Today Google is turning on tracking for many users that previously turned it off | Hacker News Reader

Today Google is turning on tracking for many users that previously turned it off

tutanota.com

481 pointsstarsep223 comments

The article seems intentionally misleading. It's implying that if the organization disabled the "Web & App Activity" setting will not carry over to the user. That's not what the support page says though:

> If you disabled Web & App Activity in the Admin console, it is turned off for Google Workspace users. Users can turn it on if they want.

So nobody will be tracked on the web who wasn't previously. The setting that will be turned on is just the one controlling search history within Gmail, Docs, Drive etc.

(But it does seem surprising that they didn't just show a option dialogue on the next load of a Workspace app and ask the user to choose.)

Yeah I was just about to ask because I went through my Google Workspace account and tracking is still turned off even though it's already March 29...

To be fair, it seems like Google backtracked on this due to the negative attention. All of their original statements about this made it clear they would be tracking people after the change, but in the two months since the original announcement they must have changed their minds.

It's more likely that they are now tracing users anyway, they just lie they don't.

> due to the negative attention

They didn't backtrack and they didn't change their minds. They decided to wait a little while until attention on this particular invasion had subsided before perpetrating it as they had always planned.

I don't think that's true. The 2022-02-02 copy of the support page on archive.org shows the same answer:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220202033903/https://support.g...

(That's the first version of that page on archive.org, and also seems to be the day this was announced based on the previous HN discussion.)

The link you shared says-

> Starting March 29, 2022, the Web & App Activity Admin console setting is going away and a new user setting, Google Workspace search history, is enabled by default for all users.

That says they're removing the existing option and replacing it with a new one, and that the new one will be on by default. This has changed- they're now honoring the old setting and migrating its value to the new one, as opposed to ignoring it like they said they were going to do here.

It's not saying that. It's saying that the "Web & App Activity" setting in the admin console is going away and being replaced with nothing in in the admin console. Users will have two settings, controlling disjoint features, "Web & App Activity" and "Workspace search history". The former one will be set to whatever the "Web & App Activity" admin console setting was set to. The latter one will be set to enabled.

The archive.org copy of the initial FAQ version explicitly states this multiple times.

> If you disabled Web & App Activity in the Admin console, it’s turned off for Google Workspace users.

> (But it does seem surprising that they didn't just show a option dialogue on the next load of a Workspace app and ask the user to choose.)

That seems like the obvious compromise here, if you are going to make it more granular at least prompt the admins to make a choice.

If it is a legitimately valuable feature to users then explain it to them why it is.

Nothing wrong with reminding them at a later date either when new things get released but they aren't seeing it because of an option they previously selected (without being annoying of course).

Facebook got a lot of criticism for repeatedly doing new option dialogs on sharing settings. There's really no way to win here since it will be interpreted in the worst possible light.

There's no way to win if you define winning as re-enabling tracking for users who have already explicitly said they don't want it, while avoiding any negative public perception, you mean.

Stop doing shady shit. "I'll keep asking, in increasingly devious ways, until you say yes, and then even if it was an accident I'll remember it forever" is shady shit.

Wasn't the criticism a result of them not having a "master disable" option and therefore the extra options were merely increased work for the user?

There is a way to win: have new options default to off, requiring active opt-in.

It's source is also essentially the HN discussion at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30171800

making it a really strange ouroboros of a ragedupe.

Peoples hatred of google is so strong straight up spam is making it to the top lol. The source cited in the article is HN itself and markets its own product as an alternative.

Does Google not deserve the hate they've cultivated through their actions over the years?

This is about a specific Workspace change that allows administrators to turn off tracking for products that fall under the 'no ads' category separately from those that don't (other non-core services[0]). Before, turning off this setting disabled many useful features in Gmail as well as disabled tracking for org users for the stuff you care about.

That's why this is spam - it's twisting this change into something they can use to market their 'encrypted email/calendar' product.

0: https://workspace.google.com/terms/user_features.html

>Imagine going into a restaurant and saying "I really don’t enjoy a medium rare steak please make it medium well" and having the chef say "ok fine but medium rare steak is the best way to enjoy it so I made it medium rare despite what you previously explicitly told me enjoy".

Alternative: Imagine people expect the waiter to always know what they want when they walk in the door and say "I want steak with the usual" but the waiter doesn't know what the usual is. And it's because you, the customer (or your "dad", the workspace admin), has told the waiter not to remember you once you leave the restaurant each time. You don't really know you did this, you just had some friend from the EFF tell you "Waiters should never remember you!" and so you went along with it.

People probably expect Google to "just know" what they're looking for when you search, and search quality goes down when search history can't be used to refine results. So Google is putting it back in peoples' faces saying "I am pretty sure you want this on, and with Workspaces, we aren't using it for ads, just to make the product better".

There is my charitable reading of it.

This actually happened to me, and it is how I learned that "well done" steak does not mean the same as "well done" on an exam.

I've been enjoying rare to medium rare ever since.

I recently left Google after spending a few years there.

Internally Google puts a huge premium on user safety and privacy. So much so that shipping anything requires getting changes through a regulatory process to safeguard users.

Google doesn’t do a good job of marketing its process. In some domains Google does explicitly use user behavior to drive revenue, so from the outside it becomes easy to spin changes like this as encroaching on user privacy, but I don’t see that here. I see something like a PM who is trying to surface some more functionality to users directly, and some engineers who spent far too long with lawyers to get sign off on this change.

It may be fashionable to sensationalize product changes like this, but the truth is often more mundane.

Edit: found a comment from the PM themselves in a previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30174304

While it may not be intentionally sinister, it's a precedent I can't agree with. Been on a journey to self-host as much of my stuff as I can to avoid this crap.

> It may be fashionable to sensationalize product changes like this, but the truth is often more mundane.

A company which relies on user data for its revenue using user data seems like a mundane explanation to me.

> Internally Google puts a huge premium on user safety and privacy.

It's Orwellian doublethink. Google will go miles out of its way to convince itself it gives a damn about user privacy, when it obviously does not give a damn about user privacy. Google always finds a way to justify studying users like lab rats. For Google, they believe that they are inherently in your circle of trust and that they are allowed to know anything they want to know about you because they are by default, up to nothing but good.

Google fundamentally does not understand that keeping things private means keeping things private from Google.

If you aren't paying Google, then they are harvesting your attention, activities, preferences, and future spending habits to eventually sell to the highest bidder.

Google's entire business hinges on user privacy from everyone other than Google. If, tomorrow, either this Account Security scenario happened[0] or this South Park website happened[1] (everyone's internet history searchably by anyone), and it was done at the incompetence of Google, they would crumble overnight. They might recover within a year or two if they release a statement and fix it within a few hours or something, but it would be devastating and they would have to kiss their entire Google Cloud business (encompassing Cloud Platform and Workspace) goodbye.

Once more, even for their ad business, they don't sell that data, they target based off of it. They would lose their competitive data advantage overnight if someone could pay them $100 per-user for every user's full advertising profile since they could then go behind Google's back and out-header-bid Google with lower margins.

0: https://youtu.be/y4GB_NDU43Q

1: https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/TrollTrace.com

Are you kidding me? Crumble overnight? Have you not heard of the massive data breaches from the credit reporting industry? They got a minor slap on the wrist and everything is continuing as though it never happened.

I don't understand how people can have such naive views in this day and age. Google is FAR MORE important today than a credit reporting company. They wouldn't go anywhere.

Nobody affected by those breaches willingly worked with the credit reporting industry. Everyone with a Workspace subscription willingly works with it and moving all the stuff Google Workspace offers off to Office 365 can be done relatively quickly by downloading all drive data, syncing user email, contacts, and caldav, and exporting Sheets/Gdocs as their Office file format counterparts.

There are numerous other breaches of companies that people continue to shop/work with literally weekly if not daily.

Wikipedia might not be the best source but they have a list of companies that have had data breaches, but there is a huge list of companies that have had public breaches.

Just to name a few and their sources that you people everywhere still use because the majority of people don't care about privacy or security.

Apple - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/22/apple-dev... AT&T - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jun/10/apple-ipa... Barnes and Noble - https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/business/hackers-get-cred... Capital One - https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/29/business/capital-one-data-bre...

There's plenty of other examples on here - but I agree with the parent, Google could implode and leak everything and the average person could not be bothered to change their emails or stop using Google.

As a consumer, you can make the choice to not use Google. You can not reasonably avoid dealing with the credit reporting industry.

Maybe, but you can't easily stop Google using you. Or FB, etc etc

Yes you can. You can disable cookies, or use ad blockers. Specifically, this is talking about Google Workspace customers, so all their customers can easily move off using them for hosted email.

Do you watch youtube? Get email from people using Gmail. The list goes on, if you think outside your box.

My comment is not limited to workspaces, that's a strawman.

> If you aren't paying Google, then they are harvesting your attention, activities, preferences, and future spending habits to eventually sell to the highest bidder.

Do they stop if you pay them?

Google stopped scanning Gmail.com users' inboxes in 2017[0] and Workspace in general has a guarantee that they don't use any core service data[1] for their advertising business[2]:

> Google will only access or use Customer Data to provide the Services and TSS to Customer or as otherwise instructed by Customer. Without limiting the generality of the preceding sentence, Google will not process Customer Data for Advertising purposes or serve Advertising in the Services. Google has implemented and will maintain administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to protect Customer Data, as further described in the Data Processing Amendment.

0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/26/google-wi...

1: https://workspace.google.com/terms/user_features.html

2: https://workspace.google.com/terms/premier_terms.html#:~:tex....

That "guarantee" is of no use unless you can prove it (which you can't from the outside - so much data goes into ad targeting that it's impossible to definitely prove which bit of data was used to target a given ad).

They've also proven their bad faith with their GDPR consent flow that's not actually compliant with the regulation (there should be a big "decline" button as easy to use as the "accept" button).

"Google stopped scanning Gmail.com users' inboxes in 2017"

Actually, what the Guardian article says is that Google claims that:

"Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalisation after this change."

That doesn't mean they don't scan/read/use the contents of Gmail users' mailboxes completely. It just means they claim they don't do it for ads personalization.

So nothing in that announcement prevents them from doing this for other reasons.

There's also plenty of other juicy data that Google gets on you.. such as who you communicate with and know (gotten through Gmail and many other means), and things they can infer about you, which isn't affected by this announcement at all.

IMO this is in the context of ad personalization so it's still valid, and it illustrates that they scan email for Workspace as well to provide useful features (like the 'designed to prevent you from threats' point on this marketing page[0])

0: https://workspace.google.com/products/gmail/#:~:text=Designe...

I agree with what you are saying. Google undoubtedly puts a lot of emphasis on security and privacy against external threats. In other words, it is unlikely that google systems would be hacked and user secrets be leaked. I can be relatively confident that script kiddies won't hack the Gmail servers and download everyone's data.

However, Google most definitely puts no value in privacy in the holistic sense of the word, because as you say they'll willfully harvest every last bit of information, sensitive or not, that users store at Google. Google cannot be given a shred of trust with private data, because they have time and time again demonstrated to have no moral compass in this respect.

They may take a lot of care about protecting this data from others, but they don't care at all about protecting the data from themselves.

> If you aren't paying Google, then they are harvesting your attention, activities, preferences, and future spending habits to eventually sell to the highest bidder.

And paying them won't guarantee that they won't do those things either. Look at what Microsoft is doing with Windows.

The comment really doesn't explain why Google had to do an automatic opt-in.

You sure you were not just out of the loop? Engineers are often not included because they would object. You were only there a few years so I doubt you were privy to much of the politics.

Yeah, compartmentalized design.

Let’s say I give you a box with two lights to show its state, one green and one red. Currently, the red light is on. The red light will also be on tomorrow. In fact, people who have observed this box for years have only ever seen it show red.

You might argue that this box is simply hard-wired to show red, but then I explain: No, your impression is wrong. I’ve built this box, and I’ve taken every possible measure to make it show green.

How credible am I?

And would you be more inclined to believe me more if I told you about my intrinsic love for the color green, and how I wired up the green light first, and how I have an entire committee of experts that has to sign off every design change to this box to ensure sufficient greenness? While it still shows, and only ever will, show the red light?

Related phenomena: There are four lights! [Star Trek:TNG] 2+2=5 [1984] Gaslighting

Both the related phenomena you cite are fictional. Maybe find better supporting examples.

They are fictional archetypes of established historical patterns, their reason to exist in pop culture is as shorthand allegories and extrapolations for common despotic behaviors that are already clear to everyone with a sense of history.

If they're archetypes of historical patterns, it should be trivial to find examples from history rather than fiction, no?

See: North Korea. (I'm sure everyone there is completely up to date and accirate on the character of the world around them!)

See: Russia(Same)

See: Chinese Communist Party (Same)

See: United States and... Well, every nation really. (Same)

See: Propaganda(Literally exists to create skewed perceptions in allies/foes)

See: Filter Bubbles

See: Locality (Physics)

See: Perception Management (general category of activity)

See: Truman Show

See: Information Asymmetry (If you don't know it exists, woo boy, you might want to look into doing something about that)

See: The Great Firewall (Unrestricted access to the Internet is too dangerous to be allowed by an incumbent power structure)

See: DMCA Takedowns (unmanipulated information access is too dangerous to be allowed by am incumbent power structure)

See: Classification (Secret/Top Secret; unrestricted access to information is too dangerous to be allowed by an incumbent power structure)

See: Every Diplomat and liar ever

I mean, if you're going to play the source card, you may want to pick something that doesn't have so many real life examples that actually enumerating them, and the various contexts from which they have arisen, the timelessness in terms of what generation of humanity is in the process of manufacturing/experiencing said perceptual distortions, and level of infiltration into even the most basic levels of human interaction that requiring further requests for further explanation only serve to show one in a poorer or less flattering light. People lie. Period. The more that is at stake, the easier the act of lying becomes to stomach/justify.

You cannot have achieved adulthood without encountering some level of the type of practice being discussed. Even realizing that you have is in and of itself a formative moment in knowing oneself as a free agent.

It's cognitive dissonance. It:s coping. It's repression. It's distortion. It's for your own good, or more probably for the good of someone in a position to decide what is good for you in your stead.

If this is your first time thinking about or realizing this... I'm truly sorry. My condolences. Integrating it into a naive worldview is not a fun or enjoyable experience.

> See: [...]

Locality and filter bubbles? DCMA takedowns? The mere existence of classified data? Every liar ever? Every nation that is and possibly has ever been or will be, either as concrete things or abstract entities? This is loose association of ideas, man, and still not the concrete examples from history I asked for.

But the coda makes up for it, and I thank you for the giggle.

Hey man, giggle away. You do you. Glad you can put off having to deal with how the world operates that much longer. Lotta people go their lives never noticing it, or putting a finger on it. Fewer still are ever in a position to put a finger on it and do anything about it.

I gave concrete examples of instances where an institution or root of authority implements by dicta a distortion on how information, and what information will propagate. If it's any comfort, I reacted the same way when someone pointed out to me the absurdity of duck and cover, and the impossibility of that squaring with the concept of a government conducting itself with integrity when I was more gung ho with regards to the integrity of my own government. It took a while for it to sink in that yeah, there's just stuff that ends up getting done because the unfiltered truth is so much more destructive to the status quo, that the ability to just waltz it in front of consenting to be governed people really seems like an idea that's pauseworthy.

Russia with their propaganda mill, China with the Great Firewall, media/copyright industry with DMCA, U.S. Government with executive privilege/classification authority.

It's universal. You either drive yourself mad, ignore it, work around it, or just deal with the fact info asymmetry is one of the fundamental pillars of power, and play along with the dog and pony show, trying to help the next group of sods not get burned so hard by it.

So tell ya what. Lemme turn it around on you.

How are any of these not things that if just about everyone knew about them in intimate detail would not have substantially changed the way things are today?

MKUltra

The Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiments.

COINTELPRO.

Operation Mockingbird.

The Sugar industry's great success at just conveniently not reporting studies that didn't make their cash crop seem the best way to go. Tobacco industry too. Hell, lets throw in pharma. Thalidomide happened too.

IBM sold machines to facilitate concentration camps.

DuPont happily working with IG Farben to scale Zyklon B production.

Petrochem, burying climate analysis over the last century.

19th-20th century capitalists hiring Pinkertons to bust union organization or get dirt on prospective partners/hires/competitors.

The American Fruit Corporation, and the Banana Republics.

Each one had it's veneer. Each one, frighteningly, may have had a legit claim to "being the right thing to do at the time" from the understanding underpinned by the information that was allowed to propagate for consideration at the time.

I can go on. I'm just weary of it. I see more banal and lower impact examples every day.

Coworker X not doing something because it won't be his problem by the time the consequence comes around, and fuck it, management doesn't care.

Management doesn't care because they've got an acquisition on the hook that'll just shitcan the business to keep it from disrupting the same old business model.

Like I said. Just look around. Info asymmetry is everywhere, and the benefactors (of which the little guy makes up not an insignificant number) like it that way.

It's bugged me for the longest time. Still bugs me.

It's so trivial that it's pointless because the intended reader is presumed to have already done it himself, excising that triviality is the purpose of any kind of shorthand.

The green light is on, you just can't see it.

Mundane != OK

The banality of evil: https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-...

"The first step to data privacy is admitting you have a problem, Google" - 2022 https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/28/google_data_privacy/?...

"Android's Messages, Dialer apps quietly sent text, call info to Google" - 2022 https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/21/google_messages_gdpr/

"What Data Do The Google Dialer and Messages Apps On Android Send to Google?": https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/privacyofdialerandsmsapps...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30751751

Is the GDPR-breaking consent flow also result of some bored PM?

google collects all your information and device info. They can also tie together all of your devices and accounts. They then share that info with the state and law enforcement.

See, this just doesn't pass the bullshit test. Look at Google's history and ask whether this could possibly be true. Could it? Really? Yes, but only if we posit that Google is hiding their nefarious activity from their own employees.

Look at stuff like this:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/28/google_data_privacy/

Is this the Google you left? If so, one really needs to ask is whether we should be even more worried about a company that hides its evil from its own employees than about a company that's just plainly shitty.

Previous discussion (2 months, 442 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30171800

If user preference was their concern (and GWorkspace users were really pining to get all that wonderful tracking enabled) then they could've simply implemented an individual option to override the admin's setting.

But no, this is once again a pathetic smokescreen where the actual motives are obfuscated and the users lose again.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Google, and this does sound in character; but something is off about this website.

  How do I turn Google Workspace search history on and off?
  You can enable or disable Google Workspace search history:
  Go to the My Activity page.
  Click Other Google activity and then Google Workspace search history.
  Click On or Off.

That's from: https://apps.google.com/supportwidget/articlehome?article_ur...

But I don't see any "Google Workspace search history" on mine.

Same here. I checked when they announced, and now today. As well, no dice. Maybe it will be there tomorrow? Bizarre

Re: Cannot find Google Workspace search history

Thank you for contacting us. We will get back to you within 10 working days. With the utmost respect,

The Google support team

===

Re: Re: Cannot find Google Workspace search history

Thank you for submitting an issue. Your feedback is very important to us. Unfortunately, we cannot determine the nature of your problem. Could you reply to this email and attach a screen shot for each step, and include your account details: your full name, physical address, email address, telephone number, and Google ISID. Glad to be of assistance,

The Google support team

===

Re: Re: Re: Cannot find Google Workspace search history

Thanks for your patience. We have looked at your issue, and cannot find anything irregular. Please use a search engine (https://google.com) to look for more information. Always at your service,

The Google support team

===

Re: Re: Re: Re: Cannot find Google Workspace search history

Thank your for filing a complaint. We appreciate it, and we learn from valuable input as yours. The support team has concluded that the issue was an outdated text on the support portal. This will be resolved within 10 working days. Unfortunately, the deployment team will deploy a new version in the mean time, which might not be compatible with our currently approved support documentation. Updating the new documentation could take 4 to 6 weeks. This ticket is now closed. Please feel free to open a new ticket if you run into another problem. Do not contact us for the same problem. Our legal counsil will contact you if you keep harassing us. With the highest regards,

The Google support team

You got a response? I'm locked out of ebay until I call them, but they won't tell their phone number.

Sorry, this is fictional. It’s how I imagine it’ll play out.

The relevant Google link : https://support.google.com/a/answer/11194328?hl=en

One tidbit from the link, I don't know if it changes the narrative much or not :

> Note: Google never uses your data in Google Workspace core services for advertising.

I really want to believe that owing to the prevalance of Google Workspace at every job I've worked, but my cynical side doesn't believe it. I would not be surprised if they twist the definition of "advertising" or just use your private data in other unstated ways.

We can assume this is just legal coverage for them. For you, cunning wordplay to make you believe what they want so you don't act in your own interest.

Honesty is too much to ask when you make your billions from tracking and advertising.

Why has no one sued for violation of contract?

Even if Google wins, it would be a big PR event.

Because they really don’t use that information for advertising. They even stopped scanning @gmail account email for ad purposes in 2018. Advertising still happens outside of these core services, eg via cross site tracking in the web browser.

> owing to the prevalance of Google Workspace at every job I've worked

This frightens me. I may have a skewed vision from 25 years in the banking industry; do real functional businesses (not VC money fires) actually pay Google to harvest their data and not deliver inbound email?

It's a small sample, but I've worked for two small software houses and one medium sized software company. All these use Google for nearly everything except IM. AFAIK, all my university contacts have went to companies where the story is the same. (Actually the university itself was the only exception, they moved from Exhange to O365 during my studies).

Sad to see it but not much love for Sendmail or Exchange.

Page 11 of this document [0] is a good place to start.

Clearly people have strong opinions on this topic, so now is a great time to review your changes.

[0] - https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/google_workspace_d...

Seems hard to believe that a document dated December 2020 would still be valid. Maybe not everything in it has changed, but to think that nothing has changed from a company like Googs is odd as well. Hell, how many offered services that would be listed in that document has Googs killed in the years since the ink dried on the document?

It's the first result in a Google search, so if it isn't, then that would be pretty ironic. Still...

This is spam. It cites an HN post from 2 months ago as a source and doesn’t add anything new to that discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30171800

tl;dr the “Web & App Activity” setting got moved from google workspace admin settings to each user’s settings. The “many users” who toggled this setting are all google workspace admins. Too bad that doesn’t make for a good story.

It's a sad commentary to HN, that the only accurate comment is at the bottom.

It would be slightly nearer the top, if you hadn't written essentially the same comment three times in this discussion.

And their advice is to switch to their service - shame this made it to the top of HN.

User "choice" should persist through any product's development just like their private information. It should be protected by law. How often this happens in big tech products to re-establish user telemetry to "help" said company build better product is almost satire at this point.

No means no. It does not mean I have to say no again in the future.

You can dislike this, you can call it a dark pattern, but the title is inaccurate:

> Google is changing its Workspace Settings, including a change that activates activity tracking for all users of Google Workspace accounts even if the organization's admin disabled activity tracking for all users previously.

The users never turned off tracking. Their organization admin did so for them. Now users have to go do it themselves (edit: they may not even have to do that per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30841812). This is significantly less bad than what the title implies.

Meanwhile, there are companies that actually just forget user tracking preferences. Amazon for example silently turns browsing history for my account back on every time their cookie expires. Why does Amazon store this as a cookie rather than as a persistent account setting? Great question...

It was turned off by the entity paying for the service, and that choice is being ignored in the ever growing search for more personal data. Title’s perfectly accurate IMO.

Exactly, they should default to turning it off, not on.

> The users never turned off tracking. Their organization admin did so for them. Now users have to go do it themselves.

In some countries, this may put the company in a rough spot legally, and it seems fairly clear the motivation is "we at Google want more tracking, even if the organization paying for the service does not".

> This is scummy,

I’m struggling to understand why this is even scummy.

This specific activity tracking isn’t even used for advertising like many are assuming (Source: https://support.google.com/a/answer/11194328?hl=en ).

Everything about this article and what it’s implying feels like it was carefully crafted to generate maximum outrage while omitting all of the relevant details that might clarify what’s happening.

This article and headline were basically crafted to be ragebait, and it appears to have succeeded.

> I’m struggling to understand why this is even scummy.

Y’know what, I edited that out.

It does seem to me that the new user preference should default to what the admin set previously. It looks like that may be what is happening though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30841812. My original comment had assumed that the article itself, at least, was accurate.

Even were we to assume that Google is telling the truth regarding the activity tracking, let's switch the context here and make the setting relatively benign.

Imagine Microsoft or Apple were to reset settings around crash reporting, causing all Windows and MacOS systems to begin sending crash report data. Would this be acceptable? This would IMO be scummy as well.

Even if all you say is true to the above, if company policy requires it to be off, then this is costing companies money to bring them into compliance with policy, suddenly, because of Google.

I'm not sure how this is an inaccurate title; Users whose tracking was off will now have it activated.

The "organization" is the user here for workspace accounts. These orgs are now going to have tracking turned on for a bunch of their accounts.

Problem is most people don't care. Most people couldn't give a flying f** if their data is being collected, as long as they get all these free services. They don't know or care how much it costs to build/run/maintain things like instagram and youtube, which to them are just "websites" or "apps" on their phone, and therefore don't question how google/fb etc funds them.

They need to be hit round the face with the truth, like if they saw someone at their home window watching them. They need to be shocked into realizing what is happening.

Interesing. Today I released the new version of my app without Google Analytics or Crashlytics.

How do you check your Youtube subs without getting the cookie and Google knowing exactly who you are on each of their sites? Have to switch back to Firefox to get containerization?

How is this related? You don't have to switch to Firefox, you can create another profile in Chrome where you allow all the cookies and use that for Email and YouTube subscription checking.

Isn't using multiple profiles a normal thing to do?

If it's a good helpful feature to have activity tracking then tell the user... let them decide if they want it.

Does this include student google accounts provided by schools?

Every day I feel more vindicated about moving to Apple's ecosystem 2 years ago. Their only two services I use are YouTube and Google Maps; both on safari so no tracking. I'll give Apple maps a try.

I am still using YouTube and YouTube TV. Just last month I finally moved email and deleted my workspace account. Pretty happy so far.

I only use Apple Maps in the US and have been happy. If you haven’t used it lately then it is worth another try.

"What is more, admins can no longer control this setting for their users, but all users need to invidually toggle the tracking off again."

Side tracking, to me it would seem legal for an admin to turn tracking off, but would it be legal forn and admin to turn tracking on?

That's a great question, and I don't have a general answer--maybe there isn't one--but in this instance, the admin wasn't turning the tracking on or off, but was making the service available or not. If the service was turned on, it was up to the user to turn tracking on or off.

I still can't figure out how to turn this off! Can anyone tell me?

If I read:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/11194328#zippy=%2Chow-do...

Then the instructions say:

> You can enable or disable Google Workspace search history:

> * Go to the My Activity page.

> * Click Other Google activity and then Google Workspace search history.

> * Click On or Off.

If I go to:

https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

Yes, I can find "Other Google activity" (check the top left hamburger menu if you don't see it)

But inside this, there is NO "Google Workspace search history". How are you supposed to do this? I'm definitely logged in as my workspace account.

Same here, no Google Workspace search history

ok how to turn off this crap?

I do love the double standards in tech.

Can you imagine the uproar if Microsoft did something like this. for all users of active directory enable tracking for all action anywhere on the web. Even better its not going to share the "helpful tracking" with the admin. (yes teams has spyware, but thats admin configurable)

If Facebook even tried half of this, there would be literal shitfits.

People are surprised when I tell them I don't use most Google products. Unfortunately, I still use YouTube, as that's where I consume most of my media / entertainment. The fallacy that other search engines don't work as well or that Gmail is the best email really inhibits 'normies' from escaping Google. I'll admit, Google Maps is a great service, but you can still get from A to B without it. I just print out all my navigation on MapQuest (/s).

Apple Maps has significantly improved in recent years. I actually get better navigation most of the time from it. That was not the case 5 years ago.

And in other countries Google Maps can sometimes be useless compared to local competitors.

Unfortunately it's still way worse than Google maps in the few European countries that I've tried it. The routing is worse. Searching for a type of shop (e.g. "supermarket") doesn't work well and it doesn't have accurate opening hours of shops. And in The Netherlands it doesn't support cycling, which makes it pretty much useless for the many people who use that as their mode of transport.

I install Apple Maps every once in a while to see if it has become useful, but always remove the app after a few days because it hasn't.

a lot of youtube can be avoided with odysee and browser plugin that redirects you from youtube to their version if one exists

Invidious can be used to proxy YouTube.

> If Facebook even tried half of this, there would be literal shitfits.

Facebook will just track you without explicitly letting you know by turning something back on.

This is not what the article is about at all. This is about your Gmail search history.

Knee jerkers are going to jerk their knees. To do otherwise would require too much reading.

Of course Microsoft would never do something like this.

Mainly because they wouldn’t give you an off switch for them to toggle back of.

Microsoft just forced all Minecraft users to switch to Microsoft accounts.

Some of security options require you to enter a cell # for account verification.

Browsing reddit, a lot of folks are defending the switch. "Better account security".

I really think that folks just don't care about their own privacy anymore.

I don't know that it's folks don't care, as much as they don't understand it.

It's a cell phone number. That's essentially public - if you search your phone number, you will find your name and probably address attached to it in the results, if not even your family and friends.

So, at that point, it doesn't matter. I guess it's the death by a thousand cuts.

So instead of not caring, I think it's more of - If there are companies who publish this information that I literally have never interacted with and have zero control over, what does it matter if I give it to a company to get something I want in return?

Where are you searching that you're getting the owner's name back for a cell number? I get nothing of the sort.

I remember this being the case back in the landline days when you had to pay not to be in the phone book.

searchpeoplefree.com

"Folks" never did care about their privacy. I've been trying to open people's eyes since forever, and it just doesn't work, because, you know, weeeeeeeeee!

I've been really shafted by this, I signed up for Minecraft donkey's years ago and don't have access to the email address I used any more so I can't link it to my Microsoft account which I got very grudgingly in the first place. There's security questions but I don't remember what my favourite author was one month over a decade ago or whatever else they want.

You can, if you login on Minecraft.net and click through to edit your Minecraft profile first.

It’ll let you change the email address without sending a confirmation to the old address first. They’ll send a confirmation request to the new address, change it and then message the old address that it’s been changed. Their flow is backwards but it works out for your case (sauce: I did this two weeks ago).

Once that’s done you’re good to go to link the accounts.

Ah that's good news, cheers for the heads up!

And if you literally do not have a cellphone...?

Much like if you don't have an internet connection, or don't have an e-mail address, or don't have a bank account, or don't have the ability to read, tech companies have decided your custom is not worth having.

Have you been using Windows 10?

Every time there’s a major update, half the tracking stuff comes back on.

Goggle cultivated a “good guy” image for a long time. It takes a while for people to realize that they aren’t the good guys anymore.

At some point, society will have a broader conversation about respecting the word 'no.' Without mentioning a different context explicitly, we all recognize the grotesque immorality when 'no' must be stated repeatedly (and even then, the requests do not cease).

Google (and other large tech companies) require a level of vigilance from their users in boundary-setting that would be unacceptable in almost any other context.

Yes and, I would add, not just respect the word 'no', but allow it to be expressed in the first place.

Not 'maybe later'. Not 'remind me tomorrow'. Not 'manage options'.

Just 'no'.

Modern UX:

“ We respect your privacy! Do you agree to the use of cookies by this website?

[x] Yes, all of them, with some extra on top.

[] I would like to manually review and uncheck 859 individual checkboxes or be directed to some other 3rd party website to manage my settings there. Also, I would like these settings to expire after 7 days.

Your personal data matters to us! (In ways you can’t imagine) “

Put it in the pile with the other dark patterns.

> our personal data matters to us! (In ways you can’t imagine)

No, "we value your privacy (at a very high price!)".

We value your privacy, that’s why we don’t give it to you for free

That kind of consent popup is illegal in the EU, please report them to your local DPA. Rejecting data collection must be just as easy as accepting it.

Also watch out for the use of "legitimate interest". I have seen banks trying to deprive customers of their right to refuse data collection, data sharing and marketing messages, claiming legitimate interest.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/02/europe_iab_decision/

Except they left the “legitimate interest” loophole which gets abused by every website.

As I understand it, the law provides reasonable limits on what is covered by its legitimate interest provision. Violation of the law is widespread because everyone knows the enforcement is a joke.

See also a rare exception https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27060609

Funny, I’ve seen this on multiple government agency websites. This is in Sweden.

> please report them to your local DPA

That requires an unreasonable amount of effort, and at least in the UK the DPA is completely useless, corrupt and/or incompetent.

i got even better one.

do you accept your cookie policy ? [ yes | no, customize ]

and after you go through all that :

big green button [ continue with recommended settings ]

smaller gray one [ save my choices ]

guess what the green one does.

Or the equally obnoxious 'pressing consent is instant, pressing don't consent takes 5+ seconds to process'. This one is plausibly deniable too.

> This one is plausibly deniable too.

How can it be? You do nothing for 5+ seconds or you save a ton of cookies instantly.

I think if it was in a court of law it'd be quite difficult to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it's malicious unless it was literally something as obvious as `Thread.sleep(5000)` rather than the software just being badly written. I managed to introduce a really annoying and very specific timing issue a few weeks ago completely by accident for example, I reckon the accused would just say 'non-consent is processed differently to consent for $legacy_cruft reasons and it's quite slow, we're incompetent but we're not malicious'.

What about when you remove yourself from a mailing list. and they inform you it will take 10 business days to take effect?

It just feels like corporate weasel words.

Wes Borg from Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie did a skit called "Internet Helpdesk" that included this bit:

> Thank you for calling, your call is very important to us, please hold!

https://youtu.be/1LLTsSnGWMI

The only thing that's going to make that happen is legally enshrining the permanence of "No" in law, as I believe parts of the GDPR do.

Otherwise, if companies can covert >0% of users and therefore make >$0 with every re-ask, they'll just ask again.

Large scale tech companies are predators when they want something. And they aren't going to magically stop being predators absent legal repercussions.

The only way that’s going to happen with an empirical world order (the United States) is either by full-fledged political revolution or war with a competing power.

The American state prioritizes corporate interests by design. This is how industrial capitalism works and always has worked. And the EU is a dependent of the US, not an alternative to it.

The Western neoliberal consensus of the past half-century has caused people to forget how power works, and nowhere is that more clear than in these utopian calls for regulation on Hacker News.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Capitalism or a society. Pick one.

Without derailing too far, how would you explain the existence of work hour limits and workplace protection regulations?

All of them were won by fierce mass labor movements, which were then aggressively suppressed and wiped from the curriculums during the McCarthyist era, prior to the neoliberal era. And those hard-won protections have been eroding ever since. These things don’t just fall from the sky.

Since you mention “work hour limits”, look up the Haymarket Strike in Chicago that won the 40 hour work week for private employees in the US, but not before police shot and killed 4 peacefully striking workers.

Yes. That's what the rough and tumble reality of freedom in a democracy looks like.

> You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Capitalism or a society. Pick one.

You can have both. It just comes with people giving a shit and putting their lives and careers on the line in an organized fashion.

Which seems like a bargain, given the only alternatives have collapsed into "neither."

If getting shot to death for not working is freedom then what do you consider slavery?

If organized workers withholding their collective labor to exercise power over the means of production is capitalism, then what do you consider socialism?

> If getting shot...

Not answering a strawman.

> If organized workers withholding their collective labor to exercise power over the means of production is capitalism, then what do you consider socialism?

Worker organization being mandatory and controlled by a bureaucracy, as opposed to freely opted in, from among a diverse set of independent options.

> The Western neoliberal consensus of the past half-century > You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Capitalism or a society. Pick one.

I think what we're seeing here is the breakdown of the neo-liberal consensus, and at least the specific form of capitalism that comes with it. We see this on both the left and the right (consider that neither Trump nor Sanders support neo-liberalism). It's still the status quo for now, but even amongst the mainstream of the mainstream I'm seeing a waning of support. That hasn't been followed by actions yet, but I think it's only a matter of time.

There seems to be broad recognition that these companies have too much control on our lives, and I expect a wave of regulation of things like consent for tracking, interoperability between services and right to repair to come through soon. Probably first in the EU with the US following. The GDPR has shown that it's possible, and already completely changed the conversation around data retention.

How is that regulation going to happen? What mechanisms of power are going to oversee such a thing? With all due respect, I think you have everything right except for this. I think you’re dreaming. These kinds of blessings don’t just fall from the sky.

Not to get too targeted at people here... but I need to get something off my chest on this topic, and your comment serves as a pretty decent launching point.

I'm not going to be saying this to attack people, but I am going to be pretty stern and resolute in my language here. Fair warnings have been given.

------------

Tobr, and anyone concerned...

For this kind of thing to occur, every single one of you out there would need to grow a backbone.(no offense, but its true.) I can't begin to start complaining about how many spineless fuckwits are out there letting these kinds of people like google get away with this all the fucking time, all because no one ever actually stands up for each other. Sure, they'll virtue signal when someone makes a scene, stuff like that.

But when the chips are down and its time to fight, these cowards run. These spineless fuckwits that ruin our society is all of you. All of you who never stand up against your boss. All of you who never tell your teachers off when they are in the wrong. All of you who never tell your families to be better, because they'll just act worse. Or your supposed so called 'friends'.

This problem is much deeper than just Google Tobr and crew reading this. This problem goes straight down to the heart of the reason as to why humanity just can't seem to catch a break in regards to evil people out there.

Remember, google's only good advice ever, they screwed up. "Don't be Evil."

They are evil, because all of you are gullible cowards; with only a few exceptions existing and not as a rule.

And to those who figure "You're wrong!"

PROVE IT. Get out there and do something useful for once in regards to this problem. I might believe you then.

In this context, the user never said 'no.' Some other party said no on their behalf and the user never got a say.

If its a corporate account, paid for by the corporation, the party who said no is absolutely a concerned party who should be able to say no to tracking on behalf of its employees while they're at work.

I, for one, appreciate my employer will no longer be able to turn off auto-search-completion on my behalf.

Pain in my ass when that feature's disabled because my employer has skewed paranoia dials (so they don't trust Google with search history, but we're using Workspaces, so they trust them with... every corporate document stored in Drive? Wat?)

If I had one dollar for each time I clicked "unsubscribe" and $ONLINE_STORE decided to forget about that one month later...

I kinda solved that with fast mail + masked addresses, but still super annoying.

I have a rule in my email account. If it includes the word “unsubscribe” it gets sorted into a folder that gets deleted after 14 days. I manually review that folder every now and then to explicitly mark all of them spam. I would never sign up for any kind of email list to begin with, so it’s spam.

Ali express sometimes gives interesting stuff, so I accept their ad mails, even if they are daily. A few days ago, they somehow decided I should speak french, which annoyed me enough to unsubscribe.

3 days later, the mails spontaneously reactivated themselves, but the french reverted to dutch. Which is what I want, so I presume it all worked out in the end.

how you turn off "play protect" on android and the on every app install the OS asks you to "why dont you protect yourself by turning on play protect".

if you enable it once, it will never ask you if you want to turn it off

Create a massively adopted product -> Start breaking your product to milk profitability -> Ignore user input and feedback, override their stated preferences with yours

The Microsoft playbook, currently in play at Google.

This is the "big laggard capitalist corporation" playbook.

People want to disagree, that's fine.

But it's such a common pattern of behavior in less regulated environments. There are many variants, but the common one is this:

1. upstart innovator, filling a need; scrappy, hungry, motivated.

2. reaching the market, making waves, building a base. still same mood as #1.

3. "sudden wealth". ICO, big investment, buyout, f-u money, whatever. some people leave, some stay and lose their hunger, and some people ascend into management and play the long (money) game.

4. quarterly earnings per share concerns top all others; executives know their pay is based on board considerations and appearing to keep shareholders happy. innovation takes a deep sideline as short-term and protectionist approaches prevail.

5. other companies like this one when it was on steps 1-2 appear; threats are real, but board and shareholders are slow to catch on; company is large, and it has lobbyists. monopolistic behaviors are the easiest route to maintaining dominance. stamp out competition before it hits the public radar. keep the quarterly EPS on target. keep the bonuses.

6. predictably this cannot continue, and the company falters. it is embarrassed by a hungrier company. execs leave and upgrade their positions in other similar companies. sharholders "suffer" with stagnant share prices.

7. maybe. company pivots, reinvents itself actually or in appearance. cycle either starts anew-ish, or a publicity campaign convinces the public investors that it has (and new investment should arrive).

This is the state of American capitalist corporate behavior. Downvotes are fine; they simply indicate how ignorant (unfortunately) the latest generation of HN readers are. I'm near the point of not caring. The world can burn, the ignorant masses can be under the boot of corrupt people, and anyone remaining can die with far less than they hoped they would have.

I would like to help prevent that, but celebration of ignorance has become so great that there may be no recovery.

I've said it many times... Google's policy is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Look at Android, what's supposed to be a Linux Distribution, feels nothing as such. It definitely destroyed Microsoft's attempts, Ubuntu's attempts and Firefox's attempts, whether deliberately or not it definitely did.

Then you have gmail, no official client or nothing, at least Microsoft gives us Outlook which is insanely powerful.

Google also owns your browser engine, which does who knows what level of telemetry? It was with Chrome that I was put off by Google back in the late 2000s.

They're certainly trying, but they aren't as good at it as MS was.

Linux still exists, and Android hasn't harmed it at all. No extinguish here at all.

GMail is definitely making all other email providers and clients look bad. It's basically done as much extinguishing as it can, though. People have reasons not to use it, and I don't see them overcoming them now.

And it's a miracle that other browsers still exist. Sheer tenacity keeps Firefox alive at this point, yet somehow they're making it work. And Safari only exists because of an OS-monopoly.

It'll probably need to be a generational thing to overcome Google's tentacles.

My parents are stuck on their ISP's email, I was stuck on GMail (but fighting to get out). Anyone I warn about Google's lockout horror stories think it won't happen to them because they're playing by the terms of service.

The next generation will hopefully be on their own personal domains as we should have been from the beginning. I'll admit I used think, "I'm saving $10 a year not paying for a domain, I'm a thrift genius!"

>My parents are stuck on their ISP's email, I was stuck on GMail (but fighting to get out). Anyone I warn about Google's lockout horror stories think it won't happen to them because they're playing by the terms of service.

I regale everyone I know with Google lockout horror stories in the vain hope that they will switch. No one ever does. I've spent the last year migrating services from my Gmail account to my personal domain, but it's a huge PITA, and I feel like I'm only 30% there. The only thing which keeps me going is the sinking feeling in my stomach I get when I imagine how fucked I would be if I lost access to my email address.

It's still not turnkey enough to buy a domain and use an email provider. There are multiple gates to climb through and they are often technical in nature. Just trying to understand how a domain works, where to buy it, how to host it, and how to plug that into an email provider is beyond 95% of the public.

There needs to be some better vertical integration, but as it stands, the best domain marketplaces and hosts are not the best email providers, and vice versa.

What I would love to see in the future is for email addresses to be like phone numbers, they transfer with you as you move to different email providers along with your data. Whether you're using a public domain or your own custom domain.

It would be nice to start by finding a way to allow email@domain.xyz ownership in a decentralized way.

Their goal was bever to extinguish Linux. Free and open Linux is critical to their business model because it is the infrastructure behind the third party sites where they sell ads and insert their trackers. Their goal was to extinguish the nascent community of free and open phone OSs, thereby making themselves a duopoly with iOS, a task which they executed to perfection.

> Google also owns your browser engine

Chromium and Blink are BSD-licensed.

Google decides where Chromium is heading.

> no official client or nothing

The web page is the official client. There's no need for them to support a native application on some platform when the web page runs on every platform with a browser.

Android had no chance if M$ hadn't made stupid moves three times in a row.

Gmail was actually way before Android and I was one of the few early testers got invitation directly from Google. Unfortunately from day 1 the newly registered email address(not even started using it) got spams. Asked quite a few times for ability to block certain senders, the answer had always been "Nah, our spam filters are good enough, you don't need to block any spammers at all". Of course I do. So I never use gmail as my primary email address and I'm glad I didn't.

I ditched Chrome a couple of years ago, so currently the only thing I don't really have a substitution is search, but giving Google search result quality is deteriorating pretty rapidly, I guess soon it would become no issue. By which time I would happily block all Google related stuff from my Pi-Hole.

“No” is just a decorative toggle for Google at this point.

I have to set on a weekly basis no auto play on thumbnail hover, no auto play next video when the current one is over, I don't want this user as my main Gmail account, etc.

In fact, user input is probably only regarded on the million/billion scale. I quote strings on search, ask for suggestions to be only in the languages that I speak rather than my geolocation… all bluntly ignored. The best one can hope for these days is to add its own grain of sand to the pile to slightly nudge the algorithm.

Out of curiosity, are you using uBlock or tossing your Google cookies frequently?

Plugins like uBlock interfere with a function of a web page in ways that are very hard to predict by page developers, so there's no telling what's going on if you have that enabled (maybe it thinks a request to a server to fetch your settings is going to an ad server and blocking it). And some of those settings, of course, are stored locally in cookies.

> million / billion scale

That is true. "Don't optimize for the uncommon case" is something I've had a Googler tell me as a software best practice.

"Don't optimize for the uncommon case" and "don't handle the uncommon case" are different, though. Google seems to go for the latter, more often than not.

The thing being optimized is developer time.

"Don't optimize for the uncommon case"

A fun way to ensure the case you focused on and optimize for is always the most common case since the other use cases are suboptimal and frustrating.

Nope, no uBlock. Just Safari on multiple devices.

Oh, I missed the other thing you mentioned:

> I don't want this user as my main Gmail account, etc.

Google's multilogin support is notoriously broken. That's a huge bug on their end; I'd be willing to wager it's screwing up and dropping your setting on the floor because you're soft-logged-in as a different user.

I solve this issue by running multiple accounts under Chrome, because log-in-as-someone-else is just so inconsistent and bad on Google's properties.

I thought it was some blocking, but I disabled my uBlock, Firefox's tracking protection, as well as the router-level DNS adblock, and it still toggled back on sporadically.

I would turn it off, close the page, and bam, there it was again enabled.

It got back working a few days later though, so I guess it was some idiotic A/B test.

That's likely a good metric on whether the page developer is exceeding reasonable bounds. If their content looks like an ad as detected by the best, hardened, most widely used protection software, it's reasonable that the developer should reconsider the implementation or feature altogether.

I've had uBlock reject an image served from my server because it was a particular size and had the substring "ad" in its URL (the image names were just GUIDs, and "ad" is, of course, valid hexadecimal).

There's a two-way communication problem with expecting ad blockers to work on arbitrary sites without breaking the sites; they aren't a web standard so developers can't code against them, and there's no way that blockers can predict every valid configuration. False positives will, of course, occur, and since code is changing continuously in both pages and the blocker, making them work with each other is a moving target.

When someone reports an issue with my sites, "disable uBlock and try again" is the first thing I recommend. Failing to do so is like trying to debug an issue in MacOS back in the day without asking the user to first disable extensions.

Sounds like we agree in principle and on assessment. Perhaps the daylight is that I believe users should be able to anticipate that sites will work under common configurations like use of ublock, which puts the onus on the dev.

Since uBlock isn't a web standard (and runs on a constantly-shifting set of heuristics), it's unrealistic to expect devs to chase it successfully. To be sure, they will chase it to maximize user eyeballs, but expecting that to be the correct course of action is like expecting devs to adapt their sites to IE6 quirks.

I thought we went through a whole standard development process to get away from the need to handle user-agent issues.

> I thought we went through a whole standard development process to get away from the need to handle user-agent issues.

We did, but it didn't address the ad space sufficiently. Hence the need for ublock, which I suspect is sufficient to be the de facto standard.

Does anyone know what's happening at Google? Have they grown to the point that the huge profits from web search aren't enough to sustain them or something?

I'm seeing Google ratchet up its monetization across all aspects:

- YouTube plays mandatory multiple ads

- Frontpage search is full of ads

- Gmail used to have some Infinity plus storage plan but now after 15gb is used you can't receive email. And they're using Photos towards this quota.

Nothing against paying for services but there's a noticeable and very aggressive drive towards lockin and monetization of its users.

Far more than before, so what happened to Google that's causing this?

Quarterly earnings have to ever go up.

Taken to the extreme, at some point Google will have to say, “We know you said ‘No’ to having children, but we know better, so we have opted you in to having children. Our lobbyists have made abortion effectively illegal and our merger with Pharmaceuticals Inc has replaced all birth control with placebos. This is for the best for our profits, uh, we mean our planet.”

There probably is a hit from increased awareness of ads, and the rise of ad-block.

But what about just wanting to crank up profits? There's plenty of stories now where those that comply with the shareholders wishes see accelerated promotion.

I think it's just a case of profit optimization rather than product optimization

Workspace doesn't have ads.

The above comment and my repsonse was about the broader Google products, not Workspace

Did they really make money off search? I was always under impression that search was only a gateway to their services ecosystem and its that what makes them money.

Search and ads are intrinsically linked and the vast majority of their profit comes from ads.

"Search is Google’s most lucrative unit. In 2020, the company generated $104 billion in “search and other” revenues, making up 71% of Google’s ad revenue and 57% of Alphabet’s total revenue.

That “search and other” figure includes revenue generated on Google’s search properties, along with ads on other Google-owned properties like Gmail, Maps and the Google Play app store."

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-a...

It pays enough that they're willing to pay Apple up to $15 billion a year so Apple doesn't make their own search engine and leave Google as the default search engine on Safari:

https://gadgets360.com/apps/news/google-apple-default-search...

That's Search Ads, BTW, which does not exist in Workspace for domains (a paid product).

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Are you suggesting they're making more money off of Workspace than they are from ads from search? Because that article says otherwise (said search ads makes 57% of Alphabet's -- Google's parent company -- total revenue)

Looks like Google Cloud (which includes Google Workspaces) is still losing money overall, not gaining money:

"Google’s public cloud has been chasing competing services from Amazon and Microsoft for so long, you might think it would be getting winded. But the critical Alphabet division keeps on keeping on, yesterday reporting revenues of more than $5.5 billion for the fourth quarter. That was the good news. The bad news was that Google Cloud accrued operating losses worth $890 million at the same time."

https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/02/with-a-22b-run-rate-does-i...

Assuming they have that revenue every quarter, that still only means $18 billion of revenue per year, which is a tiny fraction of search, and barely more than they give Apple just to keep being the default search engine.

Alphabet is so big and so reliant on ads that they're actually using LTE radios in balloons to spread internet access to Africa so that they can get even more growth.

Loon shut down last year: https://blog.x.company/loons-final-flight-e9d699123a96

(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)

The baloon project was actually one of the cool parts of Google. Notice the past tense.

And don't forget the increase in GCP pricing announced recently.

I think it's change in leadership.

Sergei and Larry seemed to enjoy supporting wild ideas and were happy to put money up for ideas that would very likely never be profitable. They had their run with these bets, none of them particularly worked out and they stepped away (as running the ad business is far less fun than coming up with a breakthrough search algorithm when they started).

Sundar and Ruth are just closer to what you would expect from a normal publicly traded company leadership (a lot like other 2nd+ generation big-tech CEOs). Focus on revenue, profit and cutting loss-making bets. Clearly very good at focusing on profitability, but at the expense of crazy bets, which I very much used to appreciate about Google

They got MBA'ed

Thankfully not Ballmered

Those crazy bets are also a big part of why nobody trusts Google to long-term support a service any more. They came up with a lot of wild and cool stuff that is now in the graveyard, since there was no real way to run them at anything approaching the profit levels of their core products.

Just why do they care about the profit margins? Alphabet has several companies that are not as profitable as Google. If the low margins destroy morale within Google, then they could have transferred all of their experiments to another company that is situated where wages are low and people are eager to work for it.

With some luck, some of their bets would have turned into winners.

Acts of desperation about their bad business practices being less and less accepted in markets, where before they reaped profits from acting in this ethically abhorrent way.

Now they shift focus towards Africa for example, where they compete with Facebook, ah sorry, I mean "Meta" of course, building Internet access, to be able to profit from that population. The giant wants to eat, and so it stretches out its tentacles to all the places it can, while milking other places for as long as it can.

It's primarily due to their competition (Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) and to match their stock valuation.

All these companies (or maybe just the stakeholders), IMO, seem to believe in the idea of infinite growth. And when they start seeing the plateau in front of them, it's the perfect time to crank up those milking dials to maintain the perception.

They're a monopoly in multiple domains. They can do whatever they want because they can crush competition using their monopoly power. Legislators in the U.S. have been sleeping on their responsibilities for decades now. It's nice to see the E.U. taking their responsibilities seriously with the announcement of the Digital Markets Act. This will allow for much more equal competition across search, maps, phones, marketplaces, and anywhere else these major corporations currently enjoy a monopoly.

“Have they grown to the point that the huge profits from web search aren't enough to sustain them or something?”

The demand of never ending exponential growth pretty much dooms a public company to squeeze money from everything. You can have yearly double digit growth while you are small by increasing your market share but once you get big and already dominate the market, where can you get more profits at the scale you need it?

I think they're reading the tea leaves and proactively locking in (or locking out) a variety of services and behaviors before the various jurisdictions they do business in clamp down. If you know that severing advertising revenue from various products is a probable penalty some time in the future you combat that now by reducing costs (no more infinite storage) and increasing non–advertising revenues. If you know that the "cost" of hosting petabytes of stale data is a relentless stream of GDPR and CCPA complaints and potential fines, you start to factor that cost in in addition to the personnel and capital costs and adjust service levels appropriately.

If you review the history of the tech industry there's many examples of high–flying companies failing to adapt quickly to changes in revenue composition. IBM’s stumbles in the early 1990s, for example, were set in stone by a shift away from leasing mainframes to selling mainframes in the early 1980s (which juiced profits for the 1980s but gave customers a reason to look for alternatives just as the PC and workstation market was ramping up).

> Nothing against paying for services but there's a noticeable and very aggressive drive towards lockin and monetization of its users.

Google is an advertising business. Always was and always will be.

YouTube is an advertising supported service. Compared to normal TV where you’d be watching 8 minutes of ads for every 22 minutes of content, YouTube having you watch 5-30 seconds of ads before you can press the “skip” button is a huge reduction in total ad time relative to TV standards.

Yet expectations have shifted so much toward free services that even showing (mostly) skippable shirts ads on the internet seems to make people angry.

> - Frontpage search is full of ads

Google is a search engine that makes money by showing ads. It shouldn’t be surprising that there are multiple ads on search results. That’s the entire deal with a free search engine.

> - Gmail used to have some Infinity plus storage plan but now after 15gb is used you can't receive email. And they're using Photos towards this quota.

This seems fair to me. 15GB is a lot of e-mail.

The company behind the linked blog post will only give you 1GB free and limit your search capabilities. 10GB will cost you 20 Euros per year. Even Google’s paid annual plans feel like a bargain.

Honestly I don’t really see the problem. Google was never a free no-strings-attached provider. There’s a lot of talk about “selling your data” from uninformed critics, but they don’t actually do that. They put ads on services and that’s how they provide them for free. It’s no different than the commercials on TV or the ads covering cheap magazines and newspapers.

The only difference really is that internet users are extremely demanding of free services.

> Google is a search engine that makes money by showing ads. It shouldn’t be surprising that there are multiple ads on search results.

Google grew to be a hugely profitable behemoth having a small number of easily distinguishable ads per search page. I don't think anyone is saying that they shouldn't be hosting ads; it's more the ever-decreasing quality of the product.

Every few months the number of ads goes up and they become harder to distinguish from content. Meanwhile, the quality of search goes down.

Google search now is a significantly worse experience than ten years ago. Despite a decade of engineering advancements and hardware improvements, they keep degrading their own service.

Google grew so big despite (or because of) the fact they didn't try to squeeze every last drop of profit out of their business. This generated a lot of goodwill which has now evaporated and gone into the negative.

Google has seriously struggled to be financially successful in anything other than selling information about you to others (via “targeted” ads). That means that they’re going to be increasingly desperate to maintain their data collection abilities.

No obviously means no, but until they are forced to Google will keep playing these “well we assume you really probably do want this so we’re just going to go back and mark you down for a yes again, but you can say no again if you’d like” games. Of course the reason they do this is they hope people don’t notice and/or forget to just keep saying no everytime this happens. Don’t be evil? This is evil.

> No obviously means no

If only YouTube understood this

Google’s most disruptive products like search and mail are over 20 years old now.

Google moved on from its values of by-nerds-for-nerds and ethos of do no evil.

I’m not the same person I was 20 years ago either.

I upped my standards so up yours: screw yougle.

Uninstall that spyware trash and move on.

Edit: Google search itself is highly invasive nowadays. Try using it behind a VPN or in private browsing mode. It’s not accessible unless you agree to let Google raid your cookie jar.

Great! Android is your personal little spy, glad I ditched it and hope many people will figure it out.

Ditched for what? It's not like iOS in an order of magnitude better, maybe just a bit or two.

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