I work at Google but not on Maps, opinions are my own.
I don't know if this is why they did it that way, but it wouldn't surprise me if the reason was merely that 99.9% of users opt in to location sharing and the developers didn't feel it useful to spend time supporting the use case for the 0.1%.
You have to also keep in mind that Google is just a company with thousands of individuals who each have their own motives and are given incentives by the company. If a developer is career driven (and many if not most are) they have to work on "high impact" things to get a good performance review. Since Google tries to be very objective, you have to measure your impact with data and sadly 0.1% of users is not really considered impactful. Unfortunately good will earned by customers is hard to measure.
Again just my observation from working here.
I find this very appropriate to modern times and employment. 'Tis A more modern update to William Gaddis's themes in J.R.
It seems rather obvious that there is little incentive to provide usefulness without tying it as closely as possible to data collection.
That seems about right. Other than services that you actually pay hard cash for (like gce), all other metrics will eventually trace back to some kind of ad/data related metric.
The real impact the team was looking for was building better advertising profiles on users.
Want to use the assistant to turn on your lights? You better believe that requires the huge "Web and App activity" which also includes location.
You apparently want fine-grained privacy controls ("save my personal locations, but not my search history"). It's reasonable to want that, but it seems awfully entitled (not you, but many others on this thread) to demand it. Especially since we've seen from past history that a multitude of fine-grained privacy controls tends to propagate the narrative "Evil corporation confuses users with complex privacy UI".
Product management is way harder than you are giving it credit for.
"Do you want us to store your data on our servers?"
Answering "no" should mean you store it locally, not that you don't store it at all. If you tell Google not to save your search history on their servers, they just disable it completely, when they could just save it locally.
This is nowhere near a product problem. The setting is per-account, so it's not like it'd be disabled on one device and enabled on another, so they'd get some weird UX, they just like crippling their app to force you to give them data.
Why don't you just build your own mapping software then if its all so easy?
I think you are ridiculously underestimating the complexity and issues that would arise with two separate mechanisms for saving the same kind of data, and an option to switch between the two. Do you download account-saved locations locally when changing to local storage? What if there are conflicting pieces of data?
I bet there would be a lot more outraged people about the bugs and limitations that would arise with this system than there are today with your complaints.
No, you delete the data that's on the server. That's the reasonable way to handle a revocation of consent from the user.
This is a bad assumption and why you would ruin a product like google maps if given the opportunity.
Google already had this problem for years with Contacts. I had local contacts on my phone, and contacts stored in my google account. It was a complete clusterfuck of duplicates, stale data, etc. Years later after I had this problem, Google added a fairly complicated power-user tool that let you reconcile this data. And then years after that, the tool became not-a-power-user tool and wasn't bad.
But we're still talking years of issues, for data that is probably a hell of a lot less complicated than what maps stores.
edit: And that said, I still have issues every now and then with that contact reconciler tool, it doesn't always do the right thing.
I'm sure you've got it all figured out. You should go work at google and implement it.
This is nowhere near a product problem. The setting is per-account, so it's not like it'd be disabled on one device and enabled on another, so they'd get some weird UX, they just like crippling their app to force you to give them data.
I work for Google, opinions are my own. I could go on and on about this so apologies for the long post.
Obviously I am biased, but I think you're being a little too cynical.
People's habits largely depend on the incentives given to them. There is no incentive for the Maps team to take in more data, if anything there are incentives to have less data because they'd have to go through less security and privacy reviews.
What they DO have an incentive to do is to get more users, since that largely determines how much funding your team gets. Having users share location data, admittedly at the expense of privacy, provides a superior experience.
Each team has limited funding/headcount, so obviously they would use their resources as much as possible to try and get more users. Supporting the use case you described, which is not used by the vast majority of users does not align with the incentives given to them.
Recently, Google updated its values (I can't find it externally but I hope you'll believe me). One of these values is "Respect the User". I personally think that your use case would fall under this umbrella. Ignoring whether the specific feature is the best use of engineering time even for this value, the reality is that values mean nothing without incentives.
And there aren't incentives. You don't get a great performance rating for following the values, you get one for impacting some large percentage of users or improving the performance or conversion rates.
Even if you had a team of monks, completely driven by their morals and not career-driven whatsoever, this would not be sufficient because if they didn't hit performance goals then the team would just get defunded, unless the person above them was also the same, and the person above them, and so on.
Very possibly.
> Supporting the use case you described, which is not used by the vast majority of users does not align with the incentives given to them.
I think you have causation wrong here. Users leave search history enabled because Google makes it unnecessarily hard to use the app with it disabled.
> Recently, Google updated its values (I can't find it externally but I hope you'll believe me). One of these values is "Respect the User".
I have no reason to disbelieve you.
> Ignoring whether the specific feature is the best use of engineering time even for this value, the reality is that values mean nothing without incentives.
If the values mean nothing without incentives, they aren't values, are they?
> You don't get a great performance rating for following the values, you get one for impacting some large percentage of users or improving the performance or conversion rates.
So what you're saying is "there's no incentive for allowing the user to have a good experience using the app without sending us data", or did I get that wrong? That doesn't sound awesome.
> Having users share location data, admittedly at the expense of privacy, provides a superior experience.
Especially when you don't bother providing a similar experience without people's data.
Ultimately, this isn't a question of "which would make Maps better, if users shared their data or if they didn't?". That's not your choice to make, so it's a question of "the user doesn't want to share their data, do we bother to make the experience good for them or not?"
If your answer to the latter is "No", I don't care if your values say "The User is the Alpha and the Omega, thou shalt have no other priorities before the User", it's a red herring because you aren't following your values, you're following the money.
That's a fair point. Nevertheless, most people on the team were not there when this feature was first introduced and we can only work from where we are now. To undo the status quo is something few are in a position to do.
> So what you're saying is "there's no incentive for allowing the user to have a good experience using the app without sending us data", or did I get that wrong? That doesn't sound awesome.
Correct.
> If your answer to the latter is "No", I don't care if your values say "The User is the Alpha and the Omega, thou shalt have no other priorities before the User", it's a red herring because you aren't following your values, you're following the money.
I think we are in agreement.
I don't think anyone is following the Values because the incentive structure doesn't align with it. I would like to believe it takes time for these changes to manifest but frankly I'm skeptical it will ever happen.
I'm not trying to convince you things are great or even okay. I just would like to dispel the notion that everyone or every team at Google is scheming together to get as much of your data as possible. Google, like any company, is made of individuals who largely are there to make money and whose actions are driven by the incentive structure. As it stands, the incentives are largely around getting more users and there is very little incentive to create privacy focused solutions (customers don't really seem to care.. or know..?)
I guess everyone in the company is complicit to that, with a share of responsibility proportional to the amount of power they have, as with any organization...
The language here bothers me to the core. User? That's the same term drug dealers use to describe their "customers", who are nearly all captive to them or others who peddle the same thing. Does it get the point across? Sure. However, there are better ways to word this sentence, such as "respect the people who use our services" or "respect your customers", though the last one ought to read as "handle product with care".
There is an incentive to have increased usage of the features I'm in charge of, many of which are intrinsically tied to (or superior with) location access. I don't believe that's the same as incentivizing the collection of location data, because it's not our real goal - if Apple would provide it I would absolutely love to provide users with a 'one-shot' location feature (it's probably too clumsy but the idea is when the user hits e.g. the directions button, the OS pops up a permission box and if they agree then maps gets one and only one GPS fix and then the permission is back off).
Sure product management is hard, I never said it wasn't. Google maps is wayy ahead of the competition in the field, with or without those history things (cue the whole Apple maps fiasco). But users will always complain about features they don't like, and they won't always give credit for what works.
Honestly I don't care that much, I mostly adhere to the idea that Google & co. don't give a damn about any user's individual data. To them, we're just numbers in a database, and a bunch of metrics to optimize (engagement, revenue, etc.). However, I do think that governments, once they know all this data is stored on centralized servers, are tempted to exploit it, for good reasons or not, which is why at some point I want to limit the gathering of data, when I find it is not explicitly warranted or needed. Case in point, Google Maps doesn't need a history of ALL the places I've been on a day-to-day basis to index my saved locations in it's search box.
So in order to have my home address saved in Google Maps, I have to let Google monitor my location 24/7, see how often I use my banking app, and which medical complaints I've been searching recently. This seems pretty excessive and I think it's designed to be so (as the article linked above suggests).
I appreciate the services Google provides but the cost is becoming excessive. A paid option (with everything enabled and no tracking at all) or at least more granular permissions seem like the bare minimum as people become more privacy conscious.
I think they would get back a good amount of goodwill if they did so, and would keep a large portion of the userbase on board without looking like (and being) assholes. Plenty of people use read receipts in WhatsApp, for example, in order to see others' read receipts.
Though I'd agree setting a home address shouldn't be tied to search history, if that's the case.
In fact, some of Google's traffic data is based off things like police reports.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find one for walking around. All the battery powered ones seem aimed at hikers, so they're loaded with great wilderness maps, but won't help me find a coffee.
I'm willing to pay a fee for many things but these three services redefined the entire world's productivity levels. Maps, Search and Wikipedia are world-changing (and miraculously, Wikipedia is a non-profit and still manages to exist and be stable. Please donate if you have the means, etc.). The reason they are world-changing is because they're free.
Free: Available to everyone, everywhere, without payment or account gating. It's a huge fucking deal for the world that they are and remain free.
You want to change the world? Make something massively useful to the planet. Then, make it free.
However, there are FOSS and privacy respecting alternatives, most are based upon OpenStreetMap - wikipedia style map of the world. Some data is still lacking, but at least you yourself can fix it if you want to.
That's fascinating. Why?
Like, they know exactly where I am all the time, why are they Autocompleting locations that are nowhere near me or any of my typical destinations?
I've had to turn off lots of automated Google things like ticket reminders (that tell me to catch the wrong train because they can't read the email right).
The iPhone does that. Or at least tries. It knows that the place I live is my wife's home, but for me it's always labeled "gym."
Apple Maps should talk to my Health app and figure out that the chances I'm at a gym are pretty much zero.
In order to have youtube app work when the screen is off, you have to pay for youtube. Its something they could provide but if they can force you to pay or give up more data (paying in a round about way) they are going to do it
That's a feature for me.
What pisses me off is that everytime I turn on my phone gps it defaults to "high accuracy" mode which scans all the wifi ap's around, among other things. I have to manually set it to gps chip only every time.