Comment by eitland
6 years ago
I haven't read this carefully enough to decide exactly how bad it is, but one thing seems clear to me:
From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
I consider it more likely than not that Google will take some real beatings in the years to come. Kind of like Microsoft was fined by the US and EU, forced to advertise for competing browsers and ridiculed by Apple ads. On a case by case basis I think some of this will be well deserved, some less so, but few outside of employees and shareholders will cry.
I also guess a lot of people, including certain owners and many in management hasn't deciphered the writing on the wall yet, and in that case it whatever comes next will be surprising.
When I moved into IT almost 10-15 years ago, Google was one of the companies that I adored (in a kind of naive way, but nevertheless..). Working at that company has always been a dream of mine. They had the reputation for hiring the best of the best engineers, with great benefits and work culture.
Meanwhile I'd hate to apply for them. Everything they do in terms of tracking, etc. has become so vile and almost evil that even Microsoft has a better standing among my peers..
Would love to hear some insight from ex employees on what changed on the inside of that company, but from the outside it doesn't even seem to be the same any more. Maybe they're just worse at hiding it..
As an Xoogler, my experience is that one thing changed, and one thing didn't.
The thing which changed is that Google operates on a much, much larger scale than anything imaginable back in the late 90s when they first started. In 1999, nobody had any inkling about the cloud and SaaS revolution that was about to come. Nobody knew that everything was about to move into web apps and cloud services, which permit and require(?) tracking in ways, and on a scale, no one had thought possible. (Require with a question mark because - ad tracking aside - what little I know of frontend development includes that they need to be able to see certain information, like your browser type, in order to provide effective services.)
The thing which didn't change is the mindset of the engineers building the services. On average, Googlers tend to be much less concerned with personal privacy than an equally educated consumer, and much more interested in the features and services they can build for themselves and others which happen to require huge amounts of personal information to function. In other words, a typical Googler is more likely to think, "Oooh, having a personal digital assistant is great! If I give Google access to my email inbox, it can suggest tasks, automatically add calendar invites, and do other cool things."
The problems we're seeing now come when the engineers working on advertising products have that mindset and access to Google-scale information. They don't consider it a problem or a violation because they don't mind targeted ads, they don't mind giving up their data in exchange for services, and they don't (want to) understand why people who aren't them might object.
It's a lot more complicated than that because Google, while the largest and arguably most effective, is not the only player in this game. There are a lot of other corporate and social influences at play. This is just to answer the question about what changed at Google.
> They don't consider it a problem or a violation because they don't mind targeted ads, they don't mind giving up their data in exchange for services, and they don't (want to) understand why people who aren't them might object.
And worse, they never thought to ask. Most users never really had the opportunity to provide informed consent.
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We thought Microsoft was evil because of how they treated their partners and competitors.
We didn't consider that a greater evil would arise, and all it would take was a disregard of the sanctity of personal privacy.
To my knowledge Google still hasn't done anything comparable to the worst offenses of Microsoft in its prime. These "tests" don't really help though.
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Well, I'm an ex employee. Actually nothing has changed inside the company. "Tracking" as you put it isn't perceived as evil, it never has been, and for good reasons. The only thing that's changed is people's perception of the company and - very recent post 2016 political issues aside - that was mostly driven by a sustained campaign by an angry media industry that wanted money (see: link taxes).
Firstly, if tracking usage statistics or activity was actually evil then everyone would hate it, desperately try to stop it and have tons of stories about the horrors of it.
In fact what Google sees is:
1. Web apps are extremely popular although they all keep server side logs that reveal every button click, every message you type, every email you send, every search you do. Users routinely migrate from thick client apps that give great privacy to web apps that give none whatsoever without batting an eye.
Hacker News readers in particular should understand this. It's overrun with Silicon Valley types who build their entire livelihoods around "let me run this program for you as a service". There's nothing special about Google in this regard. The entire software industry has moved away from privacy in the last 20 years because ...
2. Users rarely if ever use privacy features when they're provided, even when they're heavily promoted. In fact, despite all the noise, hardly anyone cares. For the vast majority convenience wins over privacy every time. But not just convenience, also ...
3. Security trumps privacy. People say they like privacy, but they hate getting hacked and tend to blame the service provider if it happens. They have very little patience for explanations of the form "yes this attacker was obviously not you and yes we had enough data to know that, but we didn't use any of it ... for your own good!"
4. Users can't and won't give accurate feedback about what they value or what their actual experience of using an app is like. This means A/B testing is critical to avoid making bad business decisions. The heavy reliance on experiments and data driven decision making is one reason tech firms tend to steamroller their legacy competitors.
Google hasn't become evil over time. It's been doing A/B tests, keeping server logs and writing unused privacy features since the company first began. All that's changed is it got big and rich, so people - rightly - started to think about its power more. But the hypocrisy is strong. The world is full of companies collecting and using data for the benefit of their customers. It's really only Google and Facebook that get the vitriol.
Most people use default settings and have no idea about the software they are using at all. "everyone would hate it" assumes people know about these things, but they do not. Don't use this as a point.
ad 3), you make it sound as if it was one xor the other. This is sometimes the case to some degree (like checking urls for phishing sites), but far from always.
ad 4), it is not my problem as a user that you have trouble doing tests. If you need information for your business, then spend the money and effort to acquire it. Do not abuse your users without care. Your business case is not more important than people's privacy. And if others do this to gain an advantage over your business, don't whine, sue them.
When I was involved in user tests we had a lot of trouble due to our ethical concerns, but we did not consider dropping these concerns.
edit: I may add that I'm German. We were taught about the value of privacy in our history. "boring statistics about religion" led to the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Disregard for privacy led to the atrocious human rights violations in Eastern Germany. I cannot understand why Americans, who explained this to us Germans after WW2, apparently forgot all about the _reason_ for privacy.
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I think it's key that I never see any kind of comparative behavior. Does Amazon do this, does Facebook do this, do private platforms do this? How does this compare to tracking done by apps? Based on my experience and knowledge, Google falls on the ethical side of the spectrum among its peers.
I get ads from Microsoft now (in app in some cases, other free services). I know this is a Mac/Linux heavy forum, but I would also love to see how this tracks with Windows telemetry (to the point made about security). I am sure that every Windows 10 install has higher fidelity fingerprinting sent with telemetry.
What has changed is how easily people can be manipulated on social media and how they can be programmatically orchestrated with much less effort than before 2000-2005.
Your points are sound, but I'm puzzled by your last line:
>It's really only Google and Facebook that get the vitriol.
The way I read it, it seems as though it's unfair that they get away with doing questionable stuff when "others do worse". Why yes, if you have nefarious intentions but no power to act them out, people are going to throw less "vitriol" at you than if you do act them out.
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> 1. Web apps are extremely popular although they all keep server side logs that reveal every button click, every message you type, every email you send, every search you do. Users routinely migrate from thick client apps that give great privacy to web apps that give none whatsoever without batting an eye.
I think people here might be shocked at the amount of surveillance going on in the most basic web apps. Lots of telemetry like you describe and other ambient data is being captured all as part of the terms and agreements you probably clicked through with the website. Google is not alone in this.
So, Google (And others) are evil, but because customers don't value privacy until it's too late, it's okay to abuse them for profit?
You aren't ethical if you only act ethically when you are forced to.
You have good points.
You have to be diligent in your efforts to show that Google is actually doing wrong before accusing them.
If you don't -- you're playing into the hands of their rivals, especially "old" media companies.
> From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
To me, the explanation is simpler: people don't want to defend Google on HN because they'll get downvoted or shouted down because of it.
More and more people are blocking ads. Google’s business model is under threat. They will turn into hyenas in order to survive.
Good point. Although I feel their hyena nature has been visible for a while now and what we are now seeing is hungry hyena :-)
Oh it will get worse. Youtube will be riddled with ads every 5 minutes or so. Will take the cable tv path soon. The good news is that their greed will eventually crash themselves.
Hey, i dont mind a little ad here and there even though I give 0 fucks about any product being advertised. But the quantity is becoming hard to process without adblockers. Had they not taken the full evil mode path I’d have considered paying for youtube.
I think im better of weaning myself off almost completely. Or alternatives...
i think their business model is just fine: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/9to5google.com/2020/02/03/alp...
There's a certain irony of linking to an amp site on Google's domain as part of a larger discussion about their business ethics.
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There's been more than a few departures at Google recently. You have the profile departures of C-level execs; You've had prominent open source folks leaving projects like Angular. While some attrition is personal circumstance, you have to wonder how much is attributable to the changing identity of Google itself.
There is little point trying to correct misinformation about Google on Hacker News anymore, because people will just make up more tomorrow, and it will get hundreds of upvotes if it looks vaguely plausible.
So, people who want to dislike Google will find everything they need to confirm their biases here.
IIRC it's not that long ago that trying to criticize Google here on HN was an exercise in futility.
I won't say that the current situation is perfect but I can see why. In my view Google had earned the current criticism by hard work:
- mismanagement of services people loved to the point were Google always running 3 different more or less incompatible message services, while closing services east and west has become a meme,
- shoving other ideas down people's throats (hi identity and real name part of Google+)
- etc
>From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
Be careful, most of us on HN are part of a very small echo chamber. "What you see" is a small, non-representative portion of "techies". If it wasn't Firefox wouldn't be at sub-5% in general usage surveys and AMP would've died years ago.
> From what I see many techies are now aware and upset, and hardly anyone seems to want to defend Google anymore.
From what I've seen is it's like it's always been: people are upset for a day or two and then continue to not care, and continue to (directly or indirectly) support the evil they were upset about. It's incredibly difficult to get even geeks to support a cause if it requires more than pressing a like button or posting a comment.
Also, it's not like Google's wrongdoing are recent news. Anyone remember Google Watch (the site)? People have been warning and predicting things since very long ago, yet the geek crowd never seems to hesitate to embrace the next soon-to-be evil company and their proprietary offering.