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I work at Google; opinions are my own. > I don't understand why the Chrome team is picking this hill to die on- their team (managers and developers) are all ov
by rifung 8y ago
I work at Google; opinions are my own.
> I don't understand why the Chrome team is picking this hill to die on- their team (managers and developers) are all over twitter and reddit trying to explain the privacy violations away as if the people upset about this are just not understanding what's going on.
My impression is that this is the new norm at Google. It happens with everything, internal or external. The sad reality is that most decisions will deeply upset at least some people, and those people likely don't have the context into the decisions but still complain loudly.
From my perspective what happens is that it doesn't matter whether a decision was a good or bad one, there will be people who complain (ESPECIALLY internally as Googlers can be very entitled) and so at some point you're just completely immune to this.
This is not helped by the fact that people externally often think Google is on some evil plan and speculate in wild ways which are completely wrong.
To give you an idea of how these things usually happen.. it goes something like this..
Someone finds a UX problem, and makes a plan to fix it. In this case I guess it's confusion among signed on accounts. Someone on the team probably raises some concerns, likely similar if not the exact ones being raised now, and they debate it but eventually they say well, the proportion of people who seem to care about this is only 0.1% of users (Because we are objective!).
Sadly, even though it's "only" 0.1% of users, those users are extremely negatively impacted in a way that's not really reflected by the small percentage, and 0.1% of a billion is still a considerable amount.
On the other hand, there are many other decisions which were released just fine and we would not be able to do anything if we were always afraid of negatively impacting some small proportion of users. To me this is a weakness of the attempt to have everything be objective and "measurable".
Let me state that I don't think this is good or even acceptable, but I'm definitely not smart enough to know how to solve this on a wider scale than my immediate team. However I hope this at least provides some insight into why these kinds of thing happen.
- kevingadd 8y ago'0.1% of a billion is still a considerable amount' is a very important observation, and one my colleagues at Google (before I left) rarely seemed to grasp. People think they can get away with a lot of cutting corners or lack of rigor in their engineering and design when mistakes can impact millions of people... our industry really isn't prepared for deploying products at this scale.
- quickben 8y agoUse checkboxes?
- Tracist 8y agoWhen you have a checkbox for every possible customisation option, you end up with a commercial airliner cockpit - hundreds of flashing lights and switches, that you need a comprehensive manual and years of experience to properly operate.
- screaminghawk 8y agoOr you end up with `about:config`. Doesn't solve the impossible to comprehend everything problem, but it still gives people to option.
- pilif 8y agoAnd then you end up with people complaining about bloat because the browser contains code for every possible state of all these settings.
- snaky 8y agoIt's clearly not the case when the checkbox you adding is an option to turn off some feature enabled by default. No, not the feature all other components do need so much you have to work around by adding another zillion lines of code in other places of your program to deal with the case it turned off.
- beenBoutIT 8y agoI'm convinced that most users would prefer having zero options or checkboxes.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoYes, they would prefer the software to always be perfectly tuned to them, even as they change their own... preferences.
- 0x54D5 8y agoThat 0.1% doesn't take into account hours spent using the actual app. Power users tend to spend all day in a browser whereas a typical grandma might look at it for 15 minutes and close it. Meanwhile people who have multiple Google accounts and who spend literally all day in the browser are the ones that get the short end of the stick? That makes zero sense and it's why people are starting to hate Google just like any other corporation that makes decisions by committee. There should have been a product owner on the browser team that said "No this is a browser. Not an extension of GSuite." The total indifference to people's valid use cases is what really grinds my gears. Chrome is still the only browser that ruins my UX by putting a profile picker into the title bar. A place it has no business being. I literally made a patch and compiled my own version of Chromium for a while to get rid of it. https://github.com/hparadiz/chromium-disable-profile-button-patch https://github.com/hparadiz/chromium-disable-profile-button-... I'm so tired of the arrogance. Chrome used to be a beautiful simplistic browser. Now it's just bloat. I'm done. Get off my computer. You guys had your chance and blew it.
- zbentley 8y agoIf all the power users leave, the app makers do not care. If all the typical grandmas leave, their margins are significantly impacted. You can figure out the rest. That’s not a problem or an indictment. Just an observation of how systems work st scale.
- TheKarateKid 8y agoHow do you think Firefox and Chrome overthrew IE? The power users (us) who set up and fix everyone else's computers spent years telling others why IE is terrible and installed a different browser, and it slowly but surely worked (along with strong developer and media/press support).
- snaky 8y agoThat's very short term focused observation though. Power users are influencers. When power users leave - especially being annoyed and angry - they start to actively advise against the product left and right, to the regular users and to other power users.
- zlotnydiev 8y agoWhy would they repeat the Google+ linked accounts nightmare though? I never wanted a fucking chrome account, and linking my business and private accounts is the stupidest thing you idiots could have done. I never wanted my youtube account tied to my business email.
- dang 8y ago> the stupidest thing you idiots could have done Would you please read the site guidelines and follow them when commenting here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- zlotnydiev 8y agoThose guidelines were followed. Given the chance I would say that to their faces.
- dang 8y agoBetween this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18072106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18072106 it seems clear that you don't want to use HN as intended, so I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
- autocorr 8y agoOr before that, Google Buzz! The opt-out social network which nobody asked for that automatically shared your contacts.
- RobertRoberts 8y ago>...people externally often think Google is on some evil plan... The real bad guys don't ever think they are evil. (consider Al Capone, hero of the people)
- pvorb 8y agoYes. Acting evil is what makes you evil.
- kbenson 8y agoThen again, maybe we shouldn't be throwing around words like "evil", which we all know is hyperbole (even if invited hyperbole because of Google's own prior statements). Someone talks about Google being evil, and then other people push back because it's not really "evil", and they are both right, so neither ever gives an inch. Sure, there's less impact when statements are less hyperbolic, but there's also less bikeshedding about the problem, so maybe something actually happens in the end.
- eksemplar 8y agoEvil sort of loses it’s meaning when it’s thrown a google in a world where Pennsylvania just banned books that aren’t sold through their systems from prisons, where ICE kills children in concentration camps, and that’s talking domestic issues only. I mean, if google is evil then what do you call North Korea? Super duper evil?
- bad_user 8y agoI’m very sympathetic to your situation, delivering software that’s this popular can’t be easy however in this case it’s really not that hard ... When I’m doubt, Google should err on the side of privacy. That’s the safe way to go. And in this case you can clearly see that some people will freak out if their browser syncs their history to the wrong identity or that it syncs at all.
- CaptainZapp 8y agoI think that any decision, which impacts user privacy in any way, shape or form should be especially carefully vetted. Unfortunately, and with a long list of "accidental" blunders Google is long beyond the point of deniable plausability.
- reilly3000 8y agoI'm glad you're here talking. This is hard to navigate as an employee. A company as large as Google must make it nearly impossible to anticipate every downstream effect it may have on seemingly unrelated areas of the business. As an example in this case, I am an IT decision maker for a small group of people, I'm not that active on social media as a contributor, and losing an Apps subscription because of a browser auth decision could be one of those impacts. Its likely not, but if it were it would be impossible to understand in the aggregate, and of infinitesimal impact. Be that as it may, user PII is now on the liability side of the ledger, and some businesses just haven't adapted to start operating like that is reality. Beyond financial hazard, the moral harm of a leak, the risk of telling the secrets of millions to the world (or a dangerous few) should be of grave concern. The best way to be trustworthy is to not know the secrets in the first place. Bulk data collection doesn't affect 0.1% of users, that is the only group of people that understand enough to be concerned about. It affects everybody who signed up as a user. Their secrets and their safety are now in your hands. This IS an engineering problem. I have full faith that with the right will, Google could figure out a way to offer web scale services to all manner of users and still deliver on its ambitions to deliver intelligent experiences with provable privacy at the heart of it. It probably involves data living at the edge; it probably involves renting datums from customers; it definitely involves a radical shift in business models. Engineering a solution to a privacy-at-scale repository of human knowledge cannot happen without leadership that truly sees privacy as profit, at every level of the company.
- wickedwiesel 8y agoAs you probably know, Google does have quite clear policies on the matter.[0] You and your colleagues could raise that these are there for a reason, approved by senior management, and there to help you respect your users' rights. I like the sound of "Applications that affect or change your user experience should make clear they are the reason for those changes." or "It should be clear to you when you are installing or enabling software on your computer and you should have the ability to say no." or "We believe you should be asked explicitly for your permission in a manner that is obvious and clearly states what information will be collected or transmitted." All of these sound relevant to the grievance of the OP. [0]: https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/software-principles.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/software-principles.htm...
- tumetab1 8y agoThanks for that insight, it makes sense. Big corporations usually pick some good rule of thumb (use data based decisions) and pervert it until it's a blind rule. Now I can see some understand some of Google bad decisions, sentiment and grudges aren't easy to measure. I can find some aspect of a google product annoying but not bother me much. Still, annoying thinks add up and most users, like 99,9% users don't write complains publicly so they can't never tell. It's also harder to account for network effects like the family geek stop caring about chrome and moved the whole family and friends to firefox. An estimated negative impact in 0,1% can really mean last push for 1% of users. Add several episodes like this and you can destroy a company.