I recently left Google after spending a few years there.
Internally Google puts a huge premium on user safety and privacy. So much so that shipping anything requires getting changes through a regulatory process to safeguard users.
Google doesn’t do a good job of marketing its process. In some domains Google does explicitly use user behavior to drive revenue, so from the outside it becomes easy to spin changes like this as encroaching on user privacy, but I don’t see that here. I see something like a PM who is trying to surface some more functionality to users directly, and some engineers who spent far too long with lawyers to get sign off on this change.
It may be fashionable to sensationalize product changes like this, but the truth is often more mundane.
> Internally Google puts a huge premium on user safety and privacy.
It's Orwellian doublethink. Google will go miles out of its way to convince itself it gives a damn about user privacy, when it obviously does not give a damn about user privacy. Google always finds a way to justify studying users like lab rats. For Google, they believe that they are inherently in your circle of trust and that they are allowed to know anything they want to know about you because they are by default, up to nothing but good.
Google fundamentally does not understand that keeping things private means keeping things private from Google.
If you aren't paying Google, then they are harvesting your attention, activities, preferences, and future spending habits to eventually sell to the highest bidder.
Google's entire business hinges on user privacy from everyone other than Google. If, tomorrow, either this Account Security scenario happened[0] or this South Park website happened[1] (everyone's internet history searchably by anyone), and it was done at the incompetence of Google, they would crumble overnight. They might recover within a year or two if they release a statement and fix it within a few hours or something, but it would be devastating and they would have to kiss their entire Google Cloud business (encompassing Cloud Platform and Workspace) goodbye.
Once more, even for their ad business, they don't sell that data, they target based off of it. They would lose their competitive data advantage overnight if someone could pay them $100 per-user for every user's full advertising profile since they could then go behind Google's back and out-header-bid Google with lower margins.
Are you kidding me? Crumble overnight? Have you not heard of the massive data breaches from the credit reporting industry? They got a minor slap on the wrist and everything is continuing as though it never happened.
I don't understand how people can have such naive views in this day and age. Google is FAR MORE important today than a credit reporting company. They wouldn't go anywhere.
Nobody affected by those breaches willingly worked with the credit reporting industry. Everyone with a Workspace subscription willingly works with it and moving all the stuff Google Workspace offers off to Office 365 can be done relatively quickly by downloading all drive data, syncing user email, contacts, and caldav, and exporting Sheets/Gdocs as their Office file format counterparts.
There are numerous other breaches of companies that people continue to shop/work with literally weekly if not daily.
Wikipedia might not be the best source but they have a list of companies that have had data breaches, but there is a huge list of companies that have had public breaches.
Just to name a few and their sources that you people everywhere still use because the majority of people don't care about privacy or security.
There's plenty of other examples on here - but I agree with the parent, Google could implode and leak everything and the average person could not be bothered to change their emails or stop using Google.
Yes you can. You can disable cookies, or use ad blockers. Specifically, this is talking about Google Workspace customers, so all their customers can easily move off using them for hosted email.
I agree with what you are saying. Google undoubtedly puts a lot of emphasis on security and privacy against external threats. In other words, it is unlikely that google systems would be hacked and user secrets be leaked. I can be relatively confident that script kiddies won't hack the Gmail servers and download everyone's data.
However, Google most definitely puts no value in privacy in the holistic sense of the word, because as you say they'll willfully harvest every last bit of information, sensitive or not, that users store at Google. Google cannot be given a shred of trust with private data, because they have time and time again demonstrated to have no moral compass in this respect.
They may take a lot of care about protecting this data from others, but they don't care at all about protecting the data from themselves.
> If you aren't paying Google, then they are harvesting your attention, activities, preferences, and future spending habits to eventually sell to the highest bidder.
Google stopped scanning Gmail.com users' inboxes in 2017[0] and Workspace in general has a guarantee that they don't use any core service data[1] for their advertising business[2]:
> Google will only access or use Customer Data to provide the Services and TSS to Customer or as otherwise instructed by Customer. Without limiting the generality of the preceding sentence, Google will not process Customer Data for Advertising purposes or serve Advertising in the Services. Google has implemented and will maintain administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to protect Customer Data, as further described in the Data Processing Amendment.
"Google stopped scanning Gmail.com users' inboxes in 2017"
Actually, what the Guardian article says is that Google claims that:
"Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalisation after this change."
That doesn't mean they don't scan/read/use the contents of Gmail users' mailboxes completely. It just means they claim they don't do it for ads personalization.
So nothing in that announcement prevents them from doing this for other reasons.
There's also plenty of other juicy data that Google gets on you.. such as who you communicate with and know (gotten through Gmail and many other means), and things they can infer about you, which isn't affected by this announcement at all.
IMO this is in the context of ad personalization so it's still valid, and it illustrates that they scan email for Workspace as well to provide useful features (like the 'designed to prevent you from threats' point on this marketing page[0])
That "guarantee" is of no use unless you can prove it (which you can't from the outside - so much data goes into ad targeting that it's impossible to definitely prove which bit of data was used to target a given ad).
They've also proven their bad faith with their GDPR consent flow that's not actually compliant with the regulation (there should be a big "decline" button as easy to use as the "accept" button).
> If you aren't paying Google, then they are harvesting your attention, activities, preferences, and future spending habits to eventually sell to the highest bidder.
And paying them won't guarantee that they won't do those things either. Look at what Microsoft is doing with Windows.
Let’s say I give you a box with two lights to show its state, one green and one red. Currently, the red light is on. The red light will also be on tomorrow. In fact, people who have observed this box for years have only ever seen it show red.
You might argue that this box is simply hard-wired to show red, but then I explain: No, your impression is wrong. I’ve built this box, and I’ve taken every possible measure to make it show green.
How credible am I?
And would you be more inclined to believe me more if I told you about my intrinsic love for the color green, and how I wired up the green light first, and how I have an entire committee of experts that has to sign off every design change to this box to ensure sufficient greenness? While it still shows, and only ever will, show the red light?
They are fictional archetypes of established historical patterns, their reason to exist in pop culture is as shorthand allegories and extrapolations for common despotic behaviors that are already clear to everyone with a sense of history.
It's so trivial that it's pointless because the intended reader is presumed to have already done it himself, excising that triviality is the purpose of any kind of shorthand.
See: North Korea. (I'm sure everyone there is completely up to date and accirate on the character of the world around them!)
See: Russia(Same)
See: Chinese Communist Party (Same)
See: United States and... Well, every nation really. (Same)
See: Propaganda(Literally exists to create skewed perceptions in allies/foes)
See: Filter Bubbles
See: Locality (Physics)
See: Perception Management
(general category of activity)
See: Truman Show
See: Information Asymmetry (If you don't know it exists, woo boy, you might want to look into doing something about that)
See: The Great Firewall (Unrestricted access to the Internet is too dangerous to be allowed by an incumbent power structure)
See: DMCA Takedowns (unmanipulated information access is too dangerous to be allowed by am incumbent power structure)
See: Classification (Secret/Top Secret; unrestricted access to information is too dangerous to be allowed by an incumbent power structure)
See: Every Diplomat and liar ever
I mean, if you're going to play the source card, you may want to pick something that doesn't have so many real life examples that actually enumerating them, and the various contexts from which they have arisen, the timelessness in terms of what generation of humanity is in the process of manufacturing/experiencing said perceptual distortions, and level of infiltration into even the most basic levels of human interaction that requiring further requests for further explanation only serve to show one in a poorer or less flattering light. People lie. Period. The more that is at stake, the easier the act of lying becomes to stomach/justify.
You cannot have achieved adulthood without encountering some level of the type of practice being discussed. Even realizing that you have is in and of itself a formative moment in knowing oneself as a free agent.
It's cognitive dissonance. It:s coping. It's repression. It's distortion. It's for your own good, or more probably for the good of someone in a position to decide what is good for you in your stead.
If this is your first time thinking about or realizing this... I'm truly sorry. My condolences. Integrating it into a naive worldview is not a fun or enjoyable experience.
Locality and filter bubbles? DCMA takedowns? The mere existence of classified data? Every liar ever? Every nation that is and possibly has ever been or will be, either as concrete things or abstract entities? This is loose association of ideas, man, and still not the concrete examples from history I asked for.
But the coda makes up for it, and I thank you for the giggle.
Hey man, giggle away. You do you. Glad you can put off having to deal with how the world operates that much longer. Lotta people go their lives never noticing it, or putting a finger on it. Fewer still are ever in a position to put a finger on it and do anything about it.
I gave concrete examples of instances where an institution or root of authority implements by dicta a distortion on how information, and what information will propagate. If it's any comfort, I reacted the same way when someone pointed out to me the absurdity of duck and cover, and the impossibility of that squaring with the concept of a government conducting itself with integrity when I was more gung ho with regards to the integrity of my own government. It took a while for it to sink in that yeah, there's just stuff that ends up getting done because the unfiltered truth is so much more destructive to the status quo, that the ability to just waltz it in front of consenting to be governed people really seems like an idea that's pauseworthy.
Russia with their propaganda mill, China with the Great Firewall, media/copyright industry with DMCA, U.S. Government with executive privilege/classification authority.
It's universal. You either drive yourself mad, ignore it, work around it, or just deal with the fact info asymmetry is one of the fundamental pillars of power, and play along with the dog and pony show, trying to help the next group of sods not get burned so hard by it.
So tell ya what. Lemme turn it around on you.
How are any of these not things that if just about everyone knew about them in intimate detail would not have substantially changed the way things are today?
MKUltra
The Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiments.
COINTELPRO.
Operation Mockingbird.
The Sugar industry's great success at just conveniently not reporting studies that didn't make their cash crop seem the best way to go. Tobacco industry too. Hell, lets throw in pharma. Thalidomide happened too.
IBM sold machines to facilitate concentration camps.
DuPont happily working with IG Farben to scale Zyklon B production.
Petrochem, burying climate analysis over the last century.
19th-20th century capitalists hiring Pinkertons to bust union organization or get dirt on prospective partners/hires/competitors.
The American Fruit Corporation, and the Banana Republics.
Each one had it's veneer. Each one, frighteningly, may have had a legit claim to "being the right thing to do at the time" from the understanding underpinned by the information that was allowed to propagate for consideration at the time.
I can go on. I'm just weary of it. I see more banal and lower impact examples every day.
Coworker X not doing something because it won't be his problem by the time the consequence comes around, and fuck it, management doesn't care.
Management doesn't care because they've got an acquisition on the hook that'll just shitcan the business to keep it from disrupting the same old business model.
Like I said. Just look around. Info asymmetry is everywhere, and the benefactors (of which the little guy makes up not an insignificant number) like it that way.
It's bugged me for the longest time. Still bugs me.
You sure you were not just out of the loop? Engineers are often not included because they would object. You were only there a few years so I doubt you were privy to much of the politics.
While it may not be intentionally sinister, it's a precedent I can't agree with. Been on a journey to self-host as much of my stuff as I can to avoid this crap.
See, this just doesn't pass the bullshit test. Look at Google's history and ask whether this could possibly be true. Could it? Really? Yes, but only if we posit that Google is hiding their nefarious activity from their own employees.
Is this the Google you left? If so, one really needs to ask is whether we should be even more worried about a company that hides its evil from its own employees than about a company that's just plainly shitty.
google collects all your information and device info. They can also tie together all of your devices and accounts. They then share that info with the state and law enforcement.
Internally Google puts a huge premium on user safety and privacy. So much so that shipping anything requires getting changes through a regulatory process to safeguard users.
Google doesn’t do a good job of marketing its process. In some domains Google does explicitly use user behavior to drive revenue, so from the outside it becomes easy to spin changes like this as encroaching on user privacy, but I don’t see that here. I see something like a PM who is trying to surface some more functionality to users directly, and some engineers who spent far too long with lawyers to get sign off on this change.
It may be fashionable to sensationalize product changes like this, but the truth is often more mundane.
Edit: found a comment from the PM themselves in a previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30174304