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.
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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).
