

Ask HN: How much more is there to Google the company than meets the eye? - mtowle

How do you think they compare to defense contractors, et al. in terms of secret initiatives, black box projects, whatever?<p>Asking due to Assange-Schmidt transcript and the Assange NYT op-ed, but might prefer answers which avoid Assange and focus on Google (or MS or whoever).
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mcintyre1994
They'll give the government whatever they like, just like all the other
mentioned companies. Collecting more data is pretty much their business goal,
so they're pretty well aligned already. I doubt they do anything special
exclusively to help the NSA though, if the data's useful they'd be collecting
it for themselves anyway.

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nostrademons
You should probably assume that with any large corporation you are privy to
about 0.01% of what goes on there.

(Of course, that doesn't mean that the remaining 99.99% is evil. Actually,
your assumptions about what's going on with stuff that you don't know about
says a lot about yourself as a person.)

~~~
tgpc
(ex-googler here)

google is pretty good about this. if you're a googler, you'll find out about
most of the other things going on. there were a few exceptions during my time
there (Android, Wave), but the teams involved always came clean to Googlers
before they told the world. The culture is definitely very open.

my suggestion: join and find out :-)

