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Comment by riverguardian | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

You don’t always have a choice.

This is pure apologetics.

No, it is pure logic. I moved my presence off of Google services because of privacy concerns. I am not being an apologist at all.

The point is that if you are hosting your data on Google services this setting makes little difference to your privacy footprint.

...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.

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.

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