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Search is on for Google workers leaking secrets
- deogeo 8y agoNothing to hide, nothing to fear~
- SkeptinenSpede5 8y agoYes.. don't be evil let only Google sensure and ban users ... Hahaha
- TimTheTinker 8y agoHahaha! Indeed. Perhaps they’ll take user privacy more seriously after this.
- xiphias2 8y ago"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." - Eric Schmidt
- Fuckyourself 8y agoI hope to god that phrase comes back to bite you in the ass.
- deogeo 8y agoI sympathize with the sentiment, but I was being sarcastic.
- aokiji 8y agoThe leakers at Google should be executed and their families should be forced to pay the bullet.
- vrazj 8y agoWhat exactly is odd or wrong about a company wanting to stop leaks? Is Google the next target of the press, once they are done trashing Facebook?
- ForHackernews 8y agoGoogle and Facebook are the two biggest violators of user privacy on the internet. You call it "trashing", I call it long-overdue public scrutiny.
- Applejinx 8y agoIt's really not about simply violating privacy. It's about the actions one takes after one violates all the privacy ever. Big data is power. Facebook and Google know that. Everyone else had better learn. These reactions telegraph that Google and Facebook have been eagerly making use of the power they've gained, and it's obviously backfired… or, the first things they've tried to do have been totally evil and reprehensible, and successful.
- ForHackernews 8y agoPart of the goal of the GDPR is to turn massive stores of user data from a corporate asset into a legal liability. If we can get internet companies to treat user data the way brick-and-mortar companies treat hazardous chemicals--occasionally necessary for some industrial process, but best avoided where possible, and always treated with respect--then that would be a big win for society IMO.
- badrabbit 8y agoIt should be if the press isn't afraid to do their job because of Google's far reaching influence.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoYou think the press is trashing Facebook? That makes no sense. Facebook is committing trash behaviors and the press is just reporting on them.
- projectramo 8y agoI have never worked at Google but I have worked at several large firms. They are without exception constituted by dozens or perhaps hundreds of tiny fiefdoms. Within each fiefdom the senior most manager has their own policies, culture and values. If this is true of Google — which if you think about, has to be the case — then I would read this as one particular manager got very worked up about leakers.
- new299 8y agoThe article doesn’t really read like that to me. There’s a global “stopleaks” email address to report leakers to, and leakers have been fired when reported.
- darren_ 8y ago> If this is true of Google — which if you think about, has to be the case I don't necessarily disagree with this re: google but you're not making the strongest case here
- jimnotgym 8y agoAn interesting shift. 'Don't be evil' becomes 'Don't let people know we are evil'
- johan_larson 8y agoI think this is just Google growing up. When you're a smallish company with little influence, what you say and who you talk to just don't matter. But when you're a big company, with big responsibilities and a big footprint, everything you say and do are closely watched, and therefore matter. You just can't run a multi-billion dollar enterprise like a free&easy five-person startup.
- bsiemon 8y agoIsn't that a false dichotomy? Large organizations can have organizing principles other than profit at all costs. The groups of people that comprise these organizations just choose not to.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- darren_ 8y agoComment deleted as the URL linked changed after I wrote it.
- arkades 8y agoWould you like to offer up your version of events? An anonymous person saying "no, that's not accurate, in some ways, you don't need to know which," doesn't ... well, I don't know to extrapolate any meaning from that at all.
- darren_ 8y agoDeleted, see parent.
- garethrees 8y agoThe description must be sufficiently similar to something that did happen, though, for you to be confident that you recognise the incident.
- needaccount 8y agoCan you share more about what really happened?
- everyone 8y agoNo, that would be leaking lol!
- 8y ago
- mabbo 8y agoThere are two kinds of leaks. The first kind is leaks for glory, profit, etc, ie: we're about to release this hot new product and I'm sneakily letting TechNews.whatever know about it ahead of time. Maybe you get paid for this leak. Maybe you just do it because you're excited or want to feel important. It's rule-breaking behavior for personal gain, monetary or otherwise. The second kind is the moral, ethical leak. Whistle-blowing. My company/government is doing something that I find horrendous, that violates my ethics, that I think is or should be illegal, and I want the world to know about it. I also don't want to lose my job because despite not liking what my organization is doing, I also like my life as it is. This is rule-breaking behavior not for personal gain, but for a sense of morality. We should not let ourselves believe these are the same thing. The first is a selfish act, while the second is (to some extent) a selfless one. Those who yell "F--- you leakers" are trying to convince you its the same thing and use the negative emotions directed at the first to convince people not to do the second.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoThe second one is also personal gain, as you yourself explained. It's a way to protest the organization or harm coworkers without making a personal sacrifice. Morality is self interest as much as money is.
- egeozcan 8y agoBut it's for the society's best interest that such people keep their jobs, don't you agree?
- manquer 8y agoWhen you are leaking something illegal there are laws usually in place to protect your job or compensate you if it can't be protected. However there is no way to protect you when leak what you think is unethical but is not illegal (yet). The recommended course action in that case participate in legal actions which help make such unethical actions illegal i.e. change the law, until then you are essentially committing a crime. You may consider committing a such crime lesser cost morally than actually partaking in the unethical activity, this by design comes at a cost. Morality to reflect in laws comes at a great cost. Slavery was not made illegal just because it the right thing, it was made illegal because people fought and died for it.
- drewg123 8y agoOne of the problems with leaks is that the natural management reaction to leaks is to decrease the free flow of information within the company. When I joined Google in early 2013 it seemed like there was a lot more information and technical details shared at internal forums like TGIF than there was by the time I left in mid 2015. In fact, we used to joke that the internal go/stopleaks web page where people reported leaks was the new way to find out what was happening in the company, since TGIF had become basically a press release..
- triplesec 8y agoOf course, this is classic authoritarian behaviour manipulation by the management. Stop people doing the just and correct thing by punishing everybody, so that the rank and file start to believe thatthe question of leaking should be seen in terms of their own working conditions. And they start to watch other people and turn against whistleblowing because it makes their own lives less interesting at work. This makes for more peer-to-peer surveillance in the interests of the authorities. The workers themselves start to align themselves hegemonically with the authorities, quite possibly against their and their society's interests.
- gcc1993 8y agoMy view on it it's Google has a vastly more open culture than any other place I've worked and some leaks contribute to making the culture more open but on the other hand there are people leaking pretty much everything and it's hard to have candid internal discussions when literally everything is being leaked. It's not like they all dislike leaks because management told them to, it actually has practical affect on internal discourse that are bad for the culture
- stdplaceholder 8y agoBy 2013 TGIF was a virtually information-free internal propaganda session compared to what it had been.
- drewg123 8y ago
- cpcallen 8y agoMy impression is that it is not so much that management wants to stop leaks (though I'm sure they do) as it is that the vast majority of rank-and-file employees want the leaking to stop because past leaks have so very badly damaged the previously-open culture of communication within the company. The NYT should not be my main source of information about what is going on in my workplace.
- mannykannot 8y ago>The NYT should not be my main source of information about what is going on in my workplace. ...and I assume your position is, by implication, that no-one outside of Google has any business knowing what is going on inside it by any means, even as it sucks up unprecedented levels of information about their own lives.
- ryandvm 8y agoThat's an excellent point. There's a delicious irony about the world's nosiest company complaining about its privacy being violated.
- brown9-2 8y agoSounds like you should be upset that management was keeping projects like Dragonfly or the ambitions of the DOD contract a secret internally then.
- Lkjhmnbv 8y agoYeah I seriously dont understand the point being made. Op likes the culture because it's so open and transparent, but doesn't like that the transparency is shattered by having the nyt report on things internally? Does op just want to be kept blinded by ignorance? I'm seriously confused by the point, and think I'm missing something really basic and fundamental.
- joshuamorton 8y agoHistorically, google has been open internally but closed externally. I as an employee could expect transparency from leadership about a lot of things. If something was interesting you could expect detailed, technical answers. This is no longer the case if the thing is controversial (but for many non-controversial things, there's a lot of transparency still). One way of putting it might be that historically, employees had enough informayto generally keep the company in check. I'm not convinced that's the case anymore, and I can't blame the leadership when their attempts to be transparent result in live leaks to the nyt.
- new_here 8y agoGoogle obviously sees China as an important growth opportunity. Perhaps their strategy is to launch a search service in China that is ‘compliant’ with local regulations and they thought they could do that in a balanced way (e.g. warning users upfront before searching) but now that the story is out of the bag and they can’t control the narrative it’s tainted their approach and the opportunity.
- adonovan 8y agoWhen I started working at Google 14 years ago its most striking feature was the contrast between its external secrecy and its internal transparency. Essentially all engineering information was accessible to all engineers. Obviously the company has grown a lot since then, and there are numerous legal constraints on its internal transparency (contracts, national laws, commercial sensitivity, etc) but it is still has a culture of internal openness unusual for a company of its size. Many rank-and-file employees, myself included, would like to preserve that internal openness even though we may oppose recent leadership decisions regarding Maven, China, and sexual harassment, or support stronger government regulation of privacy. Hence employees' ambivalence about leaking: it has helped shine a light on important issues, but it risks important future decisions being made in secret.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- darren_ 8y agoHello hackernews, what's going on here? I commented on a businessinsider* story about this. It is now a times.co.uk story that a) I can't read in full and b) is not the story I originally commented on. I'm not particularly happy about having my comments attached to a different article than the one I originally commented on, especially one I can't read. * i wrote bloomberg here originally; it was actually businessinsider.com.au. i'd say i regret the error but i don't really
- balibebas 8y agoAin't that some shit. HN blows goats.
- Waterluvian 8y agoI know Hacker News doesn't like change, finding value in keeping the UI simple. And I really really like that. But maybe there should be some little dot one can click that shows a history of original post titles / URLs. This doesn't directly address your valid complaint. But I think it might be a palatable remedy.
- ethbro 8y ago@dang I know this isn't done often or without cause, and it certainly serves a value. But as we grow and the necessity of url subs increase... parent does have a valid point. Particularly if changes are UI-invisible. Even a "[changed]" tag suffix might help.
- darren_ 8y agoPlease insist on dropping comments if you're going to keep doing this. Imagine commenting encouragingly on some programming article, and then HN merges it with another one, and now you're on record as being at all positive to ESR
- dang 8y agoWe usually post a comment about it, but not all the moderators are in a position to do that. I understand the sentiment in favor, but am not inclined to add moderation tags or widgets to HN's UI. Features like that add complexity, and take up space that might otherwise go to more valuable features.
- grigjd3 8y agoI don't know of any employer I've ever had that would be ok with me sharing strategic information. This sounds entirely normal to me.
- reaperducer 8y agoI don't know of any employer I've ever had that would be ok with me sharing strategic information. Letting the press know of an upcoming product is a leak of strategic information. Letting the press know that your company aids government repression of basic human rights is not a leak of strategic information.
- baxtr 8y agoI’m sure that there is someone at google working on an AI solution for this. And I’m not even joking
- tomohawk 8y agoThe leak about the Google winge fest after the Trump victory is an interesting data point. On the one hand, the company claims not to be acting in a partisan way; on the other hand this comes out. 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... The company continues to claim, despite the contents of the video giving an appearance partisanship, that they are not biased in any way. Then they launch the leak hunt. If the video is no big deal, then why the big hunt and the paranoia? Google is not just some private company out there - it is a large monopoly with the power to sway elections. They need oversight.
- Proven 8y agoCome on, let's get real - it's their right to find and punish leakers. Employees don't have the right to leak because they have obliged themselves not to. That's how they got the job. If something conflicts with their morality and it's not internally fixable, they could quit. If it's something illegal, either against law, they should speak up. You can't break your contractual commitment just because you don't like how some product or service works. You're not the owner. My moral compass tells me to avoid using Google Services as much as I can, and install ad blockers to do my part to prevent them from monetizing data they gather. Also to speak up if I want to.