Woof. Talk about a bad reputation exemplified. I can't imagine what it's like working on stuff like this at Google, earnestly just trying to make a great product people will want to use, only to have to fight decades of user-hostile product destruction that the company has done.
Take a look at Instagram's Threads. They had 100M users in a few days. Do you think people around the world really care about data being used?
On a related note, I am sad about the state of HN comments, which resembles Reddit more and more.
The blog post specifically mentions the data is private and won't be used to train models, which can't be said about the ChatGPT based tools which do this, but yet, here we have people not bothering to read and just write a cliched comment about "collecting user data".
I don't think the audience here cares as much about the data. I think people here (myself included) are mostly just deeply cynical about how Google will handle this product long-term. Why invest time into using it when it's going to just get yoinked in a year or two?
Isn't the solution to it -- use Google product if it's superior and won't fuck you if its abandoned? Instead of not using it because it may be abandoned, if those products instead get more users, it is less likely to be abandoned.
I mean, purely considering this product, isn't it also likely for some ChatGPT extension which provides similar feature to also be abandoned, or to have privacy or quality issues?
Only us big nerds on Hacker News actually pay attention to this or care.
Most people never even hear about this stuff. From what I understand, in the Google world, you release a product, you get a promotion. So, as cynical as it is, and everyone in Google knows, their product will get cancelled eventually.
Screw it, I got a promotion, I got some money. It's good for my career.