I'll save you the read. A Google employee downloaded 100k documents from the company-wide available internal wiki, identified all the ones that seemed anywhere from highly-to-mildly offensive to anyone in the world, and then published it all as a book on Amazon. The book has been out for about a year and continues to sell well (not to mention the hundreds of paid media appearances for the author to speak in front of like-minded audiences).
Here's the fun part: Google considered suing, but recognized that this would trigger the Streisand Effect and let him off the hook. Obviously, this was a calculated risk this dude took and that paid off (at least from the legal perspective).
Did Google act ethically 100% of the time? God no! But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha.
So clearly there's a market out there for juicy internal documents. I would still say the first step is not to do anything wrong, ever. But once you have enough people working for you and you can't be in every meeting at all times, shit is going to happen, and people are going to want to pay to find out about it.
> I'll save you the read. A Google employee downloaded 100k documents from the company-wide available internal wiki, identified all the ones that seemed anywhere from highly-to-mildly offensive to anyone in the world, and then published it all as a book on Amazon. The book has been out for about a year and continues to sell well (not to mention the hundreds of paid media appearances for the author to speak in front of like-minded audiences).
You also have to keep in mind that a "company-wide available internal wiki" is going to be almost entirely full of boring crap that people literally have to be paid to read.
I mean, the internal wiki pages for nearly every system I've worked on in my company don't even describe what that system is supposed to do in terms someone from outside the team would understand.
> So clearly there's a market out there for juicy internal documents. I would still say the first step is not to do anything wrong, ever. But once you have enough people working for you and you can't be in every meeting at all times, shit is going to happen, and people are going to want to pay to find out about it.
It's not a "bad actor" thing to leak things like that. "Shit" that happens at low levels is still shit, even if it's not company policy coming from the top.
Google a decade ago wasn't like that. I learned so much about software development from reading internal wiki pages for things like MapReduce, GFS, Colossus, their search serving system, search algorithms in general, their authentication/ID system, GMail storage, Google Reader feed ingestion, Google Moderator voting algorithms, etc. Not to mention snooping on code reviews from folks like Jeff Dean, Rob Pike, and Guido van Rossum.
It's not like that now - things are so much more locked down. The first time I was there I could basically treat it like a Ph.D that I got paid for, in terms of learning new things. This time, it's a job where I do my tasks and receive lots of money in return. I think this is kind of a shame - I liked the environment much more when most people were there to learn and invent rather than collect a paycheck - but perhaps this is the inevitable result of a company growing past 100K employees.
>"Shit" that happens at low levels is still shit, even if it's not company policy coming from the top.
In some cases, it can be worse. If something happens at a low level that is unambiguously bad and no one at the top does anything about it despite knowing about it, then to the public, it's as if upper-management is condoning the behavior.
Case in point: the Redskins practicing human trafficking with no strong public denouncement from the team's front office.
> But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha.
I hear this often and find it a bit puzzling. Perhaps it's part of believing that speech is violence - thinking that critical speech or angry feelings are really hurting Google.
So how do you think it hurt them? Did they lose customers, and if so, how many? Did they miss a quarter? Have to lay people off? Cancel product initiatives?
Honestly this doesn't happen if you have a good corporate culture to begin with (which Google has not had for quite a while).
I always go back to my experience at HP when Bill and Dave were still alive: the leadership decision to trust employees was pretty much reciprocated so openness worked just fine.
So lack of leadership skill (especially an inability to "lead by example") is usually what causes this type of situation.
This is folly because it only takes ONE person to leak documents, and there are always disgruntled employees somewhere in a company at the scale we are talking about.
You cannot assume good behavior of literally tens of thousands of employees because you have an overall "good" company culture.
Not at all. Most companies are not in the business of making the world a better place, and therefore they are not going to be optimizing their info access policies against that target, but instead they will be optimizing for shareholder value or what have you.
Don't confuse this statement with an endorsement - I wish it all worked differently, but this is the reality.
Most companies put a lot of money and reputation on the line advertising and taking stances on current events in such a way to imply that they are "in the business of making the world a better place". Either they need to step up and practice what they preach, or a regulatory agency like the FTC should step in when they make false claims about corporate governance.
I think this comment is giving an (interesting, IMO) example of the claim "Sometimes transparency encourages bad actors" and not making a value judgment on whether it is worth the tradeoff to limit internal transparency just to have stopped this one bad actor.
> But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha.
Good. Google should not be able to hide anything from anyone, especially the public whose privacy they invade. The more leaks, the better off we are. Especially the kind of leaks that hurt them. Those are the ones we want most. If they didn't want us to find out, maybe they shouldn't have been doing it, right?
I'm suggesting they stop surveilling the world's entire population. Until they stop violating our privacy, I won't feel sorry for them when others violate theirs. Total lack of privacy is exactly what these big tech companies deserve.
"Paid media appearances" - how would you know he got paid?
I'm not on his level, but I have a book and I've done "media appearances" (BBC stations in Berkshire & Bristol). You don't get paid for promoting your book.
Maybe on a TV show, the union forces them to pay you the minimum, which I believe is not very much.
When the GP says "filtered out" the offensive ones, I think he means he filtered out the inoffensive ones and kept the offensive ones, which makes for a much shorter book.
Google used to (c. 2005-2008) let you freely download your contacts & email from GMail, either as a file or an API. Facebook used this to seed Facebook. When you signed up with an @gmail.com account for Facebook, it'd prompt you to import all your contacts, and then send them all an e-mail inviting them to sign up for Facebook.
Google's requests for some reciprocity from Facebook, where users would own their own social graph through technologies like OpenSocial, naturally fell on deaf ears. Google walled off their own platform and decided to abandon open standards for proprietary systems a couple years later, and this is a large reason why we can't have nice things.
I believe GDPR enforces the ability to download all your data and both Google and Facebook offer it, but it's practically useless now. GDPR also makes the regulatory burden of starting a new social network impractical, so it's not like we could get an ecosystem of interoperable competitors.
> I believe GDPR enforces the ability to download all your data
Only data you have provided, both directly (entered name) and indirectly (e.g. page views). Analyses generated by the company based on that data aren't included in the insight right. I would presume both facebook and google have a lot of data that fall in the exempt category.
Not sure if this applies but the Obama administration has spoken previously about how releasing/publishing their visitor list was something they regretted. They got mild accolades at the time of doing it (in a move to be more transparent that other administrations) and then the right wing (mainly) used the visitor log to make hay for 8 years. Then the Trump admin stopped releasing the info and no one made a big deal about it (relative to the number of stories written about who showed up on the lists the Obama admin released).
FB saying "please oh please don't regulate social networks!" sure would seem like Br'er Rabbit. Most prospective regulations in this area would have a bigger impact on e.g. a completely open community-driven network, for example.
Interesting. I was thinking more in line of ppl simply siphoning money and power from fb. I don’t see a grand scheme here, just some blood in the water.
