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Comment by brianorwhatever | Hacker News Reader

Which is why I am surprised seeing this come from Google. Everyone has already admitted they are fine sending all of their data to them which benefits them greatly.

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I think this may be a Xerox Alto, IBM PC, or Sun Java moment. In the short term I can see a clear benefit to Google for this. They want to get machine-learning into more aspects of the Android mobile experience, Android customers are justifiably paranoid of sending things like every keystroke on the device back to Google's cloud, and so this gives them a privacy-acceptable way to deliver the features that will make them more competitive in a new market. Remember that the vast majority of Google employees honestly want to do what's best for the user, not what preserves Google's monopoly.

The vast majority of people in any organisation are good people who want what's best in the sense of the greater good - that does not prevent organisations from doing bad things.

I don't hold the leadership at Google with the same contempt as I hold the leadership at say Verizon, GE, Ford, or News Corp (WSJ). I'm sure given enough time all corporations are categorically evil but Google isn't there yet.

Oh god. Has YouTube drama escaped to Hacker News?

>> The vast majority of people in any organisation are good people who want what's best in the sense of the greater good

No. The vast majority of people in any organisation are timid folks who want what's best in the sense of the greater good, unless the greater good involves any courage on their part. These people are congenial, but don't confuse those with good people.

I have never heard it put so pithily, nice.

Google's internal training emphasizes to do the right thing and compete fairly%, going so far as to not use terms in PR or even internal email such as 'crush the competition' 'dominate' 'destroy', and always doing what's good for the user, rather than bad for the competition.

% and often mentions competition/monopoly laws

There's nothing altruistic about that. Emails with those words will cause problems for the legal department when they come up in discovery during antitrust litigation.

Wittgenstein disagrees.

Google forcing their employees to go through training to avoid bribery, sexual harassment, and antitrust problems for the company is not due to anything other than saving the company money. To be pedantic, the disagreement with GGP is not whether the actions are altruistic but whether the actions were done out of altruism.

It's easy being altruistic when you're the clear leader and have a comfortable margin. Doesn't give me any comfort knowing how benevolent Google is presently.

True, but there are some kinds of data that people are still uncomfortable sending to Google. Medical data is considered especially private, and aggregation of medical data is a huge obstacle to improving treatment using ML. I think this could be really huge in that space.

There is a movement to change consent forms (which patients sign as they enter a medical system) to permit larger sharing of medical data outside of its direct use. IE, you are offered an opt-in to permit your data to be analyzed beyond an individual visit, possibly for medical issues completely unrelated to any immediate medical problem. The consent forms are transparent, and opt-in- the health consumer is informed what their data will be used for, and they explicitly have to say it's OK (blanket consent, can be revoked).

I think this is a win, because the consumer has the choice, and if enough people do it ,the resulting aggregated datasets will have exceptional power to help solve global medical problems.

I'd say they reason they want your data is to make money, if they can do so without sending your data to their datacenters, why not?

If a goverment wants more power it makes sense to be able to read and store the data in their datacenter.

It's not training a very computation intensive activity?

Maybe Google could be interested in move some of the processing load to the users devices.

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