It's kinda cool to be able to look back at this stuff, I almost wish this were more integrated into the rest of Google so that I could rely on this (and for better awareness).
Your comment makes me assume you are very young or you work at Google. I don't mean that snarky, but your comment is a very different response than the rest of this thread.
I'm late 20s and I don't have any affiliation with Google.
It is nice because I can go back to 10 years ago and see what I searched, essentially taking me back to that time and loads of memories come back. "Why was I searching for cheat for this game? Oh yeah because this was the summer when I was playing with person X, Y and Z while doing A, B and C".
It's just kinda.. nice.
Sure, you can acquire this info via some other means, but that would mean someone else having it.
I do not want to do that in my off time.
I know "do it locally" is often repeated here, but do you really expect a local solution to be able to get this kind of information and keep it safe, secure, and constantly working for this long? And how much time, money, and effort should you spend maintaining such a solution?
I have data in my Google account going back 10 years! That's impressive as hell!
Personally I actually do track some "hourly" data, maybe 2-3 hours in total to set it up and it's running for 2-3 years. I suppose you could add some time to run it through some encryption software and put it in Dropbox without too much of a hassle.
It would continue to be backed up on Google's servers.
1. The snooping doesn't buy much ad placement benefit. That from Roberto Bayardo, Google advertising engineer.
2. The idea is not to cram ads down people's throughts all the time, but to not skeeve people off so much that you're not wwhere they go for purchase recommendations. If that means services which are mostly privacy-aware but that this means that you're where maps or shopping or search queries happen, that's a win.
A counter might be that Google's primary aim now isn't ads but AI and training data. I still think that not annoying or alarming people is preferable. Some data are better than no data, or intentionally distorted data, or massive regulatory burden.
Short answer: because privacy-promoting would be the better business choice.
Are you saying Google should drop Maps, Gmail, Drive and all the rest because they are not valuable from a business perspective? Their business is ads after all (today at least).
Which means that when I am open to suggestion I am on other services.
By not maximising the short-term ad-impressions (or other short-term) metric, Google increases odds of being there when people are interested in its money-maker: quality suggestions for commercial goods and services.
They've lost me. I suspect they'll lose others.
>>> By not maximising the short-term ad-impressions (or other short-term) metric, Google increases odds of being there when people are interested in its money-maker: quality suggestions for commercial goods and services
Google is already 18 yo, they are clearly not playing the short term game.
And they are offering quality suggestions for commercial goods and services. People are arguing whether or not they collect too much data for said services, but I haven't heard anyone complain that their ads are obtrusive. Including yourself.
And, as people get older and their biological memory starts to suffer, this sort of external memory jogging feature will only get more and more useful, I suspect.