14 DAY TRIAL // A lot of fuss was made over Google's decision to unify its privacy policies earlier in the year, which would also unify the data Google holds for you. What this meant was that any Google product would be able to access data stored by other products.
This was labeled as an evil move, as is everything Google does lately, and it's undeniable that Google benefited from it, but, to date, the move has only yielded positive results for users.
Not so long ago, Google started including Gmail messages in the search results, to make it easier to discover stuff without having to go to your inbox.
Now, Google has started syncing your Google Maps searches across devices. If you search for a coffee shop on your laptop, you'll be able to find it faster on your phone as the query is going to be suggested the next time you start typing it.
The feature also makes available both search history and directions history across devices. Granted, Google Maps is Google Maps, on the desktop and mobile devices, and no privacy policy was stopping Google from sharing the data.
But Google relies on web history to store your searches and, indeed, to allow you to control how and if Google can save your previous searches.
The nice part and the part where the new privacy policy comes into play is that web history is the same for any search you make on Google.
There's just one place to manage it all, if you don't want your searches to be stored, you can simply disable web history and it will be disabled across all Google products on all devices.
Likewise, if you do want personalized search results, a unified search history means any search you make will be used to improve the results for your next ones.