8 ms·

> Scott Beaumont, Google’s leader in China and a key architect of the Dragonfly project, “did not feel that the security, privacy, and legal teams should be abl

• Nasrudith 8y ago
  Well it is clearly an authoritarian personality - don't question his decisions and just obey. Sucks to work under but isn't usually quite as bad as an authoritarian government. And really that sort of thing should be a reason to be fired instantly from a tech company - not because of employee morale, expecting people you pay to think not to think being bad management, ethics, or anything like that but just because that it is a massive security liability. If your boss really is the sort to demand to send over all employee records over email or else you are fired that makes everyone far more phishing vulnerable. Of course if it is 'disregard safety procedures both can kill you just the same'.
  • debt 8y ago
    Idk probably knew they weren’t breaking any laws and also wanted to hit an aggressive deadline. That is if any of his engineers had qualms about what they were doing they’d be checked at the door because again it’s all legal according to the law and they had to hit a deadline. Especially because there’s nothing here that’s technically exceptional other than it runs counter to what we Americans considered ethical. Glad the PR fallout tipped whatever cost-benefit analysis they did by severely damaging the Google brand. Crazy they didn’t consider it up front. The fallout feels similar to them the release of the Boston Dynamics video. They don’t want to be associated with “job automating” robots.
    • Nasrudith 8y ago
      I think the issue is less PR but more labor dispute essentially - the high end having greviances is rarer but it does happen. They can weather being just another evil corporation reputationally - they can't weather mass defections of expensive talent that may decide to go to competitors or go Traitorous Eight on them. They have a pattern there of being forced to bend since at least the "memo-gate" and although they don't like it the math is clear enough to them. If employees are making money net it is rational to replace them if the alternative could make more money. Willful employees are an annoyance with a relative liability to corporate but their productivity gives them cold rational sway that says "just add it to the employee expenses section if you know what is good for you". It isn't ideal for everyone - indeed it works because they are outliers. If everyone can do flawless brain surgery it no longer demands a premium no matter how difficult it is. It is in some ways more powerful than traditional labor - they organize because they need the company. Companies can decide to leave and out source to cheaper locales in response. Powerful labor has few equivalent alternatives. I say powerful and not scarce because mere obscurity can be subsituited for - powerful less so. If they could have already they would have. The companies need the high end and they know it. Just look at Hollywood movie budgets to the stars - they can ask for such outrageous sums because the alternative is worse in the current climate. Of course there is a caveat - if they ever become obsolete they will be dropped quickly due to their leveraging. Things can be very fickle especially with advances that can metaphorically turn weaving from an apprentice-journeyman-master trade to a factory job worked by illiterate women and children.
  • joejerryronnie 8y ago
    >And really that sort of thing should be a reason to be fired instantly from a tech company You will find this type of person throughout all companies, including tech. It’s really unfortunate but if these people get results, their horrible behavior is not only tolerated but rewarded.
• jeklj 8y ago
  Companies like them want employees who think for themselves and work hard to change the world... But only within implicitly-defined areas.
• ekanes 8y ago
  Interesting. A friend was just telling me about how inside Apple, the privacy and security teams have special powers. They can shut things down if they put customer data at risk, or allow them conditionally based on needed changes, etc. Very different culturally.
  • anonymouzz 8y ago
    Pretty sure that's generally the case at Google too: > Under normal company protocol, analysis of people’s search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company’s privacy staff, whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after The Intercept revealed it, and were “really pissed,” according to one Google source.
  • lclarkmichalek 8y ago
    Is it? Apple stores Chinese customer's iCloud keys in Chinese data centers run by a state owned company. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in-china-is-now-handled-by-a-state-owned-mobile-operator/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in...
• Aunche 8y ago
  The key words in this quote are "product decisions." In no way does this quote imply that Beaumont can bypass a legitimate security or legal issue.
  • jhayward 8y ago
    No, that's not how the quote reads. It reads "If he made a decision about how the product would operate no legal, privacy, or security teams could contradict him." So, if he says "we will deliberately expose private conversations directly to government agents", that's a product decision. You are inventing your conclusion from nothing.
    • Aunche 8y ago
      No, it's the Intercept that invented its own conclusion from out-of-context quotes from an interview with a disgruntled ex-employee. The only substance from that interview was that Google was being less open than they usually were. Zunger had a political objection, which was outside the scope of his field of work, and leadership dismissed it as unimportant. Zunger deemed this unfair. The Intercept chose to interpret that as Dragonfly completely bypassing security and privacy, which other Googlers on that team claim never happened.
• dm3730 8y ago
  > I'd draw some analogy between Scott Beaumont's behavior and China You could be just as likely to draw the analogy with the USA.
• ehsankia 8y ago
  I'm sorry, but almost every peace of information about Dragonfly we have is from the intercept, which has for source people who clearly are very biased against the project. So while we can come up with dozens of rumors that shine it in a very bad light, I'm not sure how fair that is, since we're missing the other half of the story. With enough selective "facts", I can make almost anything look bad.
  • snovv_crash 8y ago
    This is a tisk any organization involved in secret projects risks. If you won't control the narrative, someone else will.
  • throwaway2048 8y ago
    Bias dosen't mean incorrect, every single human and organization has bias, its a fools errand to demand some kind of mythical "bias free" position. Do you have specific issues with their reporting? Or do you just want to baselessly cast aspersions on what they are saying?
    • ehsankia 8y ago
      Neither, and I never said they were false (although they could be, there's no way to tell). I very clearly stated that it's still possible to paint a misleading picture of something only using facts. The key point here is that it's not the full picture, and some facts, without the proper context, sound very different.