I think they keep the teams isolated from each other. Google never did that until recently, and most of the product leaks seemed to come from random people not

I think they keep the teams isolated from each other. Google never did that until recently, and most of the product leaks seemed to come from random people not working on the product that was leaked. (A great way to kill the company culture, and that's about it. It's not like you're being paid 7 figures to leak some detail about some inconsequential Android app.) When I worked on Google Wallet, I remember most of the leaks coming from people running "strings" on the Android binaries. Stuff that wasn't released would ship in release builds but be turned off by feature flags. The feature flags had, apparently, easy to decipher names. I don't really know how actual names ended up in release builds (they're just enum values on the wire), but there was quite a push to remove some of this stuff before release to keep leaks to a minimum. Lots of tooling created, and I never heard about it again. (I feel like there are some authors that have some trademark method of getting scoops, and when that changes even in the slightest, they disappear into the ether never to be heard from again.) Overall, I found all the secrecy kind of pointless. I spent most of my time at Google working on a project that was an open-source embedded device, and nobody ever wrote articles about upcoming features... even though they could clone the Git repository, read all the code, read all the incredibly-detailed commit messages, run it on their machine, and send us a pull request. My conclusion is that nobody really cared.