My problem with this is that it conflicts with identity ownership. If I give every company [email protected], I no longer have the ability to switch email providers, especially if I only decide to switch after losing my someservice.com account. If I give every company [email protected], then I’m still ID’d by mydomain.org. Maybe in a way that automatic linkers miss, for now, but maybe not: how hard is it, really, to automatically determine with decent confidence that mydomain.org is a personal domain, and strip the entire username and subdomain part in the existing normalization step?
It can be some secret mydomain.org, but that still links all my profiles together.
I could buy a different domain for every company, but that’s cost prohibitive, and also piercing WHOIS privacy is just another data sharing agreement away.
Posting this because I’m hoping somebody has a better answer.
> Change the forwarding address
Every unique, random address you create with Hide My Email is forwarded to the same email address. You can change the forwarding address at any time.
On iCloud.com, go to Account Settings, then click Manage in the Hide My Email section.
Scroll to the “Forward to” section, then choose a different address.
The “Forward to” section is below your list of active addresses and above your inactive addresses.
what many sites don’t let you change is the address associated with your account, but that’s not the fault of the email provider.
I got a memorable phone number a while ago. Websites like numberbarn.com make it relatively easy. A key realization I had is that repeating numbers aren’t the thing to look for, because they’re what everybody is depleting and marking up, and actually aren’t a very good proxy for what you really care about, which is memorability and maybe aesthetics. For example, 34567 is better than 37771, and also more likely to be available and cheap. Repeating digits and their associated markup are also about typability, but that probably barely matters to you if people are almost always calling from their address book.
Who achieves more power, the guy who dedicates his life and soul to it, or the guy who wants it, but only if it’s ok with everybody, and only when his family doesn’t need him?
Did you suggest they change their device settings? Yours was probably the right approach, I’m just curious whether we have actual data to support that people prefer this split configuration, and aren’t just suffering under bad defaults.
I like this change. If a website misconfigures encoding and users have an encoding override menu, the result is 99% of users see a broken website, 1% know how to fix it. The menu doesn’t meaningfully improve the situation, but it does keep the people who could improve it from caring. Take that away and I predict 10%+ of currently misconfigured websites will get fixed for 100% of visitors, and that’s a big improvement over 100% of websites being fixed for 1% of visitors.
So you think that making things miserable for the remaining 1% is good because it gets them to care, and therefore for the website to be fixed? I’m sorry, but most of the time when a website has a borked encoding, it is some website where I doubt I would ever get in contact with the webmaster anyway. It’s mostly small websites. But small websites are important to maintaining a healthy web where things are not dominated by a few big players.
But perhaps most importantly, I have never agreed with any mindset of that encourages punishing some subset of users in order to get someone to change their ways, even more so if that isn’t even the users themselves.
> I’m sorry, but most of the time when a website has a borked encoding, it is some website where I doubt I would ever get in contact with the webmaster anyway.
So you wouldn't bother to try to get the webmaster to fix the issue, you would just resolve it on your own, letting everyone else be miserable?
> But perhaps most importantly, I have never agreed with any mindset of that encourages punishing some subset of users in order to get someone to change their ways, even more so if that isn’t even the users themselves.
It sounds like you don't care if people are punished, as long as it isn't you.
> So you wouldn't bother to try to get the webmaster to fix the issue, you would just resolve it on your own, letting everyone else be miserable?
I mean that I would not be able to. Huge swaths of the web are static content that was just put there and then just abandoned. The web will remain this way unless everything is moved onto SPA social networks, and I hope that we agree that that would not a good thing.
> It sounds like you don't care if people are punished, as long as it isn't you.
If the added benefit of causing people more inconvenience is that they push for problems to be fixed, I don’t think it’s fair to cause that inconvenience with the intent of using that to solve the problem. I think it’s a manipulative tactic. That is my idea of what “punishment” we’re talking about. What kind of punishment are you thinking of if you think I’m fine with punishment, and who is getting punished by it?
> If the added benefit of causing people more inconvenience is that they push for problems to be fixed, I don’t think it’s fair to cause that inconvenience with the intent of using that to solve the problem. I think it’s a manipulative tactic. That is my idea of what “punishment” we’re talking about.
We are talking about the same punishment.
If fixing the pages would reduce the amount of times people would have to manually fix page encodings locally, just working around the problem leaves the punishment in place for more people.
You express that you are being manipulated to prompt webmasters to solve the underlying problem, even though many more people would benefit from not having to manually work around it.
The thing is that I do not agree with you that the ends justify the means. You seem to think that people seeing fewer pages in the wrong encoding in the long run justifies making the problem worse when it does happen. I do not.
And again, I will reiterate that this does not solve that problem anyway because vast swaths of the web are static content that was put there and never touched again, so no one will fix it. Unless we want everything to live on content farms, it is essential to be able to access content like this. You are viewing the web as something that is actively maintained, similar to a software project. That is true for a certain category of website, such as the one that we are on right now. It is not true for the kind of website which is most likely to have borked text encoding.
Probably much less than 1% English speakers know how to to select a text encoding in a browser, but for speakers of languages where multiple non-utf encodings were common until recently this knowledge is more common.
My anecdata: once having only a smartphone with me I needed information from a txt file in cp1251 encoding. The server was configured correctly for .html, but not for .txt Mobile browsers available on the smartphone didn't allow me to override text encoding. It was very frustrating experience and it would be enough for me to switch to another browser in future except I don't know a mobile browser which allows to select text encoding and not much worse than mobile Firefox. And I don't blame the maintainer of that site - he does (or did) this in his spare time and had more important tasks than to check text encodings for every single URL on the site so users of crippled web browsers would have no problems.
I like comparison of this feature to emergency services - you rarely need it but when you need it you need it very much.
Interesting how somebody can be tripped up by 1.2 vs 1.18 yet not tripped up by 1/2 vs 1/18. It could just take time, but I think there’s also a factor of feeling that dates are worth learning while version numbers don’t deserve direct attention and instead should be a subset of a nearby concept that does.
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).
How did the erosion affect the entire planet so thoroughly? Is it plausible we’ll someday find a place where the geological record of the missing years is still intact?
Ah, so while there were ice sheets on every continent during these glaciations, there are actually quite a lot of places where sedimentary rocks survived the glaciations - perhaps as much as a fifth of the area of the continents (back-of-the-envelope, given that there is about a fifth as much preserved sedimentary rock per unit time prior to the end of the unconformity).
Generally a lot of these regions where rocks from the "missing" interval are well-preserved are at the margins of the (paleo)continents. This is for two reasons, as far as we can tell: (1) erosion by continental icesheets is more hit-or-miss near the margins; "hit" if you're in an outlet ice stream, but "miss" if you're not, since marginal ice tends to be "cold-based" and generally not very erosive at the margins outside of the outlet ice streams; (2) the paleo-continental margins are where all the tectonic activity was at the time -- and while tectonic uplift won't help any, tectonic subsidence can help a lot if it makes a basin subside below sea level (which will protect against erosion).
cbkeller, thank you so much for your answers!
Its rare I read such good answers on the grand scale implications of someone's research.
When you study plate tectonics, watch the Earth Story documentary [1], read Earth System History [2], Five Kingdoms by Margulis [3] or the books of Steven J. Gould [4] you get an overview of the history of planet Earth that geology, paleontology, biology and astronomy sciences pieced together in the last 150 years.
But then you never hear about the new breakthrough research that happens after these publications. But now I have learned about a new mayor piece of the puzzle by these comments of cbkeller [5], thank you very much!
If there is anything I could assist with, like writing complex (simulation) software in just a few thousand lines of code [6] for your research, you can reach me at morphle at ziggo dot nl.
> The CAMELS collaboration cooks up its universes using two different recipes. A neural network trained on one of the recipes makes bad density guesses when given galaxies that were baked according to the other. The cross-prediction failure indicates that the neural network is finding solutions unique to the rules of each recipe. It certainly wouldn’t know what to do with the Milky Way, a galaxy shaped by the real laws of physics.
It can be some secret mydomain.org, but that still links all my profiles together.
I could buy a different domain for every company, but that’s cost prohibitive, and also piercing WHOIS privacy is just another data sharing agreement away.
Posting this because I’m hoping somebody has a better answer.