Google to turn on activity tracking for many users who turned it off

>> ...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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 ?

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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_...

This is specifically being done purely for evil purposes though, right?

They are trying to diversify into business services and hardware, but those are struggling even though often heavily discounted. Their tarnished reputation is making it harder for customers in those markets to trust them.

A series of startups will begin to cut away at the fat and the cycle will continue.

Say what? I've neither experienced nor heard others mention this, is this recent?

Coincidentally, as a result of an HN post earlier in the day (wifi required for GPS) I installed Osmand+ to try out for navigation.

I did this recently and it's wonderful. RSS-Bridge, locally hosted feeding into my locally hosted FreshRSS.

If you use a plugin like privacy redirect, you don't need to remember to use an alternate front end

Meanwhile the whole thing is obviously a charade because voice guidance and the GPS enabled map are happily running behind the modal!

When you use Chrome, you're literally using the DoubleClick Browser.

Privacy and ethical concerns aside, this is a clear antitrust violation. Google's ad competitors are at an automatic disadvantage.

The FTC has gone after Intel for releasing a compiler that deliberately disadvantaged competitors, but Google doing much more egregious evil stuff to ad competitors isn't touched. I guess it pays to have the House of Reps Speaker Pelosi own copious amounts of profitable call options in Google. [2] It's profitable to look the other way, isn't it?

[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/e51dcb0c148...

[2] https://nypost.com/2021/12/30/nancy-pelosi-buys-call-options...

There are things that bother me. For example, blacklisting certain websites because people who have control over them tell them to, or removing certain things from auto-complete because of someone having control over them. But again, that doesnn't make THEM evil. It's the people who have gained control over them, mostly by threatening them of regulations (via disinformation in mass media) and most likely Epteinesque blackmailing of their executives.

This is why we need exponentially increasing fines for repeat offenders and perhaps even harsher things like prison sentences for CEOs or the company itself (i.e. a temporary complete ban).

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

If true, that means our social pressure on Google (and Facebook, collaterally) is working, and we should keep applying it.

From Wikipedia [1]:

> Following Google's corporate restructuring under the conglomerate Alphabet Inc. in October 2015, Alphabet took "Do the right thing" as its motto, also forming the opening of its corporate code of conduct.[1][2][3][4][5] The original motto was retained in Google's code of conduct, now a subsidiary of Alphabet. In April 2018, the motto was removed from the code of conduct's preface and retained in its last sentence.[6]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_be_evil

I'm not using any google product except android at this point. I need to use a few apps that require the BS of safetynet, and when this happens you're pretty screwed. I remember some years ago I was still able to setup an android phone without a google account, but it was so _intentionally_ broken there was no point.

People suggest Apple, but apple is just as bad if not worse in my eyes. I'm a dev, and I do not eat their kool-aid.

The "turning on activity tracking" of the post is nothing new to me. I have no means to prove this, but I'm quite privacy conscious and I went through every single setting in the google account and android during setup. The settings reset by themselves to tracking a couple of times per year. I do the same treatment to my family members, and I see the same end result (although in that case I cannot know if they were just coerced to tap "allow this thing" somewhere).

The end result is that I stopped trusting google quite a long time ago.

Regarding search, you can switch to pretty much any other search engine right now. DDG, bing.. it doesn't really matter much. They all got better, but the real kicker is that google got a lot worse to the point that I no longer see their engine useful for search queries. I've read some people here say "google still has better verbatim search".. HA, that's so far from the truth it's almost laughable. The only way I can get my terms in the results so far is with kagi and searx with additional filters.

I can say the same for most of their offerings. The technical excellence is still there, but it's being intentionally corrupted to the point that doesn't matter anymore.