Disclaimer: I work for Google. I also think that there is an anti-Google bias on hacker news, holding Google to a standard not applied to others and taking any excuse to roll out the same old tired rants in response to almost any Google post (DAE Google Reader etc).
If what I read is true then this is the first thing that has truly rocked my confidence that the company generally tries to do the right thing (while making money of course, we're not a charity). I expect significant internal backlash if they proceed and I hope they learn from this.
> 4.1 Uphold, promote, and respect the principles of the Code.
The future of computing depends on both technical and ethical excellence. Computing professionals should adhere to the principles of the Code and contribute to improving them. Computing professionals who recognize breaches of the Code should take actions to resolve the ethical issues they recognize, including, when reasonable, expressing their concern to the person or persons thought to be violating the Code.
> 4.2 Treat violations of the Code as inconsistent with membership in the ACM.
Each ACM member should encourage and support adherence by all computing professionals regardless of ACM membership. ACM members who recognize a breach of the Code should consider reporting the violation to the ACM, which may result in remedial action as specified in the ACM's Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct Enforcement Policy.
Please voice your concern. Your voice as a Googler is louder than mine.
So are you as critical with every other company that does business in China. Are you gonna throw out half of the products in your house which are Made In China? Are you also criticizing Apple and Tesla for doing business in China?
It isn't just about doing business in China, but the nature of the business (and propping up the Chinese regime).
Apple have had plenty of stick about their practices too. I think they just have too many diehard followers that the negative information gets drowned out by the positive.
I think there's a perception that Google is the one company that many people are (or were) supportive of, because of their past stance with regard to China. Google's former motto of "Don't be evil" convinced a lot of people that they have strong ethical standards. This may have been true in the early days. To me, it has not been true ever since Schmidt became CEO. I've been actively avoiding Google as much as possible since around 2005, because it was glaringly obvious even then that they were out to destroy privacy.
I also avoid Apple. Never liked their software, and they have pretty much the same problems wrt privacy.
A couple of months ago there was a post on the frontpage about some Google service being redesign. All the top comments about it found some non-obvious negative spin on it. That was the time when it became obvious to me how strong the anti-Google sentiment had become at HN.
Look no further than this page. The top comment compares the Chinese Government's surveillance with being forced to sign into Chrome. There would have been a lot more interesting intellectual discussions to be had about this topic: China, corporate responsibility, are the Chinese better off with just Baidu...
It is just a reflection of the accumulated negative sentiment. If you categorize the users, on one end, you'd have a group that would complain about the redesign (but not care about world hunger as a problem, because it doesn't affect them), and on the other the egalitarian crowd that would react to Google's motives more than Google's moves (in China or elsewhere). Lately, it looks like Google is actively trying to alienate anything inside the user spectrum in search for profits.
Unfortunately we can't reach an engaging intellectual discussion on this. In the same way we can't about North Korea dedication about giving up the nukes, or women being able to drive in Saudi Arabia, because people are starving in family prisons and are being hanged and skinned alive, in 2018.
Sometimes the overall picture obscures the interesting intricate details, and as humans are emotional souls, in a very survivalist fashion, they react to what threatens them the most.
> holding Google to a standard not applied to others
When Microsoft was deemed "evil" under Balmer, Google acted like it was a "cool startup which didn't do evil" and used that positive PR to grow as they were seen more "ethical" than the competition. That's why they are held to higher standards today.
Microsoft for instance never claimed they had any sort of moral compass other than the morals of making money.
I also think that there is an anti-Google bias on hacker news
I think you are correct. But I don't think it's people being anti-Google because it's Google, or tribalism, or whatever. It's people being anti-bad things, and Google has evolved into a bad thing.
A bias is defined as an unfair leaning towards one opinion regardless of stimulus. If you're saying that Google is being evaluated fairly, you are disagreeing with the parent's claim that HN is biased.
HN isn't biased, but it is an interesting example of collective hypocrisy without any individual changing their mind.
Google is and always has been a privacy disaster waiting to happen, and we know lack of privacy and bad government are a potentially lethal (in the strictest and most literal sense!).
Historically, there has been a strong pro-Google bias in the tech sector that ignores this, possibly because of all the cool technical work they do. Still exists in my opinion, I've talked to techies who don't seem to realise that Google is an advertising company.
The current process is all the pro-technical-coolness people going quiet and all the pro-privacy people speaking up because Google has started to make poor decisions.
While I cannot speak for user comments after this one, nobody is referencing Google Reader here. The stakes are higher here than general "Google ain't what they was back in the Good Old Days", they are "People could be detained, tortured, (please just be hyperbole...) killed because of searches they made that were tracked by this Google Joint Venture and handed over to a repressive government".
But that's kind of my point. This is substantively different and is pretty serious. And no, I haven't seen any particularly unreasonable comments in this thread.
So, here's an honest question: How do they find people to work on these products if the general consensus is that this is a bad thing to do? How do they keep word of these projects from spreading within the company?
It seems if enough people feel strongly about this, then at least one would quit after being assigned to this project, and even if there's an NDA and they can't relate the details of why they quit, it would be alarming enough to say "I felt compelled to quit because I could not in good conscience work on the project I was assigned." I'm not sure an NDA can protect against something like that.
"(1) A major corporation is like a construction set. It can be used to put together the whole world. (2) Because of the growing division of labor, many people no longer recognize the role they play in producing mass destruction. (3) That which is manufactured in the end is the product of the workers, students, and engineers."
This last thesis is illustrated with an alarmingly clear image. The same actor, each time at a washroom sink, introduces himself as a worker, a student, an engineer. As an engineer, carrying a vacuum cleaner in one hand and a machine gun in the other, he says, "I am an engineer and I work for an electrical corporation. The workers think we produce vacuum cleaners. The students think we make machine guns. This vacuum cleaner can be a valuable weapon. This machine gun can be a useful household appliance. What we produce is the product of the workers, students, and engineers."
The suggestion from the link is that some people involved didn't fully understand what they were working on. And obviously they weren't able to keep word spreading in this case.
But obviously a number of people must have known. I don't know how they approach and recruit these people, it's above my paygrade.
You just get asked to work on project blah. And you're like okay, what do I do? Figure out this system for them, okay. And you work and focus on the technical details.
I mean, I really appreciate all of you who seem to dig in and dive into the what and why of every system you work on, but I often just do work. I get tunnel vision and do the things I have to do. I don't really care about much outside of that spectrum unless it impacts what I have to accomplish.
Oh, I do that too-- especially those times I have to drill down several layers deep into the ugly undocumented guts of an abstraction some other developer left knots in.
But somehow I never climb back out to find the bug I just fixed is part of a giant censorship machine.
Are you saying there is a greater than zero chance that you've accidentally done work on a similarly unethical system?
I've worked on something that I didn't realize was... perhaps not in the sphere of things I want to work on for 1 year.
When you're focused on technical details, cost evaluations, etc, you're not exactly thinking about what the thing is used for, or why. At least, I wasn't and I assume it works the same way for others.
It's really easy to just get assigned to a project, and start working on it.
Just some editorial advice: put the lede in the first paragraph. The disclaimer should be lightened up, unless that's what you want people to engage with.
Edit: I wrote this because I was sad that people were arguing with the disclaimer, not the author's more substantive point. I don't mean to be patronizing or condescending in any way.
It's true. The google group in question is still active and visible to any Google employee.
However, you should put this in perspective. Google is still one of the most transparent companies of its size. People intentionally collected and shared high sensitive company information. At most companies, security would show up at the desk of everyone involved in this with a box to pack their stuff. At Google, they got an email which asked them to delete the document.
Also, keep in mind that we are talking about a project that is not launched, probably never will be and, if you give Google's leadership the benefit of the doubt, was never going to be.
> Disclaimer: I work for Google. I also think that there is an anti-Google bias on hacker news, holding Google to a standard not applied to others and taking any excuse to roll out the same old tired rants in response to almost any Google post (DAE Google Reader etc).
I hate to break this to you, but the anti-Google bias is well beyond HN. Google is pissing off conservatives who think you censor them, civil rights activists who are being ignored, privacy activists who want Google to be accountable, regular users who simply can't figure out how to get Google to stop tracking them, developers who go unheard on your message boards, influencers who are tired of Google unilaterally imposing their will on the internet (coughAMPcough), and a ration of other people who are just tired of Google having it's nose in literally everything they touch.
Google is held to the standard it wants to be held to. You think Project Zero can just go around blackmailing competitors forever without eventually pissing someone off? When was the last time Microsoft or Apple publicly disclosed a Google Zero Day? Google does that all the time.
You can't try to maintain 99% market share in search and not expect people to hold you to a high standard. Google put itself here and now has it in it's collective head that it's "too big and important to fail."
Even you are going around the internet saying that Google can do no wrong despite being confronted with an endless stream of evidence proving otherwise. LISTEN. TO. PEOPLE.
Is this the Google complaint line? I didn't know this existed! I'd like to complain about the stupid "Al Jazeera is funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government", "teleSUR is funded in whole or in part by the Latin American government" [where is the capital of that government?], etc. messages I have to see every time I watch a trustworthy news program. Why don't those messages show up when viewing dreck like CNN and Fox News?
If a literal link to their code of conduct with the motto in tact isn't enough to convince you, then I don't see what will. You're free to keep spreading misinformation as you please.
If what I read is true then this is the first thing that has truly rocked my confidence that the company generally tries to do the right thing (while making money of course, we're not a charity). I expect significant internal backlash if they proceed and I hope they learn from this.