyone who had opted out of search history set to off by default for this new setting as well. Otherwise you're actively violating the privacy and wishes of users based on their previously stated preferences. Shame.
> the somewhat confusingly named Web and App Activity
You know what is confusing ? re-enabling things with a new name on top of it, despite users disabling it before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
No means no.
It doesn't mean "OK, just the tip".
It is hard to trust companies that want to start billing me, it seems, without telling me first.
Google is becoming even more infuriatingly scummy. Literally a minute ago I saw this post about YouTube throttling the number of views on videos by new channels:
https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/sim12o/well_...
Search history can be immensely useful for our users, since a lot of them re-run prior searches or want search experiences built on top of prior ones. Today, for the Workspace paid offering admins who choose to disable the somewhat confusingly named Web and App Activity admin console control, users in the domain have no ability to get relevant and historical search suggestions in Drive or Gmail that can help them save time.