4 ms·

>Building a new censored search engine only seems to have started after Pichai took over and Brin/Page checked out. >The employee backlash phenomenon only seem

by lovich 7y ago

>Building a new censored search engine only seems to have started after Pichai took over and Brin/Page checked out. >The employee backlash phenomenon only seems to have started recently. Yes and concurrent with the executive change, Google employees have started becoming openly more liberal. I am saying that its just as plausible that the change in tone from the employees as a group, was a reaction to the managerial decisions that were themselves a change in tone. >As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off. Nothing had actually changed about privacy policies of tech firms, and users were clearly very happy with the ads-for-services arrangement given the rapidly rising usage numbers. That's three separate ideas that are not coupled together. Nothing has to change about the privacy policies if they were always tracking, and most users can be happy with the product even with the privacy intrusions. I will disagree with you that they were happy though. It seems more like a matter of ignorance as there has been a rise in ad blockers and deleting Facebook since the privacy violations of major tech companies has become more widely known Also for this claim specifically >As for "started surreptitiously tracking everyone", that was a media attack that started around the time Google News took off. Are you really trying to claim that Google does not track user data? That it does not suck up every bit of data it can from all the traffic they have access to? How exactly does Google target their ads and make their revenue then? Edit: Literally at the top of the front page as I am writing this comment https://www.pulse.ng/bi/tech/google-exec-says-nest-owners-should-probably-warn-their-guests-that-their/z1e1d5n https://www.pulse.ng/bi/tech/google-exec-says-nest-owners-sh...

repolfx 7y ago
You're right that it is hard to disentangle cause and effect, but Google's senior leadership has been very stable over time. Pichai was clearly the continuity candidate. The things I've named were all bottoms up - Google's leadership has always been quite reactive hence policies like 20% time. But when I joined the whole company was 10k people and only 5k in engineering. Now it's over 100k people. Google does track user data but if you aren't logged in it's anonymous, resets frequently and is a very noisy dataset. That's why they create lots of good incentives to be logged in, like useful products. Facebook isn't suffering at all, it continues to do great. To the extent users get bored of the classical product they move to Instagram which Facebook also owns. There's no evidence of any real change in user behaviour: free is a great price. But most as targeting isn't based on personal data. The core Google cash cow is ads targeted to your current searches. That works even if you're anonymous. The rest is worth doing but not that massive. It's certainly not worth worrying about. Bear in mind the media had for years been claiming Google "sells your personal data to advertisers" which as I'm sure you know is totally misleading (really is just a lie).

by lovich 7y ago

repolfx 7y ago

You're right that it is hard to disentangle cause and effect, but Google's senior leadership has been very stable over time. Pichai was clearly the continuity candidate. The things I've named were all bottoms up - Google's leadership has always been quite reactive hence policies like 20% time. But when I joined the whole company was 10k people and only 5k in engineering. Now it's over 100k people. Google does track user data but if you aren't logged in it's anonymous, resets frequently and is a very noisy dataset. That's why they create lots of good incentives to be logged in, like useful products. Facebook isn't suffering at all, it continues to do great. To the extent users get bored of the classical product they move to Instagram which Facebook also owns. There's no evidence of any real change in user behaviour: free is a great price. But most as targeting isn't based on personal data. The core Google cash cow is ads targeted to your current searches. That works even if you're anonymous. The rest is worth doing but not that massive. It's certainly not worth worrying about. Bear in mind the media had for years been claiming Google "sells your personal data to advertisers" which as I'm sure you know is totally misleading (really is just a lie).