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.
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.