Wow. I'm genuinely struggling not to respond with something aggressive and mean, just because of how calloused your lack of interest in preserving the privacy of others is. This is a bad feature that should not be turned on by default.

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.

It's search history in Workspace, which is data Google already has associated with you and your organization. The difference between retention of Workspace and general Google search history is huge. If you are worried about your searches in Workspace being cached you should probably not be using Workspace for that data.

You don’t always have a choice.

This is pure apologetics.

No, it is pure logic. I moved my presence off of Google services because of privacy concerns. I am not being an apologist at all.

The point is that if you are hosting your data on Google services this setting makes little difference to your privacy footprint.

...I understand what you're saying and there's no dispute in the fact that people shouldn't use these services knowing the privacy concerns. But like another poster said, some people just don't have a choice here. Many non-profits, activist groups, and journalists use google workspaces as part of their core.

This change is dishonest and gives little notice to people who have no choice in using these services for their work.

PR and damage control isn't effective if the employee in charge is like "oh shit dudes our company screwed up!"

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.

Loads of valid issues mentioned around here describing concerns with users being tracked. Not really reactive when misuse and abuse of tracking data is so insanely common.

Can you please clarify what you mean and why you think this?

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.

Let's start with your earlier comments.

> 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.

I bring up that group because I'm a part of that group and work with people who have been targeted with subpoenas for simply investigating a company. This is something that effects me personally and the work I do that's deeply intended to help and inform the public. That you don't think protecting that group is a critically important thing for everyone is very telling.

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.

> that you don't think protecting that group is a critically important thing for everyone is very telling.

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?

You clearly have no intent on trying to understand why people have issues with this, so I'm done here.

Best, friend.

I don't mean to judge your argument, but Google is well-known to be part of the USA military industrial complex by now, and to be very friendly with the Chinese government. If you're a journalist investigating anything else than sports competitions results, you may want to consider (for your personal safety) never to use services by such companies. When i say such, i do mean other companies close to the US gov (Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft), but i do mean also other companies close to other governments (Qwant/Orange/etc in France).

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.