Hello hello, PM for the feature checking in here. amf12's reply is quite on-point. Web and App Activity is designed to store search activity across all Google services, and we're splitting Workspace data out since it's governed by strict data handling guarantees, 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.
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.
Your reason for splitting this into two separate settings is understandable.
>> ...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.
> 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.
Verizon is now doing this. If you opt out, they add new categories of tracking and then opt you back in:
> 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.
There really should be more personal culpability, at least on the exec team and board of directors, for things like this.
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.
Is it possible to sue executives and project managers involved in this decision directly in civil court? I imagine quite a few have juicy enough salaries that it would be nice to take a bite at them.
"Please reconsider" is the wrong tone. One might as well ask an abuser to "please reconsider" abuse. Closer to the point might be, "Your actions are unethical, illegal, and I will gladly join the class action that results from this."
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?
I encourage you, unreservedly, and without any personal malice, to fight the reality distortion field that causes people to make decisions like the above.
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.
It's fascinating to see Google and Facebook employees defending the undefensible here almost daily, using all the upbeat expressions they can muster out to obfuscate the fact that they are not accepting no from people when it comes to data collection.
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.
1. For non paid users, it isn't turned back on. But it is turned on if you're a paying user. In these cases it's never the user who switched it off, it was the admin, so since the control is being shifted from admin to user (admin can no longer turn it off for users of workspace apps) its kind of like a brand new setting for them.
2. True but it's somewhat useful to be able to use your account on different devices and retain your history.
> 1. We’re talking about people who have already switched it off.
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.
> 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.
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.
The users in question never opted out, their domain admins opted out of a different feature.
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.
Google turns off maps nav search history if you turn off web search history. Maps could easily switch to local to the device instead, since you usually nav with the same device over and over and could rebuild common history if you got a new device (or transfer history), but it feels like they want a carrot and stick.
Well the google PM said that before this change all their apps history were unified, and they just split off the workspace apps. But maybe you're right and the only reason it's still that way rather than split up is a business decision rather than a developmental/resource allocation decision.
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.
Ah you're quite right (I was expecting that the queries would be POST-like, not GET-like).
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.
I admire how focused you are on drive & gmail search quality. I have a lot of concerns about using user data to improve search that are larger than this specific feature or discussion. This leads me to implement strategies to reduce new data generated, such as loading URLs directly instead of accessing them from search. I’d like to conclude by conceding your approach will generate the better results, but that the best search results aren’t what I’m optimizing for.
I certainly do not want that! I want to search through the web as it is, not as some search engine imagines I would prefer it to be, based on its inevitably limited understanding of my preferences.
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.
Ah ok! So then the other replies are valid then. Agree with others, to me this is useless. Browser handles it already if I wanted it, and I never use that anyway.
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
There was this thing in Melbourne cafes for a while (and maybe still, I'm not in Melbourne any more), where you would walk in and order your usual from other cafes "a large Flat White" and the barista would go "We only make coffee in one size".
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"
There are thousands of coffee shops of various calibres, so I'm not even remotely suprised that two people could have different experiences. I definitely had it happen at more than one coffee shop. It definitely wasn't all of them, or even a majority. For example:
> 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.
I have heard that reason. It fals apart when you take your own Keep Cup (etc) and it's still a problem. The problem with having an amazing coffee culture is that you end up with a bunch of coffee shops that think they know better than the customer.
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).
> “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”
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.
Active, soon to be former user here. Constantly moving things around, to at the very least temporarily hoover data from users is wrong.
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.
Absolutely. Google search is now my choice ONLY when I want to buy something, and it's likely to be from someone who'd advertise through google. Otherwise you've got to go a long way through the results, and then you get to just junk - pretty useless.
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.
They probably do, then give themselves a nice round of applause. They're getting rid of their (unprofitable) discerning users, and keeping all the (profitable) naive users. On average, this increases the effectiveness of their ads and decreases costs. It's a big win for Google's customers (not you).
I've run into this a lot as well. If I'm looking up a place that catches my interest, 9 times out of 10 I'm *not* interested in hotel rooms or flights there. One Firefox search bar feature that I dearly love is that I can quickly and easily override my default search engine.
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
I've been using DDG for a few months for almost all my searches now. It gets me the results I want almost all the time. When I do switch to google when DDG isn't enough, google gives me SEO crap and I go back to DDG, rephrase and focus my search and get the results I want.
Why does google serve up so much irrelevant crap nowadays?
> 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)
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
I've tried switching numerous times over the years and always found myself back at Google eventually. Played with it a today after your comment, and I'll definitely have to give it another go.
> I'm dropping (paid) GSuite/Workspace/whatever it's now called for my family, and for a couple of businesses.
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.
There are several options (including my domain host) that seem very attractive. Shockingly so is iCloud. My only iCloud issue (and I have ZERO Apple products) is that I can't find a way to mount the storage on Linux. If I could do that, it's what I'll choose.
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.
I have yet to buy an Apple product, but Android is making me consider it. The difference for me is that Apple seems to have little or no interest in people who are not Apple customers, whereas google has just become a generalized surveillance agency. Apple's values may be a little unpleasant, but at least they have some.
I've been using Fastmail for years. Love it. Rarely a problem. Support always responds within 24 hrs if there is. Ended up having to move my calendars back to Google Workspace so they could sync with Acuity (SquareSpace) Scheduling. Really annoying that they can't provide hooks into other standard CalDAV services.
Same. This is the last straw that has led us to unanimously decide to transition all our clients paid accounts from G. Some stakeholders were already on the fence but this is what tipped the scales for everyone. Doing the same for my family (we have also been using a Workspace for our emails, photos, and calendars).
I call bulls*t here. Facebook has a long history of change-the-name-of-the-setting-and-the-new-flag-defaults-to-ON as a method of changing users' settings back to what facebook would prefer. Excuses aside, it looks like the same thing from google.
I have to agree. You don’t turn on stuff for people who turned it off. The default should be off, no matter where you are moving the new setting, which is fine all by itself, if informing the user. Golden rule is that the user is in control.
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.
That’s why I find it interesting how the original comment bends in mysterious ways to answer for what they did. It’s the dishonesty of it thats worse imo.
Look we all know how the world works so please, spare the BS.
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.
It's unfortunate that this post is being downvoted and considered a "personal attack" (debatable) as it seems to be one of if not the only comment suggesting the most likely explanation: a Google employee trying to maximize engagement / usage metrics for their feature without really thinking through the broader implications. This seems much more likely to me than a grand conspiracy to sneakily collect more peoples' data.
Your comments and the email both are written like nobody really wants tracking off, at least not if they know what’s good for them. Is that what you believe?
I think "tracking" is a bit misleading here. It's product (search) usage activity. None of the Workspace data you provide is ever used outside of Workspace, nor is it used for any other purpose than for the benefit of you and your users (we can't create machine learning models from your data to improve the experience for other customers, for example, without your prior consent), and that data is never used for ads.
But how can we trust what you say? Google is not necessarily a very trustworthy company anymore.
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.
You can't escape google. I've seen even government websites require code from Google's servers. Just like if you choose to never sign up for facebook account they'll still create a secret profile for you and populate with every scrap of data they can learn about you from other facebook users as well as from data purchased from data brokers. We can choose to limit our direct participation with these companies (and that's a good idea) but you don't get to choose to opt out of them.
"I think "tracking" is a bit misleading here." And I think you are playing a very glib game of apologia.
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.
> None of the Workspace data you provide is ever used outside of Workspace, nor is it used for any other purpose than for the benefit of you and your users
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.
You challenged the tone of the question, but you didn't attempt to answer it. Do you believe that nobody in their right mind would want this functionality turned off?
I'm relying on search history in my Google Workspace account every single day. It's very convenient and I have a feeling most people would agree with that.
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?
This is the classic "my use case is the only use case and anyone who thinks otherwise is stupid" response.
> 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.
I don't need nor want search history. If search works then it works. If I search for a term I now believe whatever settings I have will be ignored and I can expect ads related to that term to follow me around.
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.
> I'm relying on search history in my Google Workspace account every single day.
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!
“…(we can't create machine learning models from your data to improve the experience for other customers, for example, without your prior consent..”
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).
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.
> None of the Workspace data you provide is ever used outside of Workspace, nor is it used for any other purpose than for the benefit of you and your users
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?
> None of the Workspace data you provide is ever used outside of Workspace, nor is it used for any other purpose than for the benefit of you and your users (...) that data is never used for ads.
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.
> Google will share this data with law enforcement, also on request by evil and/or totalitarian regimes.
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.
> This is true of one's employer in general, no? "this data" is theoretically all related to one's work.*
(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...
Haha. This is so common with Big Tech. "Are you sure you want to turn off sending us more free user data?" Gosh, why would anyone want to do that.
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.
If you’re worried about “tracking”, you probably should have moved off Google Workspace before this change. “I’ll hand all my emails and files to you in plain text, but hey, why are you storing my access patterns (and telling me about it)?” is such a weird concern.
The data actually backs this up... Autocomplete of searches for example is used for the vast majority of searches, and users who have it turned off complain they can't locate documents they've just saved (because they don't remember the location they saved them, and it doesn't list recently saved documents in the search dropdown).
I think you're getting a lot of shit from everyone who have an axe to grind against Google. They're not necessarily wrong, but I also think your mistake is not only to sneakily re-enable a previous off setting set by users, but rather your definition of "immensely useful".
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 ?
Unless I'm mistaken, your Google Workspace also include your personal Gmail account, because, you know, it's a "Workspace".
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.
Great question. The premise here is that search is an integral part of the product experience of using Google Workspace. We don't offer controls that separate each piece of functionality within Workspace products. The reason there _is_ one governing both Workspace and non-Workspace data (the current Web and App Activity setting) is mostly historical in nature, and the fact that there are two existing controls (one for the admin, one for the user) means the vast majority of users don't even have the chance to try the feature out to figure out if it's useful for them. Hence the default on. But as noted in the email we'll be very transparent to users telling them that the setting is on, and it's also why this email went out 60 days prior to the change, as advance notice.
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.
> The premise here is that search is an integral part of the product experience of using Google Workspace. We don't offer controls that separate each piece of functionality within Workspace products. The reason there _is_ one governing both Workspace and non-Workspace data (the current Web and App Activity setting) is mostly historical in nature, and the fact that there are two existing controls (one for the admin, one for the user) means the vast majority of users don't even have the chance to try the feature out to figure out if it's useful for them.
That's a very elaborate way to say "because we don't want to".
I disagree. I think the point is reasonable. I personally find it useful to refer to my past searches/activity, especially in a professional context, and it would be unintuitive to me if such a feature was turned off by default.
> Great question. The premise here is that search is an integral part of the product experience (...)
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!
Actually, I always thought that puzzles were a poor recruiting tool. But now that he explained the problem, with all it's complexities and stakes, I kind of see the relevance.
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.
happy to hear that you found corporate marketing to be moving. unimpressed by disrespectful and nonconstructive talking over of someone right in front of them.
The harm to a live conversation of talking over someone is clear. There is no harm here, only a digression that can be ignored or not as participants wish. The OP had as much time and space to make their case. Again, threaded forums are not live, linear conversations, and have different characteristics for what is healthy and useful. Replies, even contradictory ones, are not interruptions. There is not one conversation going on, but many, and the conversation cannot be steered unilaterally without agreement from others to not engage in the original conversation.
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).
so there's talking over in the sense of literal interruptions and talking over in the sense of belittlement.
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.
> …means the vast majority of users don't even have the chance to try the feature out to figure out if it's useful for them. Hence the default on.
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.
> it's also why this email went out 60 days prior to the change
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?
Because the number of companies that disable this company wide is large enough that google believes that by muddying the waters like this employees will give them the loophole they need to get back at that data.
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 on
I agree, the tone of the answer is very 'pretending to be user firendly while doing what is good for us', I cannot trust it. Not to mention the marketing logic of 'forcing users to try out new features', like if it was a positive thing not negative. Quite user hostile tone it is in my view.
Not always but definitely here. I'm sure they know exactly what they are doing... it's like Microsoft changing the default search engine to Bing with their updates.
I agree. It's very jarring to me, coming across as insincere and faux-friendly. The sort of thing Mark Zuckerberg says in every product PR vid.
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 someone might respond to any question if unexpected, or if they are trying to get through a meeting with the public that they have to do as part of their job but it is the part of the job they are less than comfortable with - put on an energetic happy-go-lucky public persona and plow through that with some Great Questions! and Wow, I'm glad you asked that! End up seeming a bit manic but at least they get through it.
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.
That's pretty standard phrasing for "you've hit on something i've also thought a lot about". I say it all the time, usually with pleasure, because it means the opportunity to share something I find interesting or feel confident in an answer on.
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.
There’s built in asymmetry here in that we talk to him as mostly anonymous individuals but he needs to respond as a company representative, so I think it’s understandable it would come across like that.
Attack a person argument, not the way they speak. The person is saying a lot of "shady shit" and focusing on great question is a great way of making sure there are no answers.
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?
Oh it certainly doesn't require a complete search history. That's why Workspace search history will have 18-months retention by default (which is aligned with Google's policy in general) that you can change down to 3 months if you so choose (and if your Web and App Activity setting has retention set to 3 months, we'll also automatically carry that forward to Workspace search history). You can always turn the setting off.
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.
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.
...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.
> 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.
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.
Why would you not default to off and let users make a conscious decision, especially if they had turned it off previously? Because this sounds like making excuses to be honest and the usefulness is irrelevant if I do not like to share data.
Feedback:
a) I would prefer to be able to globally opt out of all tracking.
b) If you want to make it easy for me to start with a saved search, then add a saved search feature so I have control of it.
c) Google really needs to look at the number of rage inducing features that are being released. I've been hit with two in the past 24 hours: This one and I can't dial a phone number using numbers (i.e. saying the number "one two three") in Google Assistant without putting the contact in my contact book. I can only conclude that Google wants my social graph (do not want Google to have that).
Something is really wrong at Google right now. I feel like my best friend is making a drunken pass at my wife or something.
This is completely unacceptable and adds further fuel for me to remove the last few remnants I have of Google in my life.
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.
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 applaud your courage for posting here given the level of animosity in the room.
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.
PM person, any chance of having a word with those who decided to charge the free gsuite plan users? I think I gave you over 10 years of free testing. I know I've had it good for for many years but I run my family email on it and it is now going to cost me lots or be an ass ache moving to an alternative.
Will this be different for European users because of GDPR (default on that is, the splitting sounds like it would be a GDPR win), if not what are the arguments for it being GDPR compliant?
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?
Presumably just like all your corporate Slack or Teams chat history, or your emails, the things you did on company time remain the property of the company you're employed by.
Not always the case. At the European company I work there are many rules and regs on who can legally access employees email, depending on the country of the employee. Luxembourg and the Netherlands can be really tricky for example and they are not the only ones.
It's not automatically solely owned by the company.
presumably, but I was consulting recently at a company that had a Workspace and I felt that
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 kinda amazed that you thought this reply will somehow help instead of making it worse. Google having no respect to user choices is hardly surprising, but putting it so directly into words by feature's PM managed to raise my eyebrows a bit.
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.
This is quite disheartening to me. Do changes like this ever get tested with focus groups before getting rolled out? I can’t think of anyone who would be ok with this change.
Whenever Google does something awful a product manager comes in here and tries to justify it. We get that there's business reasons why you'd do this, but it's still deeply unethical.
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.
That kind of makes sense. I think the idea is that similar to how your admin doesn't have the ability to control your color scheme or accessibility settings, it's more of a personal usage feature rather than organizational one.
Really off topic, but a feature suggestion: twice I have signed up for GSuite and moved my domain there, only to quit because there is no way to use the books, movies, etc. that I bought using my free gmail account. Switching accounts is a nuisance. It would be great if there were a share option between accounts if they were tied to the same phone number.
I 100% understand your reasoning but you, as PM, need to understand that you are not alone in the room: there is a huge gorilla in the room. Office 365. Did you consider how this might be used by Office 365 sales people to convince exiting users to migrate to Office 365? Do you really think their sales and marketing is not updating their notes with this?
If you truly believe what you say, the solution is obvious: commit to letting users store history only on their own device, with no syncing. Not even to other devices, which I don't need 99% of the time.
Local storage exists, let me use it. Otherwise the only thing you are committed to is never giving users autonomy.
> with the hope that more people will feel comfortable getting the benefits
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.
Workspace without having to opt-into search history being tracked for all Google services.
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?
That's why I don't understand GPC (https://globalprivacycontrol.org/).
GPC setting is for opt-out, without GPC header it's treating like opt-in.
> 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 know the right thing to do is for Workspace to honour the user's choice for all services, and the European Commission does too. This could end with a huge fine for Google.
Thanks for confirming that Google is no longer run by the same people I trusted (at least, somewhat more than I do now) over a decade ago.
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.
I recently moved to Yandex 360. We previously had DNS, mail etc. on Google until an outage[0] occured. The outage was the classical story of "billing error in related Play Store (!) account nuked entire GCP setup", which diminished trust enough that I decided to move everything away from Google. I'm a Xoogler, but even then getting through to the right support channels is hard.
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.
I don't get this point of view. If you live in Russia, of all places, you'd likely want to avoid Yandex. On the other hand, for people from non-Russian countries Yandex is probably a better and safer choice than Google.
I made this same point awhile back to some colleagues, about my AmazFit smart watch. They were aghast that I'd have a Chinese product like that, given the possibility/likelihood of Chinese surveillance.
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.)
I don't know about Russia, but this is not really an accurate perception. US laws tend to protect US Citizens and residents. Even citizens of friendly countries like Australia don't have protection.
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].
Yes, that's the point of using tools from unfriendly countries -- though I wouldn't be surprised if there's data sharing there, I haven't heard evidence of it.
I worked for LiveJournal, which was owned by a Russian company and what our platform removed for “misinformation” was a nothing compared to what companies like Twitter do today. I know Navalny (A Russian dissident) account is still active whereas platforms like Facebook and Twitter have banned multiple elected US politicians. If you want to avoid censorship the Russian platforms are great places to go.
Yandex has the best image reverse search algos of all the search engines. Dont take my word for it, just go and try it. If you live in the US what is the most dangerous for you? To be spied by your own government, or a government on the other side of the planet?
I'm using Fastmail and have been super happy with them. I need to start looking into replacements for business suites though, since clearly Google Suites/Workspaces/Domains (whatever they're calling it this week) is making seriously unethical choices.
An good old fashioned IMAP mailbox. It works fine, and my ISP has decent spam controls. Oh, and Fair Email (a client) on Android is awesome. Webmail is really slow when you get 300-400 emails a day that are not spam.
I've not tried the new option myself so this isn't a recommendation, but if you are using iCloud for personal email yet are doing 'professional' email elsewhere because of the custom domain, then you may not know that iCloud now supports those custom domains.
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.
DDG leaks data like a sieve. When you type a query it's present in the URL. Use an engine like onesearch.com which obfuscate this. (or get DDG to add this basic feature!)
> 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 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.
Think you can get someone at Google to actually notify everyone about the upcoming GSuite changes as I, and some others, have yet to be notified of them.
It is hard to trust companies that want to start billing me, it seems, without telling me first.
Do you happen to know why YouTube has started throttling the number of views on videos by channels with few subscribers?
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:
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.