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Lea Kissner's job is making sure Google products protect the privacy of users
- andridk 8y agoGood luck Lea
- woolvalley 8y agoI think it's fairly standard that larger tech companies have privacy teams. Apple has one, facebook has one, google has one. If I bothered to search for more, you probably can find a news article about that company's privacy team.
- adamnemecek 8y agoReads very propagandy esp considering the timing. The fb drama is justcooling off, what better way to promote an fb competitor than talking about this.
- benatkin 8y agoReminds me of this pg essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- AceJohnny2 8y agoNot even necessarily promoting a competitor as much as trying to reassure people who are already very nervous about Google's data gathering.
- dogecoinbase 8y agoThis will probably go about as well as Alex Stamos protecting the private data of Facebook users (and, I suppose, Yahoo users before that).
- kerng 8y agoInteresting, I noticed as well that Alex Stamos has a record of data breaches that he leaves behind. What's his next gig? Does anyone know? Will be curious to follow.
- smt88 8y agoI think you're probably being downvoted because Stamos is a bit of a hero to some people for things like this: https://boingboing.net/2017/01/23/facebook-cso-alex-stamos-is-a.html https://boingboing.net/2017/01/23/facebook-cso-alex-stamos-i...
- confounded 8y ago> The fundamental challenge... is making computing systems that people feel comfortable using. “They don’t feel safe, they don’t feel trust... Does this company have my best interests at heart at all?..” Making users feel good about surrendering data, defined as “protecting privacy”. Google’s positioning on the current furor is pretty interesting. Specifically the preferred corporate definition of ‘privacy’ to mean... > Being respectful of a user can be as simple as giving her a way to respond to a product that bothers her, whether its an ad for a chicken recipe that’s not relevant for her because she’s a vegetarian or an abusive message that she wants to report. ... Funnel-optimization (“user trust”), and enhanced personal data collection. Very Googley. #changetheworld
- nielsbot 8y agoI find the [x] button on Google's ads annoying. I click the [x] to mean "remove this ad" but that is not one of the options presented. Wouldn't it be better for users and Google if clicking [x] actually removed the ad from the page?
- AceJohnny2 8y agoIt's interesting to me that the article mentions Yonatan Zunger, since he left Google in July 2017. Before working in the Privacy team (as a Distinguished Engineer), he was Chief Architect for G+. His short stint in Privacy (8 months) before quitting Google for a startup makes me nervous. But maybe I'm reading too much and he just needed to move on from Google after 14 years. https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger https://www.linkedin.com/in/yonatanzunger/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/yonatanzunger/ https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger
- aiiane 8y agoN.B. the startup he joined is run by one of his former coworkers (Laszlo Bock), another long-time Googler.
- theDoug 8y agoYou can always ask him directly, rather than work in imagination. He is a friendly person.
- throwaway84742 8y ago> He is a friendly person Having read many of his internal rants at Google that’s not the epithet I would use. He certainly is a solid engineer though.
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- smt88 8y ago> You can always ask him directly, rather than work in imagination He has a lot of professional incentive not to disclose privacy problems at Google...
- AceJohnny2 8y agoExactly. He is approachable on G+ and Twitter, but plain game theory means I'd doubt any reassuring answer.
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- grimskin 8y agoWell, they definitely do fail at the very core. For the non-enterprise Gmail accounts, there is basically no way for account owners to reattain control over an account if it was hijacked. Google product forums full of people blocked from the recovery of their account by sudo-AI recovery form and all the support they get is repeated "use recovery form" from some kind of "google community volunteers" (or something like that). E-mail account is basically a concentration of personal data and doing so little to protect that negates everything else.
- confounded 8y agoYou make an excellent point, but I’d say the bigger problem with Gmail from a privacy stand-point is that your contacts and email contents are surrendered to an ad-surveillance company, and deliberately stored in plain-text, for any international government that fancies a look. Even if you accept that that’s a price worth paying for the service, you’re “snitching” on all your friends you exchange numbers/emails with. If you avoid Gmail, they still have all your email, just from the other end.
- TheReveller 8y agoHow do you know they are stored in plain text?
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- sametmax 8y agoSo no PRISM ? And analytics and google font don't collect my data when I'm not on a google site ? And no scanning of my gmail messages ? And I can install updates for my Android apps easily without linking my personal email to my phone ( and risking cloud contact/photo sync if I didn't do this right) ? And ads don't get personalized to my profile according to all those data ?
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- collyw 8y agoI logged into "my activity" on Google recently for the first time. I was pretty annoyed to see they have tracked all my Duck Duck Go searches made through chrome.
- fooker 8y agoWhat's so annoying about this? DDG does use Google search for a lot of things.
- reitanqild 8y agoPeople use DDG to avoid being tracked by Google. Many don’t realise they are still getting tracked as long as they use Chrome (with default settings).
- detaro 8y ago> DDG does use Google search for a lot of things. Source? They use Yahoo/Bing in the backend, but Google?
- UncleMeat 8y ago
- gaius 8y agoThis is satire right?
- 908087 8y agoMore like Google PR team planted "you can trust us" propaganda.
- jacquesm 8y agoGoogle could easily protect the privacy of their users but it would need to be a directive from the top down and they would have to actually mean it. All this is is an attempt to show themselves as the good guys relative to Facebook whereas Google is in many ways just as bad, just along different axis. At heart both Facebook and Google are advertising scum of the very worst kind that hold the world hostage with some free functionality. The problem with Google is that that functionality is of a grade that it is hard to get around them, Facebook you can do without just fine.
- z3t4 8y agoI couple of years ago I went to bed with the computer on. I woke up in the middle of the night with hard drives in full rage. My first thought was that Vista is probably doing a defrag, but I was pretty sure I had turned that feature off. So I ran perfmon to see what was going on: googleupdate.exe was scanning all drives, not only the system drive, but all of them. I purged all Google software from the computer (Google Chrome, Earth).
- jacquesm 8y agoThat would be an interesting binary to reverse engineer.
- rainbowmverse 8y agoI don't know if it's related or even on the right place in the timeline, but at some point Chrome started doing virus scans on Windows.
- cm2187 8y agoSounds like the job of protecting the health of consumers at a cigarette factory.
- tanu057 8y agoIs there someone at Facebook that does the same as Lea Kissner?
- ForHackernews 8y agoReads like a press release from Google's PR department trying to differentiate themselves from Facebook. If you care about user privacy, you don't deliberately build a panopticon.
- collyw 8y agoShe ain't doing a very good job.
- ThatHNGuy 8y agoI must say, she's doing a bad job then. Where is the opt-out for reading GMail content? Or better written: why is the scanning of emails activated by default and not as opt-in? What about the preinstalled Android Google Services, which upload data continuously on Googles' Servers?
- lathiat 8y agoGoogle stopped personalising ads based on your e-mail (e.g. 'reading your email') last year: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align/ https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
- ThatHNGuy 8y agowhat about Google Assistant / Google Now?
- pjmlp 8y agoIf they actually care, then force OEMs to provide Android security patches, instead of hand waving with Treble and still leaving the process to OEMs.
- open-source-ux 8y agoThis article is entirely about security and Google's attempts to make sure user data never leaks outside the company. While you can't have privacy without security, security by itself does not equal privacy. Not once does this article talk about how Google tracks and records user behaviour on an industrial scale. When you create a Google account, you're asked to provide your name, your gender, your date of birth, your location and your mobile phone number. Some of your most personal and private details, all of which will now be tied to your online behaviour. That data capture starts right from school, where millions of students use a cloud-based OS called ChromeOS that records everything they do. It's quite horrible that this is happening - the kids don't even get a say, it's the adults who've decided this. The G Suite for Education Privacy Notice [1] clearly states that Google collects device information, unique device identifiers, mobile network information (including phone number of the user). Also logged are IP addresses, location information, and app usage using unique application numbers. Even if this information is detached from individual accounts and aggregated, it equals a phenomenal amount of data captured by Google on millions of students in the US. And we've seen from Spotify and Netflix how even aggregated data can reveal very private and personal user behaviour. It's baffling how little scrutiny the company faces, least of all from the tech community who, more often than not, rush to it's defence. [1] https://gsuite.google.com/terms/education_privacy.html https://gsuite.google.com/terms/education_privacy.html
- throwawaymanbot 8y agoWhy does he suck at it? Simple... its not in his bosses interests and never will be.
- ksk 8y agoIsn't this just about who 'other than google' can access your data? Its sort of like creating an API and allowing only one person to use that API. The API itself is the problem, not the fact that only one person can access it. But I don't get the pressure on Google here. What do people expect them to do if their entire business model is based on data harvesting. The only way to fix this would be to have a legally mandated opt-in policy on data collection. This will let Google charge money from end users, and maybe make them feel much better about it too.