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

> 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.

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.

2. There is no need for any tracking to implement this. It can be done on the client.

(Web browsers store previously visited websites)

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.

Surely this is a singular experience you had and not the commonality you're implying it to be?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's a very elaborate way to say "because we don't want to".

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!

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.

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.

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 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.

You can't disable it on a workspace level, each user has to do it individually now.

You probably meant to write either "optED-out by default" or "opt-in default", right?

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.

[0]: https://b.tvl.fyi/issues/155

Or

Protonmail.com

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.

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 the price of participating in an irrational market.

"I never really understood the ideas in economics, in fact I almost failed to graduate from college because I couldn’t stand going to economics lectures. Hate, hate, hate the stuff. It’s like studying Bible stories or pseudoscience—economics has so little connection to daily reality. For instance, it’s completely obvious that companies can’t in fact grow forever, year after year, without hitting some debilitating limits. But the so-called value of a company is based on how much they grow from quarter to quarter. Economics as practiced by bankers is complete horseshit, but they’ve bought out all the politicians, so nothing reasonable ever gets done. In the long run, of course, the situation will resolve itself. Meanwhile we’re seeing a resurgence of the dystopic SF novel!"

[1] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html

I would translate it as "turn at the next left; where there is a ______."

The ______ is often a convenience store. hmmmm!

Psychopaths (shown here)[1] show up where ever there is money and power, make life shit for all the better / empathetic staff, who end up leaving, gut the place and move onto the next company once it's trashed.

[1] https://pics.me.me/ha-ha-business-pig-roll-com-guys-i-havent...

But they have? DDG was founded 13 years ago...

And "bussiness model": https://wikiless.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo?lang=en#Business_model And: https://www.nichepursuits.com/how-does-duckduckgo-make-money...

I recall seeing it as sluggish and awkward when I finally decided to check it, abusing Ajax. Other web interfaces (that I tried) were more lightweight and predictable, and regular mail clients I found to be a much better UX. So I've mostly attributed Gmail popularity to Google promoting it, possibly using that invite-only policy to make the users to spread the invitations. It sounds like at least some users actually liked it, but I don't think it's a clear example of a good service by Google.