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Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

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.

> (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).

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...

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