8 ms·

When I moved into IT almost 10-15 years ago, Google was one of the companies that I adored (in a kind of naive way, but nevertheless..). Working at that compa

When I moved into IT almost 10-15 years ago, Google was one of the companies that I adored (in a kind of naive way, but nevertheless..). Working at that company has always been a dream of mine. They had the reputation for hiring the best of the best engineers, with great benefits and work culture. Meanwhile I'd hate to apply for them. Everything they do in terms of tracking, etc. has become so vile and almost evil that even Microsoft has a better standing among my peers.. Would love to hear some insight from ex employees on what changed on the inside of that company, but from the outside it doesn't even seem to be the same any more. Maybe they're just worse at hiding it..

dleslie 7y ago
We thought Microsoft was evil because of how they treated their partners and competitors. We didn't consider that a greater evil would arise, and all it would take was a disregard of the sanctity of personal privacy.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  To my knowledge Google still hasn't done anything comparable to the worst offenses of Microsoft in its prime. These "tests" don't really help though.
  - dleslie 7y ago
    > > and all it would take was a disregard of the sanctity of personal privacy ;) I would have been aghast if you had told me 30 years ago that by now our movements, purchases, letters, phone calls, photos, rolodex, walkman, television, and more would all be connected to a central database and used to produce models to coerce us into changing our behaviour.
  - eitland 7y ago
    Eh. One of the things Microsoft was actually punished for was bundling IE, and it didn't help that they were actually hostile to other browsers as proven by the fact that their documentation pages would work if Opera faked the IE headers. Googles pushing of Chrome and disregard for other browsers across their web properties comes dangerously close in my opinion.
    - Kovah 7y ago
      I think that Googles' push is even worse. Just think about how many possible devices Microsoft could target back in the days. 300-500 million devices maybe? Google not only invaded desktops in the past decades, but completely owns the Android platform, which comes bundled with Chrome and Google as the primary search engine. Desktops with Chrome plus the Android platform must be far more than 2-3 billion devices.
thu2111 7y ago
Well, I'm an ex employee. Actually nothing has changed inside the company. "Tracking" as you put it isn't perceived as evil, it never has been, and for good reasons. The only thing that's changed is people's perception of the company and - very recent post 2016 political issues aside - that was mostly driven by a sustained campaign by an angry media industry that wanted money (see: link taxes). Firstly, if tracking usage statistics or activity was actually evil then everyone would hate it, desperately try to stop it and have tons of stories about the horrors of it. In fact what Google sees is: 1. Web apps are extremely popular although they all keep server side logs that reveal every button click, every message you type, every email you send, every search you do. Users routinely migrate from thick client apps that give great privacy to web apps that give none whatsoever without batting an eye. Hacker News readers in particular should understand this. It's overrun with Silicon Valley types who build their entire livelihoods around "let me run this program for you as a service". There's nothing special about Google in this regard. The entire software industry has moved away from privacy in the last 20 years because ... 2. Users rarely if ever use privacy features when they're provided, even when they're heavily promoted. In fact, despite all the noise, hardly anyone cares. For the vast majority convenience wins over privacy every time. But not just convenience, also ... 3. Security trumps privacy. People say they like privacy, but they hate getting hacked and tend to blame the service provider if it happens. They have very little patience for explanations of the form "yes this attacker was obviously not you and yes we had enough data to know that, but we didn't use any of it ... for your own good!" 4. Users can't and won't give accurate feedback about what they value or what their actual experience of using an app is like. This means A/B testing is critical to avoid making bad business decisions. The heavy reliance on experiments and data driven decision making is one reason tech firms tend to steamroller their legacy competitors. Google hasn't become evil over time. It's been doing A/B tests, keeping server logs and writing unused privacy features since the company first began. All that's changed is it got big and rich, so people - rightly - started to think about its power more. But the hypocrisy is strong. The world is full of companies collecting and using data for the benefit of their customers. It's really only Google and Facebook that get the vitriol.
- Proziam 7y ago
  So, Google (And others) are evil, but because customers don't value privacy until it's too late, it's okay to abuse them for profit? You aren't ethical if you only act ethically when you are forced to.
alleyshack 7y ago
As an Xoogler, my experience is that one thing changed, and one thing didn't. The thing which changed is that Google operates on a much, much larger scale than anything imaginable back in the late 90s when they first started. In 1999, nobody had any inkling about the cloud and SaaS revolution that was about to come. Nobody knew that everything was about to move into web apps and cloud services, which permit and require(?) tracking in ways, and on a scale, no one had thought possible. (Require with a question mark because - ad tracking aside - what little I know of frontend development includes that they need to be able to see certain information, like your browser type, in order to provide effective services.) The thing which didn't change is the mindset of the engineers building the services. On average, Googlers tend to be much less concerned with personal privacy than an equally educated consumer, and much more interested in the features and services they can build for themselves and others which happen to require huge amounts of personal information to function. In other words, a typical Googler is more likely to think, "Oooh, having a personal digital assistant is great! If I give Google access to my email inbox, it can suggest tasks, automatically add calendar invites, and do other cool things." The problems we're seeing now come when the engineers working on advertising products have that mindset and access to Google-scale information. They don't consider it a problem or a violation because they don't mind targeted ads, they don't mind giving up their data in exchange for services, and they don't (want to) understand why people who aren't them might object. It's a lot more complicated than that because Google, while the largest and arguably most effective, is not the only player in this game. There are a lot of other corporate and social influences at play. This is just to answer the question about what changed at Google.
- dleslie 7y ago
  > They don't consider it a problem or a violation because they don't mind targeted ads, they don't mind giving up their data in exchange for services, and they don't (want to) understand why people who aren't them might object. And worse, they never thought to ask. Most users never really had the opportunity to provide informed consent.
  - alleyshack 7y ago
    Yep. "I think this way, therefore everyone else thinks this way," is an incredibly common human fallacy.

dleslie 7y ago

We thought Microsoft was evil because of how they treated their partners and competitors. We didn't consider that a greater evil would arise, and all it would take was a disregard of the sanctity of personal privacy.

raxxorrax 7y ago
To my knowledge Google still hasn't done anything comparable to the worst offenses of Microsoft in its prime. These "tests" don't really help though.
- dleslie 7y ago
  > > and all it would take was a disregard of the sanctity of personal privacy ;) I would have been aghast if you had told me 30 years ago that by now our movements, purchases, letters, phone calls, photos, rolodex, walkman, television, and more would all be connected to a central database and used to produce models to coerce us into changing our behaviour.
- eitland 7y ago
  Eh. One of the things Microsoft was actually punished for was bundling IE, and it didn't help that they were actually hostile to other browsers as proven by the fact that their documentation pages would work if Opera faked the IE headers. Googles pushing of Chrome and disregard for other browsers across their web properties comes dangerously close in my opinion.
  - Kovah 7y ago
    I think that Googles' push is even worse. Just think about how many possible devices Microsoft could target back in the days. 300-500 million devices maybe? Google not only invaded desktops in the past decades, but completely owns the Android platform, which comes bundled with Chrome and Google as the primary search engine. Desktops with Chrome plus the Android platform must be far more than 2-3 billion devices.

thu2111 7y ago

Well, I'm an ex employee. Actually nothing has changed inside the company. "Tracking" as you put it isn't perceived as evil, it never has been, and for good reasons. The only thing that's changed is people's perception of the company and - very recent post 2016 political issues aside - that was mostly driven by a sustained campaign by an angry media industry that wanted money (see: link taxes). Firstly, if tracking usage statistics or activity was actually evil then everyone would hate it, desperately try to stop it and have tons of stories about the horrors of it. In fact what Google sees is: 1. Web apps are extremely popular although they all keep server side logs that reveal every button click, every message you type, every email you send, every search you do. Users routinely migrate from thick client apps that give great privacy to web apps that give none whatsoever without batting an eye. Hacker News readers in particular should understand this. It's overrun with Silicon Valley types who build their entire livelihoods around "let me run this program for you as a service". There's nothing special about Google in this regard. The entire software industry has moved away from privacy in the last 20 years because ... 2. Users rarely if ever use privacy features when they're provided, even when they're heavily promoted. In fact, despite all the noise, hardly anyone cares. For the vast majority convenience wins over privacy every time. But not just convenience, also ... 3. Security trumps privacy. People say they like privacy, but they hate getting hacked and tend to blame the service provider if it happens. They have very little patience for explanations of the form "yes this attacker was obviously not you and yes we had enough data to know that, but we didn't use any of it ... for your own good!" 4. Users can't and won't give accurate feedback about what they value or what their actual experience of using an app is like. This means A/B testing is critical to avoid making bad business decisions. The heavy reliance on experiments and data driven decision making is one reason tech firms tend to steamroller their legacy competitors. Google hasn't become evil over time. It's been doing A/B tests, keeping server logs and writing unused privacy features since the company first began. All that's changed is it got big and rich, so people - rightly - started to think about its power more. But the hypocrisy is strong. The world is full of companies collecting and using data for the benefit of their customers. It's really only Google and Facebook that get the vitriol.

Proziam 7y ago
So, Google (And others) are evil, but because customers don't value privacy until it's too late, it's okay to abuse them for profit? You aren't ethical if you only act ethically when you are forced to.

alleyshack 7y ago

As an Xoogler, my experience is that one thing changed, and one thing didn't. The thing which changed is that Google operates on a much, much larger scale than anything imaginable back in the late 90s when they first started. In 1999, nobody had any inkling about the cloud and SaaS revolution that was about to come. Nobody knew that everything was about to move into web apps and cloud services, which permit and require(?) tracking in ways, and on a scale, no one had thought possible. (Require with a question mark because - ad tracking aside - what little I know of frontend development includes that they need to be able to see certain information, like your browser type, in order to provide effective services.) The thing which didn't change is the mindset of the engineers building the services. On average, Googlers tend to be much less concerned with personal privacy than an equally educated consumer, and much more interested in the features and services they can build for themselves and others which happen to require huge amounts of personal information to function. In other words, a typical Googler is more likely to think, "Oooh, having a personal digital assistant is great! If I give Google access to my email inbox, it can suggest tasks, automatically add calendar invites, and do other cool things." The problems we're seeing now come when the engineers working on advertising products have that mindset and access to Google-scale information. They don't consider it a problem or a violation because they don't mind targeted ads, they don't mind giving up their data in exchange for services, and they don't (want to) understand why people who aren't them might object. It's a lot more complicated than that because Google, while the largest and arguably most effective, is not the only player in this game. There are a lot of other corporate and social influences at play. This is just to answer the question about what changed at Google.

dleslie 7y ago
> They don't consider it a problem or a violation because they don't mind targeted ads, they don't mind giving up their data in exchange for services, and they don't (want to) understand why people who aren't them might object. And worse, they never thought to ask. Most users never really had the opportunity to provide informed consent.
- alleyshack 7y ago
  Yep. "I think this way, therefore everyone else thinks this way," is an incredibly common human fallacy.