But Google has created a perverse incentive here. They give me a ton of choices, so many and so vaguely explained that I couldn't possibly understand what they really mean and I get suspicous of everything they offer me.
So what I do is disable everything without even thinking. Later when something isn't working as expected and it turns out it's because of one of those privacy settings, I start to think about whether or not I really need it.
So effectively, they give me an incentive to summarily reverse their opt-out strategy into an opt-in one. I suppose that's fine with them because most people won't do even that.
However, they should be aware of the fact that this is the second easiest thing to do after leaving everything enabled.
Over time, they may be creating a popular culture of "disable everything" just like they created a culture of ad-blocking (where "they" is the whole advertising industry in this case, not so much Google itself)
Google also has an obnoxious "if we can't keep it, you can't either" approach to user data. For example, I have location history turned off for obvious reasons and tried using the Google Maps app. I wound up having to re-enter my destination several times due to accidentally doing something that cancelled the navigation and caused it to instantly forget the destination. As another example, Google's new Allo messaging app supports end-to-end encryption but it's not on by default and activating it blocks local logging - if they can't get a copy of your chat history and use it to work out stuff about you, they won't let you have one either.
If they did support keeping the history but only using it for you, it would be even harder for them to credibly prove that they are not keeping the history for advertisement purposes ("I have disabled you keeping any location history and still you list the places I have been to? How dare you??").
I can understand your point about allo more, though of course storing the local history unencrypted also means that it's going to be accessible to interested third parties in one way or another. If they don't keep it at all, it means that it won't be.
I tried to find information about it online, but the official documentation [0] is less than helpful to say the least. I'm guessing when they say "stuff", that's a euphemism for blob, but fuck if I know, maybe they are just trying to be hip in their documentation. After all, it's also business time, in case you didn't know.
Currently downloading the Chromium source code, to see if that's more helpful, but I kind of doubt it...
However, I decided to give the benefit of the doubt and did a few file-searches, in case the files were moved at some point and the documentation was just not updated.
I think the official documentation is what's found in the help center; this page contains a lot more information about using a custom passphrase for your sync data: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1181035?hl=en (top result when searching for "chrome sync encrypted").
It does, but it's poorly documented and quite difficult to use. Use the flag --sync-url="" when launching Chrome, and I believe the server is run through chromiumsync.py.
So what I do is disable everything without even thinking. Later when something isn't working as expected and it turns out it's because of one of those privacy settings, I start to think about whether or not I really need it.
So effectively, they give me an incentive to summarily reverse their opt-out strategy into an opt-in one. I suppose that's fine with them because most people won't do even that.
However, they should be aware of the fact that this is the second easiest thing to do after leaving everything enabled.
Over time, they may be creating a popular culture of "disable everything" just like they created a culture of ad-blocking (where "they" is the whole advertising industry in this case, not so much Google itself)