I only described my personal experience, I'm not making assumptions of evilness on Google's side, just pointing out that it feels a little restrictive. As someb

I only described my personal experience, I'm not making assumptions of evilness on Google's side, just pointing out that it feels a little restrictive. As somebody else pointed out in this thread, the information is still stored on Google's servers (favorite places, friends' addresses, even my home address is still on there), it's just all of a sudden no longer available when you disable history. Sure product management is hard, I never said it wasn't. Google maps is wayy ahead of the competition in the field, with or without those history things (cue the whole Apple maps fiasco). But users will always complain about features they don't like, and they won't always give credit for what works. Honestly I don't care that much, I mostly adhere to the idea that Google & co. don't give a damn about any user's individual data. To them, we're just numbers in a database, and a bunch of metrics to optimize (engagement, revenue, etc.). However, I do think that governments, once they know all this data is stored on centralized servers, are tempted to exploit it, for good reasons or not, which is why at some point I want to limit the gathering of data, when I find it is not explicitly warranted or needed. Case in point, Google Maps doesn't need a history of ALL the places I've been on a day-to-day basis to index my saved locations in it's search box.