Comment by TeMPOraL
8 years ago
> instead you want transparency about what information is used to give you a specific feature
Not OP, but - sure, why not? It would be really nice to have that. Especially if it wasn't the meaningless kind of transparency, "we use your location data as well as past interests to provide this feature", but something concrete - "we use regular GPS/cellular/wifi location updates to determine places where you've stayed for longer and correlate that with your recent searches in Google, as well as visits to venue sites that use Google Analytics".
(Personally, I'd be fine with such concrete announcements popping up the first time you use the app after a new feature was added, and if a feature is something one might want to not use, I'd be happy with it being opt-out. Just don't surprise people with application suddenly doing new things by itself, without much prior warning.)
>Not OP, but - sure, why not?
Because if we lived in that reality, you'd end up complaining about how Google was sending you unwanted marketing emails about new features multiple times per week, and I'd be arguing that they were emails discussing new privacy updates.
Not to say that no one would want that, but as someone who does, by way of working at Google, more or less get emails similar to the technical descriptions of newly released features you want, very few of them are relevant to me.
> you'd end up complaining about how Google was sending you unwanted marketing emails about new features multiple times per week
Maybe they'd combat the perception I have of Google - that they just do UI redesign every couple of months, which more often than not lose useful features than add anything of value.
You say you get lots of those e-mails internally; I'd love to know where Google is actually adding all those features - because it definitely doesn't seem to be Inbox, or GMail, or Google Maps.