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!
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?