8 ms·
Google does not want rights to things you do using Chrome (2008)
- isodev 2y agoInteresting how things have changed in the past 17 years! Google of today, would rather own one's thoughts if they could, let alone things we write in their address bar.
- Mistletoe 2y agoThere was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. -Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971
- 6stringmerc 2y agoPer “Breakfast with Hunter” that’s his favorite piece of writing of his career. Great citation.
- ViktorRay 2y agoIt’s interesting how this quote can apply to so many different things throughout history. I know it specifically references the 1960’s San Francisco counter culture but it’s a poignant quote because it can apply beyond that too.
- barbazoo 2y agoOne day they’ll write the things into the address bar for us :)
- isodev 2y ago"I'm feeling lucky" but brain-implant edition :))
- Y_Y 2y ago"My feelings are exclusively dictated by advertisers!"
- relaxing 2y agoThat’s basically the goal of the last decade of changes to Google search culminating in AI summaries: give you the information they think you want on the results page to stop you from leaving for another url.
- bear141 2y agoIn my mind it’s more like they give you what they want you to accept in these results and the AI summaries. It really seems like the days where any of these giant corps gave you what you actually wanted are long past.
- homebrewer 2y ago> would rather own one's thoughts if they could This is actually probably coming at some point in the not so distant future: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/13/229-nita-farahany-on-ethics-law-and-neurotechnology/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/03/13/229-...
- saagarjha 2y agoIs this still the case?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- vincnetas 2y agoLooks like this article might need a new "Updated" entry because current chrome ToS points to generic : https://policies.google.com/terms https://policies.google.com/terms
- koolala 2y agoTo keep things simple (for them) they get rights to everything :(
- 1oooqooq 2y agoimportant fact missing in the article (maybe even from title): matt never spoke for google and didn't work at google since the mid 2010s i think. he's an early hire who became a star Obama-era DOGEdepto-esque (mostly for good) technocrat, which then caused most of his peers to be hired left and right in hopes to get access to that cadre.
- ycombinatrix 2y agoThe article is from 2008...
- 1oooqooq 2y agowas posted now without the date
- johndhi 2y agoGreat find. Yes, things are different now. So too for SaaS.
- ur-whale 2y agoMatt Cutts was one of the Google search OGs. The kind of cultural values (e.g. make user happy all else will follow) he and a number of other original Google employees believed in and tried to defend have loooong been overridden by the Sundars and other Prabakhars who only kowtowed to the short-term demands of wall street. Cutts, Ben Gomes and similar-minded do-gooders have all neatly been benched a long time ago.
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoYeah when I was there (2011-2021) you could just see the positioning from "slightly hypocritical, probably naive, but overall in favour of the user and classic 1990s Internet principles" to... what it is now... shifting in a slow inevitable and painful wave. The last 5 years I was there especially.
- pimlottc 2y agoHe also went on to serve as the second administrator for the United States Digital Service, which has just recently been hijacked and gutted by DOGE. Sadly it’s not just the cultural values of Google that have shifted since then.
- coliveira 2y agoThe Google founders were never out there to do any good. They started hijacking web content, with the excuse that it was a scientific project in Stanford, then right away converted that into a for profit corporation (similar to what OpenAI did). Next they planned to do the same with books, before they were stoped by a tsunami of lawsuits.
- ludicrousdispla 2y agothey aspire to "don't be evil" which isn't exactly the same as "do be good"
- dang 2y ago...but still helps people on HN occasionally! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42918310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42918310
- eykanal 2y agoAny reason why this is on the front page today? Is there some context for why this is interesting now?
- greyface- 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612
- notpushkin 2y agoFirefox. [1] Note that Google does want the rights to things you do using Chrome now, too. [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&query=firefox https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&query=firefox
- johndhi 2y agoBecause it's very contradictory to Google's current stance (we can do whatever we want with your data)
- nige123 2y agoThere was always content in users’ click paths / search trails. Google has mined that for profit from the beginning. Cutts and Co turned a blind eye here. It was ALL OK though - because Google’s mission was DONT BE EVIL! In 2008 Google was besieged by SEO consultants spamming their index. Mining the collective intelligence of the hooman’s search trails was their algorithmic escape clause. Their escape clause in 2025? Mine for MORE!
- egypturnash 2y agoThis sort of agreement keeps on popping up. Again and again. The most forgiving reading of the intent of this sort of agreement is that "it is the basic function of a web browser to transfer your stuff across the internet, and it is the basic function of a website to do stuff like make thumbnails of your images and send them to people looking at your stuff, and you are cool with us doing this" but it always ends up being written in the most incredibly grabby way possible, demanding a perpetual, irrevocable license for all potential future uses so that you can't sue if one thumbnail gets forgotten when you delete your stuff or because it got turned into a new format or something. And this kind of license just happens to cover other stuff nobody thought of at the time like "we can totally train an AI on everything you generate and let people ask it to generate work explicitly derivative of your work without owing you a single cent". Which is a total dick move. So's stuff like "track everything you do and share that data with a distributed surveillance industry that sprung up around advertising". And eventually some asshole comes along and says "hey I could make a lot of money doing this thing that everyone "agreed" to when they scrolled down that lengthy terms of service and hit OK".
- 20after4 2y agoI worked at deviantArt back in the early 2010s, they notably had a user agreement that did not claim any rights more than necessary, and it was revocable by the user without jumping through hoops. So it's not necessary to do things this way, companies do it intentionally because they don't care about the rights of their users.
- yakcyll 2y agoThe corollary to this is that companies do this because they are incentivised to do so by their very fundamental goal - to make profit. Whatever pressure that does not lead to a loss on the quarterly report is, in practice, no pressure at all. If we truly want these predatory practices to stop, we have to start promoting different incentives, different priorities, and by 'we' I really mean 'each and every one of us collectively'.
- 2y ago
- blibble 2y agoif I use a pencil, I don't need to sign an absurd grant giving the company that made the pencil worldwide royalty free rights to use anything I create using it the legal entity that made the pencil is not involved in this process, and does not need to be correspondingly, Mozilla, the legal entity is not involved when I use their tool to submit a form on a third party website so there is some other motive for suddenly requiring this my bet: ads, tracking, and selling my output to the AI slop generating companies (IANAL)
- hackernewsdhsu 2y agoThey absolutely do want all the rights, they just got caught and have changed it "for now". They're modeling it after the music cartels. Can you say Mozilla? Shoot 'em all in the back!
- NotYourLawyer 2y ago>2008 Back when google wasn’t evil, did cool shit, and had a functional search engine.
- yuhong 2y ago[dead]
- jedberg 2y agoIn case anyone didn't know, Matt (the blog author) was the head of Webspam at the time, and a Distinguished Engineer at Google (and semi-official spokesperson for Google web spam issues). He left Google eight years after writing this, and went to the USDS for a few years, and then retired I believe. Would be curious what Matt thinks of today's Google.
- strictnein 2y agoI've always felt that when he stepped back at Google was when things took a turn for the worse.
- breakingcups 2y agoCorrelation does not necessarily equal causation, though.
- tahirhashmi 2y agoYeah, but correlation was the point here, irrespective of causation
- bo1024 2y agoOne takeaway of the Mozilla debacle is that software as a non-service is dying if not dead. What I mean is the concept that software could be a thing that someone just obtains, like a pencil. The things you write with a pencil belong to you. The pencil belongs to you. You don't have an ongoing contractual licensing agreement with the pencil manufacturer that gives them a worldwide non-commercial right to reflect light off the graphite in order to display words. In 2008, Google had already begun to forget that software could be like a pencil. It seems that in 2025, even the concept is alien to lawyers and perhaps developers at Mozilla, and many other places. The do not understand how one could use a software tool without granting the company behind it a license to everything you do with the tool, because they do not understand the concept of software usage except as a business relationship between the user and the company who developed it.
- ljlolel 2y agoIf AI makes the cost of development low enough then some individuals or small teams will still sell software like a pencil
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y agoOh they understand the concept. Its just that the recurring revenue and data are more important and without competition or alternatives then why not take everything you can take from the user. What are they going to do? Stop using the internet?
- userbinator 2y agoWhat are they going to do? Stop using the internet? Stop using newer versions of the software. Firefox is open-source, so forking and fixing the older versions before these hostile changes is not impossible.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y agoI hope this is true. I don't know how to maintain a web browser, hopefully those that do are willing to do the work to keep it running.
- sdrinf 2y agoMozilla is sooo fucked here. On one hand, it would take them approx ~1 sentence of blog to say "We won't sell your input info to anyone" and this drama goes away. OTOH: if the currently pending court case on anti-monopoly bars google from making payments to mozilla (which is about ~90%++ of their revenue), mozilla truly, and well is fucked. Meaning -they need to diversify, and they know it; they can't sell browsers, related services are heavily competed for, so ads & selling user data is broadly the only viable strat that can underwrite their existence. Of course, the community won't have it. And therein lies the rub: by going with google's bribe, on this long term, they wrote themselves into a corner they can't exit.
- Tostino 2y agoThey've had a decade and a half now to invest and diversify. I've been incredibly disappointed in every attempt. Honestly, just investing the good portion of the revenue from Google in an index fund and treating it like an endowment would probably have done better than they ended up.
- ycombinatrix 2y ago100% agree. there have been posts here investigating Mozilla's budget - they have clearly squandered the money they received from Google.
- crote 2y ago> On one hand, it would take them approx ~1 sentence of blog to say "We won't sell your input info to anyone" and this drama goes away. I wouldn't count on it. A pinky promise isn't legally binding, but the contract terms are. Too many companies have screwed over their customers in the past. It's 2025, nobody is going to trust any "promise" a company makes. If you give them a finger, it's all but guaranteed they are going to try taking your hand.
- _bent 2y agoThey could've just bagged Google's money and spend only as much as necessary on the browser and kept the rest for the future. If Google won't be allowed to pay them for Google Search anymore they'd still have enough money to maintain Firefox for another decade+. Mozilla trying to diversify with services nobody wants is the root of the issue, not the remedy.
- amelius 2y ago> In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don’t apply well to the use of that product. Ok, so what other Google products do want rights to the things I do? Smells fishy, to say the least.
- Animats 2y agoThis is the company that reads your emails.
- eviks 2y ago> In order to keep things simple for our users This isn't simple, of course, hence the confusion that prompted you to reach out to legal and publish a dismissive clarification