5 ms·

Interesting. I work for Google as well and I have a somehow opposite opinion here. Working here means you gotta fight through extremely complicated, thorough (a

Interesting. I work for Google as well and I have a somehow opposite opinion here. Working here means you gotta fight through extremely complicated, thorough (and sometime bureaucratic) privacy, security and legal reviews by daily basis. Those teams have a real power to block any launches they don't like; Google give them the power not because of good-will but it's more about decreasing a risk of significant revenue impacting consequences. You got a fancy design which may give you a big revenue boost at the cost of compromising user privacy or legal risks? Good luck with upcoming privacy and/or legal review sessions; they don't care about your product since they have no motivation to do that. I'm not trying to convince you and HN users to trust Google (which seems to be impossible anyway), but at least for more than 5 years there has been a strong incentive structure for not doing something that might make "the rest of America would literally come to Google and kill them". I think this investigation would enhance this structure even further, which might be a good thing since there's still room to improve especially for keeping high level executives in check.

atomical 7y ago
Is this sort of compliance testing needed in countries with authoritarian leaders?
- summerlight 7y ago
  It's mostly about western world regulations, especially those from EU.
Fins 7y ago
Where were those teams when whatever the predecessor to G+ was called was launched and started sharing with your abusive ex's, people you had orders of protection taken etc. etc.? I am sure they do review things quite carefully to avoid something too obviously illegal. But anything more than that? Color me skeptical.
blub 7y ago
"You got a fancy design which may give you a big revenue boost at the cost of compromising user privacy or legal risks? Good luck with upcoming privacy and/or legal review sessions; they don't care about your product since they have no motivation to do that." From the outside, it's doubtful that this team exists at all. Or if they do, they must watch YouTube all day instead of doing their jobs, because Google is getting better and better at compromising privacy, thanks to fancy designs/dark patterns: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/undersokelse/2018/every-step-you-take/ https://www.forbrukerradet.no/undersokelse/2018/every-step-y... It looks to me like you have no clue what your own company's doing but hurry nevertheless to defend them.
- summerlight 7y ago
  > because Google is getting better and better at compromising privacy, thanks to fancy designs/dark patterns You're suggesting that the situation is getting worse, which I don't really see much clues from the linked report, though I don't want to spend my weekend on scrutinizing 44 pages report. I don't work for Maps, but AFAIK it used to track you silently and didn't give you control on user history. But now at least it tries to get a consent (even though it's admittedly just a nominal action) and give you some amount of control on your data, which is better than typical web practice on average. Can you explain why this should be considered as going toward "dark patterns"? All those works were strongly pushed by Privacy team. I don't expect you to praise their works, but you still don't have to use that level of derogatory words as well. I don't necessarily deny that Google's previous (and probably current) business practice has been done in a quite privacy-invasive way. That needs to be corrected. But there's much more things to be considered as well, which slows down the pace for a good reason. So the best thing Google can do is improving the situation carefully rather than breaking everything by changing the fundamental at once. Let me give you a super simplified example of ads; which privacy invasive practice has gone too far. But it's also true that this has powered the web ecosystem for a decade. Any kind of significant updates would lead to direct revenue impacts on not only Google but publishers and advertisers. This is real existential threats to them; surprisingly many publishers and creators solely depends on ads revenue. There are also indirect impacts on users via garbage ads and more pay-walled contents. Of course, I know what would typical HN user's answer be; "I would rather choose garbage ads than tracking and I will pay money!" But the history shows that most of attempts to prove this kind of people are significant has miserably failed (except very few examples, such as NYT) including Google's own. BTW, one irrelevant stuff; is there anyone who have a concrete, feasible business proposal to materialize this no-ads-willing-to-pay demands into the reality? Then try a business and be the next Google/Facebook/Amazon. I'm serious. I always have been thinking about a way to do this so the web can run without ads, but because of Dunning-Kruger effect, I'm getting less and less confident about this idea :)

atomical 7y ago

Is this sort of compliance testing needed in countries with authoritarian leaders?

summerlight 7y ago
It's mostly about western world regulations, especially those from EU.

Fins 7y ago

Where were those teams when whatever the predecessor to G+ was called was launched and started sharing with your abusive ex's, people you had orders of protection taken etc. etc.? I am sure they do review things quite carefully to avoid something too obviously illegal. But anything more than that? Color me skeptical.

blub 7y ago

"You got a fancy design which may give you a big revenue boost at the cost of compromising user privacy or legal risks? Good luck with upcoming privacy and/or legal review sessions; they don't care about your product since they have no motivation to do that." From the outside, it's doubtful that this team exists at all. Or if they do, they must watch YouTube all day instead of doing their jobs, because Google is getting better and better at compromising privacy, thanks to fancy designs/dark patterns: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/undersokelse/2018/every-step-you-take/ https://www.forbrukerradet.no/undersokelse/2018/every-step-y... It looks to me like you have no clue what your own company's doing but hurry nevertheless to defend them.

summerlight 7y ago
> because Google is getting better and better at compromising privacy, thanks to fancy designs/dark patterns You're suggesting that the situation is getting worse, which I don't really see much clues from the linked report, though I don't want to spend my weekend on scrutinizing 44 pages report. I don't work for Maps, but AFAIK it used to track you silently and didn't give you control on user history. But now at least it tries to get a consent (even though it's admittedly just a nominal action) and give you some amount of control on your data, which is better than typical web practice on average. Can you explain why this should be considered as going toward "dark patterns"? All those works were strongly pushed by Privacy team. I don't expect you to praise their works, but you still don't have to use that level of derogatory words as well. I don't necessarily deny that Google's previous (and probably current) business practice has been done in a quite privacy-invasive way. That needs to be corrected. But there's much more things to be considered as well, which slows down the pace for a good reason. So the best thing Google can do is improving the situation carefully rather than breaking everything by changing the fundamental at once. Let me give you a super simplified example of ads; which privacy invasive practice has gone too far. But it's also true that this has powered the web ecosystem for a decade. Any kind of significant updates would lead to direct revenue impacts on not only Google but publishers and advertisers. This is real existential threats to them; surprisingly many publishers and creators solely depends on ads revenue. There are also indirect impacts on users via garbage ads and more pay-walled contents. Of course, I know what would typical HN user's answer be; "I would rather choose garbage ads than tracking and I will pay money!" But the history shows that most of attempts to prove this kind of people are significant has miserably failed (except very few examples, such as NYT) including Google's own. BTW, one irrelevant stuff; is there anyone who have a concrete, feasible business proposal to materialize this no-ads-willing-to-pay demands into the reality? Then try a business and be the next Google/Facebook/Amazon. I'm serious. I always have been thinking about a way to do this so the web can run without ads, but because of Dunning-Kruger effect, I'm getting less and less confident about this idea :)