I appreciate that -- but there's a difference between "chat history enabled by default [to make our services work better]" and "you can't turn off chat history permanently." In the latter case, one could imagine it wouldn't be too hard for Google to keep messages temporarily until they've been pushed to all devices and then remove them from their servers?
A very legitimate point and question. Needless to say, it seems Google is not trying to serve the same demographic and use-cases as say... http://www.whispersystems.org/
Though I agree it would be nice if someday we could enable temporary history and client-side encryption for everything. Perhaps this could be how DuckDuckGo grows beyond just search. I would look forward to such a future.
The problem is the "all devices" bit - what happens if you add a new device? How do you define the low watermark behind which a new device gets nothing?
User expectations of privacy and magic are often in conflict, especially when sync is involved.
The most annoying thing about this option to me is that it turned off my record of the chat in addition to that of my privacy-minded conversation partner. Hey, bud, I'm fine if you don't want this conversation recorded, but if the bytes are hitting my computer, I want to decide whether they're kept. I could do it with an XMPP client, but not within gmail itself. So, for me, this gets rid of a small annoyance.
But they haven't removed the feature, just it (the option) persisting from one session to another. That doesn't strike me as a feature that would be particularly time consuming.
