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Google Shut Out Privacy and Security Teams from Secret China Project

364 points by jbegley 8y ago

dekhn 8y ago
After working at Google for 10 years and leaving recently, I'll say one thing: Yonatan Zunger is a highly ethical and honest person, and I am pretty sure what he is saying here is accurate, and if so, it looks like Google's leadership went out of its way to avoid the normal processes that ensure its products are secure and private (Google is very good at privacy, notwithstanding many complaints otherwise). Although I personally wanted Google to return to China (never wanted it to leave in the first place), I don't have confidence that the team doing this was ethical or honest with the rest of the company, and in a company where employees have a surprisingly large amount of power like Google, that is an unforced error.
- Fins 8y ago
  Based just and only on Zunger's response to the infamous Damore memo, and his involvement in G+, I'd say that his ethics are highly ideologically situational.
- JPKab 8y ago
  Why do the employees seem to not care about this, yet are so vigorous in protesting the scandal with the harassment payout? Just curious and wanted a former employees view.
  - joatmon-snoo 8y ago
    https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-e...
  - shard972 8y ago
    Good point, we are talking about dragonfly alot here right now but if we look at the googles themselves, they don't seem to really care compared to the sexual harassment from leadership.
- Endy 8y ago
  So you're saying one person you like is honest. And that Google's great at privacy and ethics, except in the cases when they're caught not being great? Thank you so much for your contribution to the current situation.
  - dang 8y ago
    This comment breaks the site guideline which asks: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
- makomk 8y ago
  As someone who's never worked for Google, I recognize the name Yonatan Zunger. - He's the guy who posted the bizarre and really popular conspiracy theory about the President of the United States secretly plotting a coup: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-coup-e024990891d5 https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-coup-e... - He's the guy who posted this incredibly misleading, and astoundingly viral, tweet about children which ICE seized from their parents being missing and unaccounted for - https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/999827396046995456 https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/999827396046995456 - which lead people to believe they'd been ripped from their families and vanished, when they'd actually been reunited with family members who didn't want to be found. This was particularly irresponsible since the fix for this would literally be imprisoning more kids rather than reuniting them with their family members. - He's the guy who wrote a popular piece opposing the idea of tolerance: https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376 https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1... - I'm pretty sure I caught him posting other dubious misinformation and conspiracy theories too.
  - whydoineedthis 8y ago
    Everything you just wrote is completely misleading. As an example, he's against tolerating Nazi's specifically ,not tollerence in general. Your a loser dude, go crawl back into a hole somewhere.
    - deleted 8y ago
  - pseudalopex 8y ago
    The article says that other sources corroborated Zunger's account. That seems more relevant than anything about the man. "Opposing the idea of tolerance" is an extremely uncharitable way to describe a piece dealing with the paradox of tolerance. Zunger's description of 1,475 children as "missing and unaccounted for" was prompted by an Arizona Republic article that described them as "lost".[1] He was mistaken about ICE separating those particular children from their parents, but the article wasn't entirely clear about that. There was also still the question of what would happen to the children that ICE did separate from their parents. [1] https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2018/05/22/immigration-children-separate-families-lost-kirstjen-nielson/631627002/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/201...
- londons_explore 8y ago
  What he's saying could be true but misleading. Avoiding privacy and security review for a product is quite typical pre-launch. All that's important is it gets and passes the review on or before launch day. This product hasn't yet launched, so avoiding or delaying the review makes sense. It makes even more sense here when the privacy landscape is quickly changing - something that would have been considered acceptable in the past is no longer considered fine.
- throwawaygoog1 8y ago
  After his Damore's response [0], he's lost a lot of credibility. He exaggerated the point just to make him look "more" right. An example is: "engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers." If we are forced to rank the skills by its importance, technical skill/knowledge is definitely more important than cooperation. It's exaggerated. Then, he seems to imply that he is ok with someone punching Damore in the face, though he worded it very wisely. He's great at persuasive writing but willing to bend the "reality" to win the argument. He's not an honest person. In fact, he is borderline dangerous to be in the position of power. As a side note, I want to oppose Damore's manifesto in a knowledgeable way. But I don't have enough knowledge to do that. However, I didn't see any great response. All responses from Google's leadership (including VP of Diversity) simplistically deny the whole document, usually with a single statement (as in something like "I strongly disagree with Damore"), but Damore makes like 10 different points with references. Can we respond point by point with how/why it is wrong? I expect this kind of response from VP of Diversity. That should be one of their main responsibility. I still would like to read a good response if there's one. Please share. [0] https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788 https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...
skybrian 8y ago
At this point maybe the best way for Google leadership to restore trust (at least among employees) would be to make Yonatan Zunger the CEO.
- snaky 8y ago
  Do they really need it, the trust among employers? Other companies don't, take Amazon or Oracle for example, and they are doing pretty well.
  - skybrian 8y ago
    It's not a question with a yes or no answer. Employee morale can be better or worse, and different for different teams. The whole notion is just a vague average. Arguably it's more important at Google to the extent that they attracted idealists.
  - tanilama 8y ago
    Not all employees are concerned, only some of them. I think Google employees might find that they aren't that important in the company's agenda, however loud they are.
  - mtgx 8y ago
    Does apple really need to make the quality and innovative products they've been know for? No, and they have a lot of money to survive for a long time even with completely incompetent leadership. But would giving up the company's core values that be the best thing to do for apple? Probably not. Give this a watch and then ask yourself "why" would people still go out of their way to support Google as a company and its products.
    - snaky 8y ago
      There is a difference. Apple is selling their products in the top market segment, where consumers are usually consider an image, associated with the vendor and the products, as a big part of what they pay premium for. This works in many ways, an image of ethical vendor - in so many ways, from labour conditions for its' workers to support for Greenpeace and the attitude toward selling the customer's data - and an image of themselves, using the premium products, therefore being successful people, and all that. This model needs passionate consumers who support Apple and its products. Google is not targeting the top market segment only. People buy Android smartphones and use Google services because it works well for them, and they do not want to pay the premium for an image, and basically do not care about an image associated with the vendor. This model does not need passionate consumers who support Google and its products.
jiveturkey 8y ago
> THE SECRECY SURROUNDING the work was unheard of at Google Well that's a bit hyperbolic. Of course this kind of secrecy was and has been around google ever since after IPO. Google+ had a couple floors and even a cafe that you couldn't access unless you were on the team. The X building (or buildings now?) are inaccessible to anyone not part of X, and X does not interact with the rest of Google^WAlhphabet at all. By design. I'm sure there are many other, smaller secret passages that insiders are well aware of. But otherwise, wow this is a pretty damning article. If I can have you recall the recent article about things to ask a startup as an interview candidate, one of my comments was that you should work at a startup if you don't enjoy big company politics. Well, timely enough, here is the exemplar.
- gaius 8y ago
  Google+ had a couple floors and even a cafe that you couldn't access unless you were on the team And how did that work out, isolating themselves from everyone who could tell them it was a bad idea? I wonder if all of Google’s cancelled projects are developed in echo chambers, it would explain alot.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  > THE SECRECY SURROUNDING the work was unheard of at Google Well that's a bit hyperbolic. Of course this kind of secrecy was and has been around google ever since after IPO. The article states that Google’s own internal auditing teams (legal, privacy, and security) were kept in the dark, and this was extremely unusual. Are you saying that it’s normal for Google to keep these teams out of projects? I cannot imagine a company that willfully keeps its own legal team in the dark about anything, unless it’s leaders intend to commit serious crimes.
  - casefields 8y ago
    Honestly this seems to be the MO for people with power today. The top bankers in the 2008 financial crisis, Trump with the Mueller investigation and now Googles top brass. They all stay a step away from the dirt, even though they all have some amount of culpability to their various misdeeds.
davidmr 8y ago
“However, the Dragonfly teams were instructed that they were not permitted to discuss the issue directly with Brin or other members of Google’s senior leadership team, including Pichai, co-founder Larry Page, and legal chief Kent Walker.” If that’s accurate, I cannot possibly understand why Beaumont is still employed at Google unless the senior leadership team decided intentionally to limit their exposure to the project so they could claim plausible deniability in the case it blew up like it has. Obviously I’m not on the inside of this story, but from the outside, it’s getting increasingly shameful by the week.
- mirimir 8y ago
  I worked for several years as a data analyst for plaintiffs' firms. I've attended numerous depositions, of both technical people and management. I can't go into specifics, so I'll just say that the apparent compartmentalization was extremely impressive.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  "Please don't bring your concerns to the sort of people who get called to testify under oath before Congress" seems like a very plausible decision for a business to make. Kent Walker is who they send to testify, Sundar Pichai, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin are the people Congress would like to compel to testify. Presumably the less concerns they're personally aware of, the less they have to answer for. It's plausible to me that Sergey Brin, who has been fairly peripheral to Google's business side for a long time, may have been kept in the dark since he was the one most against returning to China (and he claimed he didn't know about it at the TGIF). But there's no way the executive team in general wasn't on board with what Beaumont was doing.
  - chopin 8y ago
    I would think that "keep me in dark of doing this questionable thing" wouldn't absolve anyone in leadership.
  - DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
    > It's plausible to me that Sergey Brin, who has been fairly peripheral to Google's business side for a long time, may have been kept in the dark compartmentalizing the org structure so that it removes the manager from liability and shifts the blame to a fall-guy is a common theme in organized crime. It is also illegal.
ordinaryperson 8y ago
I don't understand why all this outrage is directed at Google but Microsoft gets a free pass. I'm in China at the moment and if I search Bing.com for "Tiananmen Square massacre" all I get are results about Xi Jinping celebrating martyrs and nothing about what happened. If you want to be outraged by Google's actions, OK, but it seems selective to me. Microsoft and Google can't be the only ones who do this, either.
- samat 8y ago
  This sounds like a whataboutism. Harder to be outraged about something which is a status quote for a long time. Difference between MS & Google is that here are talking about an active present change in the wrong direction.
- pfortuny 8y ago
  Microsoft never claimed to be an honest company.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  > Microsoft and Google can't be the only ones who do this, either. What do you propose? Posting a critical thing about Microsoft, to then talk about how that is unfair Microsoft can't be the only ones who do "this", whatever vague thing "this" may be? Which comment in this thread would you call "outrage", whom exactly would you accuse of giving Microsoft a free pass, or "being selective"? I'll assume your comment isn't "being outraged about people being outraged", that you are just making a point. I'd say nobody is or wants to be "outraged", that's just framing comments you're not directly replying to as that. The word has become quite overused for basically anything slightly critical. Let people describe their own internal emotional state as outraged, if they feel that way, but otherwise, it's really just "y u mad" where actual interaction with the argument should be. Many companies want to use the "masses", the influx of money and bug reports, not to mention statistics and personal data, ML training, the more the merrier, come one come all -- millions, billions of people are welcome to buy the product, click on the ads and all that. But if they have a negative feedback, no matter how valid, then it's suddenly unfair. Then they're all ignorant, entitled, outraged, hipocrites, the whole playbook, and need to be routed around. But you cannot have it both ways, if you have a channel to peddle product through, blowback can and will travel through that as well. You want to be in the marketplace, be in the marketplace. Just calling inconvenient criticism outrage, to be done with them, makes them accumulate interest, it doesn't actually turn it into "mere outrage over nothing because people want to be outraged", which could be ignored. But do that enough, and you'll face outrage you fully earned, on top of the still valid criticism. Another recurring pattern, and that's regardless of company as long as it's big enough, is that so much in the form of speaking for the average user or person, or how something makes business sense. A lot of personal attacks on critics, in an indirect fashion they can't even defend themselves against properly, often by people who will not stand behind their own opinion as their own opinion.
vezycash 8y ago
Wouldn't it better for Google and the world if they instead worked on new technologies/protocols to bypass censorships? Or maybe the firewall is airtight.
ipsa 8y ago
My personal conclusions: - Google can't be trusted on anything to do with building responsible AI (they violated ACM Code of Ethics and their own AI at Google Principles). - Google has no authority to talk about ethical use of technology and human resources. The main manager responsible for this kerfuffle brands himself as promoting diversity and responsible use of technology. - Google can't lay claim to being a transparent company, both to its users and outsiders, and to its employees and insiders. Even Larry Page was blissfully unaware of this controversial project that directly goes against his motivations for leaving China in the first place. - When you go work for Google, you'll have colleagues and managers that won't speak up if they get to work on another unethical project. That will eschew core values for making their stock options grow. That want to build their own empire and positive performance reviews at all cost (even if this costs Google dearly in PR and culture damage). - Google can't be trusted to be self-regulating, putting the user first, and to clean up any damage done from a top-level ethics violation. There is no objective ethics commission or employee Ombudsman to keep the bulls in check. - There are more than a few rotten apples in the upper echelons of Google. Perhaps such $$-eyes behavior is rewarded by growing the ranks and internal opposition is seen as a necessary evil to be managed.
- Endy 8y ago
  - Regardless of all this, most people will still use Google Search & GMail for critical information and gain most of their entertainment and research from YouTube. They will also click on Google ads and watch videos on YouTube without ad-blockers. They'll use Google Fi or Nexus phones, will use Android OS on other hardware, and Chromebooks. In other words, all of those things you comment on are true but ultimately meaningless. Google is not going to change because the users do not care. They care only about their own lives - when Google harms them, they may make a token effort to move away from the platform, but they'll come back.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Quoting from a book on information risk[0] I'm reading: "... we have to remember how this form of loss [reputation damage] typically materializes for a commercial company - reduced market share, reduced stock price (if publicly traded), increased cost of capital, and increased cost of acquiring and retaining employees." Iff we want Google to change, we should figure out a way to translate moral outrage into threatening some of the things mentioned in the quote. -- [0] -- Measuring and Managing Information Risk: A FAIR Approach 1st Edition, p. 138.
jamisteven 8y ago
The intercept is typically pretty good reporting but is it not pretty obvious that this is a counter intel opp for data gathering? It allows them a massive digital footprint into the region under the guise of "search". The more american tech companies there the higher the potential for spy activities, this is geopolitics 101 and the fact that google shut out its Privacy and Sec. Teams fruther supports this narrative.
sn41 8y ago
I can't help but wonder - dragonfly, Maven etc. points to some very sinister, amoral leadership. Has this always been there, or only under the Pichai regime? I remember, for example, that Eric Schmidt was very keen on an absolutist data gathering regime. Perhaps this shift to the dark side has been very long in the making, its egregious examples coming out only now.
- whydoineedthis 8y ago
  Seems to be recent. After all, they did pull out of China to begin with...but that 2010, time flies.
  - Fins 8y ago
    Google Buzz (hmm, wasn't that "wonderfuil" person Zunger involved with that one, too?) is just around that timeframe, and the rollout of that was pretty bad.
DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
Step-1: stop idealizing FAANG employees and their contributions to engineering - they are an insult to our profession. Those we are calling elite (and getting paid like it) should know better. Writing open letters to Google isn't going to change anything. If you still work for Google in 2018 you are a major part of the problem. The only justification for working at FAANG and not protesting against this is if you are there to actively sabotage the company from the inside.
- jaw2 8y ago
  Where do you suggest they work instead?
  - DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
    sure they're amply qualified to find a more satisfying job anywhere else (provided they break their own corporate mental conditioning). those few who can't see it, can always look for a job in a high-street bookstore. The perks include: free access to all books in the ethics section.
  - ionised 8y ago
    Literally anywhere else.
  - ikeyany 8y ago
    Mozilla? Renewable energy? Medical tech?
- ex-aws-now-goog 8y ago
  By all means, stop idealizing. Learn what you can but please don't idealize anyone or any company. But I hardly think that I or most of my colleagues are an insult to any discipline. Apple, Amazon and Google each has tens of thousands of engineers (and many more folks if you consider other roles). In most companies, there will be parts of the company engaging in behaviour you disagree with. Expecting people to resign from company X because some people at company X do bad things is a very black and white way to think about the world.
endymi0n 8y ago
This is actually a pretty solid business decision, as they are not going to need either security nor privacy on that project.
- whydoineedthis 8y ago
  I see what you did there. ::Slowly claps::
kmlx 8y ago
I for one think Google in China is long overdue US, EU, Asian and African corporations, universities, institutions, NGOs, (you name it) are happily working and making money in China. This leaves Google without potential income they should have got if they hadn't left China in the first place. As for the "moral high ground" argument: As long as the US hosts concentration camps for kids, supplies bombs to kill brown people, hunts down trans reporters, and imprisons people like Manning the moral high ground against this is shaky. To put it differently: if you think China's bad, just check out the US. I might be wrong, but targeting Google (and the rest of the FAANG) began when US Republicans "found out" Silicon Valley is actually Dem. As proof: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-google-leaderships-dismayed-reaction-to-trump-election/ https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...
- jaw2 8y ago
  What qualifies in your opinion as moral high ground?
  - kmlx 8y ago
    https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-e...
- titzer 8y ago
  > As for the "moral high ground" argument: As long as the US hosts concentration camps for kids.... Please stop this Red Team/Blue Team tendency. It's both binary thinking and a Red Herring. It has zero to do with the subject at hand, which is whether a search engine should collaborate with a government to censor, suppress, find, and punish dissidents or even the mildly curious. As for moral highground, it's worth pointing out that more than a dozen human rights organizations have come out against this project.
- whydoineedthis 8y ago
  Breitbart as proof for anything? Lol, you are funny dude.
intended 8y ago
Time to invest. Sin stocks always go high.
tatersolid 8y ago
I would not participate in the project, but isn’t it fairly simple to build a censored search engine while punting all moral responsibility for that censorship to the Chinese Government? Simply build your index by crawling from machines inside the great firewall. Whatever gets indexed gets indexed; that’s up to the Great Firewall overlords. Hiding search metadata from the CCP is another thing entirely I suppose, but do-able if allowed by the regime (simply don’t log anything).
darepublic 8y ago
In order to boycott Google I guess I need to switch from Gmail and use duck duck go? Doesn't seem too daunting
AngryAnt 8y ago
Is an important part of product design not to get into the mindset of the customer? Seems that they did that just splendidly here. This "don't be evil" thing keeps nagging though. They might want to be a bit more public about its deprecation: https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

364 points by jbegley 8y ago

After working at Google for 10 years and leaving recently, I'll say one thing: Yonatan Zunger is a highly ethical and honest person, and I am pretty sure what he is saying here is accurate, and if so, it looks like Google's leadership went out of its way to avoid the normal processes that ensure its products are secure and private (Google is very good at privacy, notwithstanding many complaints otherwise). Although I personally wanted Google to return to China (never wanted it to leave in the first place), I don't have confidence that the team doing this was ethical or honest with the rest of the company, and in a company where employees have a surprisingly large amount of power like Google, that is an unforced error.

Fins 8y ago
Based just and only on Zunger's response to the infamous Damore memo, and his involvement in G+, I'd say that his ethics are highly ideologically situational.
JPKab 8y ago
Why do the employees seem to not care about this, yet are so vigorous in protesting the scandal with the harassment payout? Just curious and wanted a former employees view.
- joatmon-snoo 8y ago
  https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-e...
- shard972 8y ago
  Good point, we are talking about dragonfly alot here right now but if we look at the googles themselves, they don't seem to really care compared to the sexual harassment from leadership.
Endy 8y ago
So you're saying one person you like is honest. And that Google's great at privacy and ethics, except in the cases when they're caught not being great? Thank you so much for your contribution to the current situation.
- dang 8y ago
  This comment breaks the site guideline which asks: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
makomk 8y ago
As someone who's never worked for Google, I recognize the name Yonatan Zunger. - He's the guy who posted the bizarre and really popular conspiracy theory about the President of the United States secretly plotting a coup: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-coup-e024990891d5 https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-coup-e... - He's the guy who posted this incredibly misleading, and astoundingly viral, tweet about children which ICE seized from their parents being missing and unaccounted for - https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/999827396046995456 https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/999827396046995456 - which lead people to believe they'd been ripped from their families and vanished, when they'd actually been reunited with family members who didn't want to be found. This was particularly irresponsible since the fix for this would literally be imprisoning more kids rather than reuniting them with their family members. - He's the guy who wrote a popular piece opposing the idea of tolerance: https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376 https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1... - I'm pretty sure I caught him posting other dubious misinformation and conspiracy theories too.
- whydoineedthis 8y ago
  Everything you just wrote is completely misleading. As an example, he's against tolerating Nazi's specifically ,not tollerence in general. Your a loser dude, go crawl back into a hole somewhere.
  - deleted 8y ago
- pseudalopex 8y ago
  The article says that other sources corroborated Zunger's account. That seems more relevant than anything about the man. "Opposing the idea of tolerance" is an extremely uncharitable way to describe a piece dealing with the paradox of tolerance. Zunger's description of 1,475 children as "missing and unaccounted for" was prompted by an Arizona Republic article that described them as "lost".[1] He was mistaken about ICE separating those particular children from their parents, but the article wasn't entirely clear about that. There was also still the question of what would happen to the children that ICE did separate from their parents. [1] https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2018/05/22/immigration-children-separate-families-lost-kirstjen-nielson/631627002/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/201...
londons_explore 8y ago
What he's saying could be true but misleading. Avoiding privacy and security review for a product is quite typical pre-launch. All that's important is it gets and passes the review on or before launch day. This product hasn't yet launched, so avoiding or delaying the review makes sense. It makes even more sense here when the privacy landscape is quickly changing - something that would have been considered acceptable in the past is no longer considered fine.
throwawaygoog1 8y ago
After his Damore's response [0], he's lost a lot of credibility. He exaggerated the point just to make him look "more" right. An example is: "engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers." If we are forced to rank the skills by its importance, technical skill/knowledge is definitely more important than cooperation. It's exaggerated. Then, he seems to imply that he is ok with someone punching Damore in the face, though he worded it very wisely. He's great at persuasive writing but willing to bend the "reality" to win the argument. He's not an honest person. In fact, he is borderline dangerous to be in the position of power. As a side note, I want to oppose Damore's manifesto in a knowledgeable way. But I don't have enough knowledge to do that. However, I didn't see any great response. All responses from Google's leadership (including VP of Diversity) simplistically deny the whole document, usually with a single statement (as in something like "I strongly disagree with Damore"), but Damore makes like 10 different points with references. Can we respond point by point with how/why it is wrong? I expect this kind of response from VP of Diversity. That should be one of their main responsibility. I still would like to read a good response if there's one. Please share. [0] https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788 https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-man...

skybrian 8y ago

At this point maybe the best way for Google leadership to restore trust (at least among employees) would be to make Yonatan Zunger the CEO.

snaky 8y ago
Do they really need it, the trust among employers? Other companies don't, take Amazon or Oracle for example, and they are doing pretty well.
- skybrian 8y ago
  It's not a question with a yes or no answer. Employee morale can be better or worse, and different for different teams. The whole notion is just a vague average. Arguably it's more important at Google to the extent that they attracted idealists.
- tanilama 8y ago
  Not all employees are concerned, only some of them. I think Google employees might find that they aren't that important in the company's agenda, however loud they are.
- mtgx 8y ago
  Does apple really need to make the quality and innovative products they've been know for? No, and they have a lot of money to survive for a long time even with completely incompetent leadership. But would giving up the company's core values that be the best thing to do for apple? Probably not. Give this a watch and then ask yourself "why" would people still go out of their way to support Google as a company and its products.
  - snaky 8y ago
    There is a difference. Apple is selling their products in the top market segment, where consumers are usually consider an image, associated with the vendor and the products, as a big part of what they pay premium for. This works in many ways, an image of ethical vendor - in so many ways, from labour conditions for its' workers to support for Greenpeace and the attitude toward selling the customer's data - and an image of themselves, using the premium products, therefore being successful people, and all that. This model needs passionate consumers who support Apple and its products. Google is not targeting the top market segment only. People buy Android smartphones and use Google services because it works well for them, and they do not want to pay the premium for an image, and basically do not care about an image associated with the vendor. This model does not need passionate consumers who support Google and its products.

jiveturkey 8y ago

> THE SECRECY SURROUNDING the work was unheard of at Google Well that's a bit hyperbolic. Of course this kind of secrecy was and has been around google ever since after IPO. Google+ had a couple floors and even a cafe that you couldn't access unless you were on the team. The X building (or buildings now?) are inaccessible to anyone not part of X, and X does not interact with the rest of Google^WAlhphabet at all. By design. I'm sure there are many other, smaller secret passages that insiders are well aware of. But otherwise, wow this is a pretty damning article. If I can have you recall the recent article about things to ask a startup as an interview candidate, one of my comments was that you should work at a startup if you don't enjoy big company politics. Well, timely enough, here is the exemplar.

gaius 8y ago
Google+ had a couple floors and even a cafe that you couldn't access unless you were on the team And how did that work out, isolating themselves from everyone who could tell them it was a bad idea? I wonder if all of Google’s cancelled projects are developed in echo chambers, it would explain alot.
reaperducer 8y ago
> THE SECRECY SURROUNDING the work was unheard of at Google Well that's a bit hyperbolic. Of course this kind of secrecy was and has been around google ever since after IPO. The article states that Google’s own internal auditing teams (legal, privacy, and security) were kept in the dark, and this was extremely unusual. Are you saying that it’s normal for Google to keep these teams out of projects? I cannot imagine a company that willfully keeps its own legal team in the dark about anything, unless it’s leaders intend to commit serious crimes.
- casefields 8y ago
  Honestly this seems to be the MO for people with power today. The top bankers in the 2008 financial crisis, Trump with the Mueller investigation and now Googles top brass. They all stay a step away from the dirt, even though they all have some amount of culpability to their various misdeeds.

davidmr 8y ago

“However, the Dragonfly teams were instructed that they were not permitted to discuss the issue directly with Brin or other members of Google’s senior leadership team, including Pichai, co-founder Larry Page, and legal chief Kent Walker.” If that’s accurate, I cannot possibly understand why Beaumont is still employed at Google unless the senior leadership team decided intentionally to limit their exposure to the project so they could claim plausible deniability in the case it blew up like it has. Obviously I’m not on the inside of this story, but from the outside, it’s getting increasingly shameful by the week.

mirimir 8y ago
I worked for several years as a data analyst for plaintiffs' firms. I've attended numerous depositions, of both technical people and management. I can't go into specifics, so I'll just say that the apparent compartmentalization was extremely impressive.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
"Please don't bring your concerns to the sort of people who get called to testify under oath before Congress" seems like a very plausible decision for a business to make. Kent Walker is who they send to testify, Sundar Pichai, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin are the people Congress would like to compel to testify. Presumably the less concerns they're personally aware of, the less they have to answer for. It's plausible to me that Sergey Brin, who has been fairly peripheral to Google's business side for a long time, may have been kept in the dark since he was the one most against returning to China (and he claimed he didn't know about it at the TGIF). But there's no way the executive team in general wasn't on board with what Beaumont was doing.
- chopin 8y ago
  I would think that "keep me in dark of doing this questionable thing" wouldn't absolve anyone in leadership.
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  > It's plausible to me that Sergey Brin, who has been fairly peripheral to Google's business side for a long time, may have been kept in the dark compartmentalizing the org structure so that it removes the manager from liability and shifts the blame to a fall-guy is a common theme in organized crime. It is also illegal.

ordinaryperson 8y ago

I don't understand why all this outrage is directed at Google but Microsoft gets a free pass. I'm in China at the moment and if I search Bing.com for "Tiananmen Square massacre" all I get are results about Xi Jinping celebrating martyrs and nothing about what happened. If you want to be outraged by Google's actions, OK, but it seems selective to me. Microsoft and Google can't be the only ones who do this, either.

samat 8y ago
This sounds like a whataboutism. Harder to be outraged about something which is a status quote for a long time. Difference between MS & Google is that here are talking about an active present change in the wrong direction.
pfortuny 8y ago
Microsoft never claimed to be an honest company.
PavlovsCat 8y ago
> Microsoft and Google can't be the only ones who do this, either. What do you propose? Posting a critical thing about Microsoft, to then talk about how that is unfair Microsoft can't be the only ones who do "this", whatever vague thing "this" may be? Which comment in this thread would you call "outrage", whom exactly would you accuse of giving Microsoft a free pass, or "being selective"? I'll assume your comment isn't "being outraged about people being outraged", that you are just making a point. I'd say nobody is or wants to be "outraged", that's just framing comments you're not directly replying to as that. The word has become quite overused for basically anything slightly critical. Let people describe their own internal emotional state as outraged, if they feel that way, but otherwise, it's really just "y u mad" where actual interaction with the argument should be. Many companies want to use the "masses", the influx of money and bug reports, not to mention statistics and personal data, ML training, the more the merrier, come one come all -- millions, billions of people are welcome to buy the product, click on the ads and all that. But if they have a negative feedback, no matter how valid, then it's suddenly unfair. Then they're all ignorant, entitled, outraged, hipocrites, the whole playbook, and need to be routed around. But you cannot have it both ways, if you have a channel to peddle product through, blowback can and will travel through that as well. You want to be in the marketplace, be in the marketplace. Just calling inconvenient criticism outrage, to be done with them, makes them accumulate interest, it doesn't actually turn it into "mere outrage over nothing because people want to be outraged", which could be ignored. But do that enough, and you'll face outrage you fully earned, on top of the still valid criticism. Another recurring pattern, and that's regardless of company as long as it's big enough, is that so much in the form of speaking for the average user or person, or how something makes business sense. A lot of personal attacks on critics, in an indirect fashion they can't even defend themselves against properly, often by people who will not stand behind their own opinion as their own opinion.

vezycash 8y ago

Wouldn't it better for Google and the world if they instead worked on new technologies/protocols to bypass censorships? Or maybe the firewall is airtight.

ipsa 8y ago

My personal conclusions: - Google can't be trusted on anything to do with building responsible AI (they violated ACM Code of Ethics and their own AI at Google Principles). - Google has no authority to talk about ethical use of technology and human resources. The main manager responsible for this kerfuffle brands himself as promoting diversity and responsible use of technology. - Google can't lay claim to being a transparent company, both to its users and outsiders, and to its employees and insiders. Even Larry Page was blissfully unaware of this controversial project that directly goes against his motivations for leaving China in the first place. - When you go work for Google, you'll have colleagues and managers that won't speak up if they get to work on another unethical project. That will eschew core values for making their stock options grow. That want to build their own empire and positive performance reviews at all cost (even if this costs Google dearly in PR and culture damage). - Google can't be trusted to be self-regulating, putting the user first, and to clean up any damage done from a top-level ethics violation. There is no objective ethics commission or employee Ombudsman to keep the bulls in check. - There are more than a few rotten apples in the upper echelons of Google. Perhaps such $$-eyes behavior is rewarded by growing the ranks and internal opposition is seen as a necessary evil to be managed.

Endy 8y ago
- Regardless of all this, most people will still use Google Search & GMail for critical information and gain most of their entertainment and research from YouTube. They will also click on Google ads and watch videos on YouTube without ad-blockers. They'll use Google Fi or Nexus phones, will use Android OS on other hardware, and Chromebooks. In other words, all of those things you comment on are true but ultimately meaningless. Google is not going to change because the users do not care. They care only about their own lives - when Google harms them, they may make a token effort to move away from the platform, but they'll come back.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Quoting from a book on information risk[0] I'm reading: "... we have to remember how this form of loss [reputation damage] typically materializes for a commercial company - reduced market share, reduced stock price (if publicly traded), increased cost of capital, and increased cost of acquiring and retaining employees." Iff we want Google to change, we should figure out a way to translate moral outrage into threatening some of the things mentioned in the quote. -- [0] -- Measuring and Managing Information Risk: A FAIR Approach 1st Edition, p. 138.

jamisteven 8y ago

The intercept is typically pretty good reporting but is it not pretty obvious that this is a counter intel opp for data gathering? It allows them a massive digital footprint into the region under the guise of "search". The more american tech companies there the higher the potential for spy activities, this is geopolitics 101 and the fact that google shut out its Privacy and Sec. Teams fruther supports this narrative.

sn41 8y ago

I can't help but wonder - dragonfly, Maven etc. points to some very sinister, amoral leadership. Has this always been there, or only under the Pichai regime? I remember, for example, that Eric Schmidt was very keen on an absolutist data gathering regime. Perhaps this shift to the dark side has been very long in the making, its egregious examples coming out only now.

whydoineedthis 8y ago
Seems to be recent. After all, they did pull out of China to begin with...but that 2010, time flies.
- Fins 8y ago
  Google Buzz (hmm, wasn't that "wonderfuil" person Zunger involved with that one, too?) is just around that timeframe, and the rollout of that was pretty bad.

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago

Step-1: stop idealizing FAANG employees and their contributions to engineering - they are an insult to our profession. Those we are calling elite (and getting paid like it) should know better. Writing open letters to Google isn't going to change anything. If you still work for Google in 2018 you are a major part of the problem. The only justification for working at FAANG and not protesting against this is if you are there to actively sabotage the company from the inside.

jaw2 8y ago
Where do you suggest they work instead?
- DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
  sure they're amply qualified to find a more satisfying job anywhere else (provided they break their own corporate mental conditioning). those few who can't see it, can always look for a job in a high-street bookstore. The perks include: free access to all books in the ethics section.
- ionised 8y ago
  Literally anywhere else.
- ikeyany 8y ago
  Mozilla? Renewable energy? Medical tech?
ex-aws-now-goog 8y ago
By all means, stop idealizing. Learn what you can but please don't idealize anyone or any company. But I hardly think that I or most of my colleagues are an insult to any discipline. Apple, Amazon and Google each has tens of thousands of engineers (and many more folks if you consider other roles). In most companies, there will be parts of the company engaging in behaviour you disagree with. Expecting people to resign from company X because some people at company X do bad things is a very black and white way to think about the world.

endymi0n 8y ago

This is actually a pretty solid business decision, as they are not going to need either security nor privacy on that project.

whydoineedthis 8y ago
I see what you did there. ::Slowly claps::

kmlx 8y ago

I for one think Google in China is long overdue US, EU, Asian and African corporations, universities, institutions, NGOs, (you name it) are happily working and making money in China. This leaves Google without potential income they should have got if they hadn't left China in the first place. As for the "moral high ground" argument: As long as the US hosts concentration camps for kids, supplies bombs to kill brown people, hunts down trans reporters, and imprisons people like Manning the moral high ground against this is shaky. To put it differently: if you think China's bad, just check out the US. I might be wrong, but targeting Google (and the rest of the FAANG) began when US Republicans "found out" Silicon Valley is actually Dem. As proof: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-google-leaderships-dismayed-reaction-to-trump-election/ https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...

jaw2 8y ago
What qualifies in your opinion as moral high ground?
- kmlx 8y ago
  https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-employees-google-must-drop-dragonfly-4c8a30c5e5eb https://medium.com/@googlersagainstdragonfly/we-are-google-e...
titzer 8y ago
> As for the "moral high ground" argument: As long as the US hosts concentration camps for kids.... Please stop this Red Team/Blue Team tendency. It's both binary thinking and a Red Herring. It has zero to do with the subject at hand, which is whether a search engine should collaborate with a government to censor, suppress, find, and punish dissidents or even the mildly curious. As for moral highground, it's worth pointing out that more than a dozen human rights organizations have come out against this project.
whydoineedthis 8y ago
Breitbart as proof for anything? Lol, you are funny dude.

intended 8y ago

Time to invest. Sin stocks always go high.

tatersolid 8y ago

I would not participate in the project, but isn’t it fairly simple to build a censored search engine while punting all moral responsibility for that censorship to the Chinese Government? Simply build your index by crawling from machines inside the great firewall. Whatever gets indexed gets indexed; that’s up to the Great Firewall overlords. Hiding search metadata from the CCP is another thing entirely I suppose, but do-able if allowed by the regime (simply don’t log anything).

darepublic 8y ago

In order to boycott Google I guess I need to switch from Gmail and use duck duck go? Doesn't seem too daunting

AngryAnt 8y ago

Is an important part of product design not to get into the mindset of the customer? Seems that they did that just splendidly here. This "don't be evil" thing keeps nagging though. They might want to be a bit more public about its deprecation: https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393 https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...