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> Is it on purpose? I don't know, but I find it weird that they would tie some unrelated features together. Why does setting a Home address require search histo
by rifung 8y ago
> Is it on purpose? I don't know, but I find it weird that they would tie some unrelated features together. Why does setting a Home address require search history?
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.
- cjarrett 8y ago>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. I find this very appropriate to modern times and employment. 'Tis A more modern update to William Gaddis's themes in J.R.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- throwawaymaroon 8y agoAll I can think when I see someone willingly admit to working at Google is "ew what is that thing."
- FabHK 8y agoWell, in particular, if a developer "untied" these things (ie made the app more useful without signing in), and then the ratio of users who do sign in drops, then that is presumably a "bad impact" metric for the developer. Why would they do that? It seems rather obvious that there is little incentive to provide usefulness without tying it as closely as possible to data collection.
- bubblethink 8y ago>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.
- lozenge 8y agoYour opinion is incorrect - it was possible to save home, work etc without agreeing to "Search & Web History" until a few months ago. Google had to add new flows on the save buttons to get this opt in from users. Anyway, there is no logical reason to need Search & Web History to store a couple of map labels. The real impact the team was looking for was building better advertising profiles on users. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18070183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18070183