Google Calendar removed events like Pride and BHM because its holiday list wasn't 'sustainable'

[Oopsie Daisy]

https://www.theverge.com/news/608858/google-calendar-missing-events-holidays

Google Calendar removed events like Pride and BHM because its holiday list wasn’t ‘sustainable’

Some Google Calendar users are angrily calling the company out after noticing that certain events like Pride month are no longer highlighted by default. Black History Month, Indigenous People Month, Jewish Heritage, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Hispanic Heritage have also been removed, according to a Google product expert.

One user called the move “shameful” and said that the platform is being used to “capitulate to fascism.” Over the last few years, there have been comments and media reports complaining about the presence of the notes, but now they’re gone.

Google confirmed it’s made changes to the default Calendar events, but with a different explanation about when and why. Here’s Google’s explanation of what’s going on, provided by spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld:

For over a decade we’ve worked with timeanddate.com to show public holidays and national observances in Google Calendar. Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries around the world. We got feedback that some other events and countries were missing — and maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable. So in mid-2024 we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.

[Attilatheblond]

1. Don't use a calendar from a company that spies on you

Ease of use and near universal 'add to calendar' options that use Google Calendar are not worth the invasion of privacy.

[JoseBalow]

6. Don't use ANY products from a company that spies on you

FTFY

[AZJonnie]

2. Happened last year, and it's actually a pretty reasonable explanation

It's not like they're now purposefully excluding them from a readily available data set, it's that they've stopped trying to manually add thousands of events and observances happening across the globe. As they learned, there's probably 10's of 1000's of dates/months/years that could be marked as 'important' by someone, somewhere, and once you start adding any of them, then people start complaining why something that's important to their relatively small group of people isn't 'on the list', and feel like 'others' are being regarding as 'more important than them'. Then there'd also be a lot of intricate work involved in the geolocation implementation of these kinds of things.

This strikes me as something that was 'nice while it lasted', but can easily see why it'd be discontinued. Not worth the cost and hassle, basically.

[stillcool]

3. So all federally observed holidays are not on calendars?

[AZJonnie]

4. They're back to using only a standardized source, which I'd imagine contains federally observed holidays, yes

As I explained, this would be because:
1) It's far cheaper, and
2) It's way less hassle insofar as they can point to another outfit and say 'everyone uses this service, and so do we ... go complain to them'.

[stillcool]

7. so some holidays are allowed...I think I know which ones.

[AZJonnie]

8. I think you are confusing the terms 'holiday' and 'observance'

And I'm not sure you've read the article in question (or all of my post) if you are coming to the conclusion that it's an illiberal conspiracy. Bottom-line, it costs Google money, and it's a political hassle, to include anything not coming from the global, standardized source for this sort of data, which is at https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/. BHM and Pride Month (and probably 10's of 1000's of other, global 'observances') are not part of the standardized set, so they won't be on your Google calendar by default. To the extent they were previously, it's because Google paid employees to put them on its own platform, extending the baseline set of data. They're just not going to anymore, because it costs more than its worth. Occam's Razor.

[stillcool]

18. I think you are correct....

knee-jerk reaction on my part. Thank you for pointing that out. The only way I seem to learn

[TnDem]

12. re: federal holidays

Which federal holidays are not on the list that Google recognizes? I don't think anything listed in the blurb above is a federal holiday

[Mountainguy]

5. Feels like we are rage-hunting

Because this happened last year, and make plenty of sense that the only holidays shown my default are federal holidays that many people get off from work.

The ability to add anything else you want lets people customize their calendars, is cheaper to maintain, and doesn't cause clutter on the default calendar view.

[LAS14]

10. "Rage-hunting." That's a useful phrase that I haven't heard before.

Did you make it up or am I just revealing how out of it I am?

[Mountainguy]

13. As far as I know

I made it up.

[LAS14]

14. Watch it go viral!!! (One can only hope.) nt

[Mountainguy]

15. It should probably be outrage-hunting

if we're going to make it a thing.

[LAS14]

17. OK!!!! nt

[LAS14]

9. They didn't change the picture on the search page for the whole of "the holidays." That was new and sad. nt

[Passages]

11. Cowards.

It's a good lesson for Democrats, don't take a dime in campaign funding from these CEO's until they change.


The company has received significant criticism involving issues such as privacy concerns, tax avoidance, censorship, search neutrality, antitrust and abuse of its monopoly position. On August 5, 2024, D.C. Circuit Court Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly over Internet search.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

[B.See]

16. never used it.