But in this case I align with their decision. I don't mind websites that have advertisements as long as they aren't intrusive, and my privacy is maintained. If those demands were met on all of the sites I frequent I would uninstall my ad-blocker

>I don't mind websites that have advertisements as long as they aren't intrusive, and my privacy is maintained

It would be a cold day in hell if google stopped tracking people.

Agreed, Google is unlikely to stop trying to track it's users; it's too profitable.

On the other hand, privacy is more about choosing what you share than not sharing things, and imo Google does an okay job at letting users control what they share; better than most companies operating at that scale. And while their privacy controls are not very fine grained, there seems to be an emphasis on making sure even non-technical users understand what is being shared and why.

FWIW, https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols to control what data they'd use and how it's used, and http://history.google.com lists the data they've collected. You can delete some or all from there.

I highly doubt it and derived data are actually deleted, it merely stops you from being able to view it.

That's a pretty serious claim. Do you have anything other than scepticism behind it?

[Disclaimer: I work at Google. Every team I've interacted with takes this very seriously]

Agreed, and I don't want them to quit using my data altogether. A lot of their best products are powered by my data (search, inbox, assistant)

In this instance it's a great step in the right direction. On the other hand Google uses the "do as I say not as I do" model when it's convenient for them to do so.

Full page ad interstitials on mobile will get you banned from AdSense, but Google also offer their own full page ad interstitials on mobile within AdSense. So long as it's them disrupting the UX its fine.

Not advocating for ads just notice the discrepancies in policy.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. I appreciate the fact that because of Google's action other sites will stop using this dark pattern. Won't stop me from blocking ads though - Google is still Google after all.

It will still be nice even if you don't block ads though - I'm tired of all this garbage with I go onto someone's machine without an ad blocker, so anything they can do to make ads bearable is a huge plus even if they keep the tracking.

Wow, do you mean that for profit companies base their decisions on profit and not on niceness ?

I'd love to have less reason to use adblock.

Ok?