Reporter: Google successfully pressured me to take down critical story
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
So Google is releasing news to news outlets and asks for NDAs? Then they threaten to sue for NDA violations. I read it as Google is using NDAs to control and force only positive "news" articles. If article is painting them in a positive light, let it slide, if it is not, threaten to sue. Did I misunderstand it? Cause that sounds pretty sneaky.
> But an entity as powerful as Google doesn’t have to issue ultimatums. It can just nudge organizations and get them to act as it wants."
Very true. These systems of incentives and constraints is what Chomsky and Herman's book Manufacturing Consent is about. Highly recommended reading. Though in this case (if I read it correctly) it is not really that subtle but more of a clearcut Politburo-style "news" control.
Yes. You seem to assume this was some kind of press release. It was not: Google was previewing a new unreleased feature to one of their big clients, and that feature preview was under NDA. It just happens that this big client was Forbes, a news website. Forbes then failed to uphold the NDA internally and ended up publishing an article about this, breaking the agreement. Google PR noticed and reminded them of the NDA, and the editor in charge of the article at Forbes agreed and took down the article.
So evil.
"In addition to writing and reporting, I helped run social media there, so I got pulled into a meeting with Google salespeople about Google’s then-new social"
I wear multiple hats and sometimes roles have conflicting interests so it can difficult and confusing.
Once you publicly disclose, the nda makes no sense.
Sorry, but no.
Pretty much all nda's in the world would disagree with you.
Heck, let's just take the first search result for "nda sample" and look at it: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/sample-confidentialit...
Stare at clause 2, and you will see that situation would still be covered by NDA.
In basically all NDA's, it's about who does it, not about how it's done.
(We're assuming #1's requirements were met, as most NDA's also say that. AFAICT, the other people in the room believe #1 was met. Pretty much every presentation by Google ever is stamped Google Confidential and Proprietary)
Ok, i see your point. I'll go ahead and stipulate that the reporter was a super villain, and google was lilly white in their intentions.
Google was very lucky their lawyers were not the brain dead morons that went on record with a reporter about confidential information. There are plenty of articles speculating about how +1 would affect search rankings in 2011, which gives quite a bit of room in 2(a).
Google was in a position of immense power, and their clown-car approach happened to work out for them. Seriously guys, the trick to fire is banging the rocks together.
Do not go on record with a reporter about confidential information. it's PR 101. Just don't do it. Ever.
edit
This is condescending and harsh. I'm going to leave it, rather than delete it, because i think big G's PR department should have known better. But maybe take the words with some salt.
Under most NDA's, this would not matter. She originally received it as part of her employer. Most NDA's exclude the disclosing party telling you somehow else as a way of it becoming non-confidential.
Again, i'll just take the first sample NDA google finds (http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/sample-confidentialit...)
" (c) learned by the Receiving Party through legitimate means other than from the Disclosing Party or Disclosing Party's representatives"
Google PR telling a reporter a thing is "learned by the Receiving party from the disclosing party", not through another means. There was also no written approval here.
Pretty much every NDA i've ever seen (somewhere in the hundreds or thousands) would still cover the situation where PR confirmed something to someone that they had learned in an NDA'd situation.
Whether reporters respect these NDA's or not is another story. But this isn't even a close call. I think you'd struggle to find an NDA this wouldn't be a violation of.
A huge portion have always supported disclosure by journalists even when such disclosure represents an obvious violation of the law.
In short please pardon my language. Fuck the law.
People are angry with Google for abusing their power as a search engine to prevent journalists publishing true negative stories about Google.
I don't think people are going to be less angry after you explain that Google are doing this via the "clever hack" of informing the news site's SEO team about the negative story under NDA and using that to bind the site's journalists.
> The incident occurred in 2011. Hill was a cub reporter at Forbes, where she covered technology and privacy. At the time, Google was actively promoting Google Plus and was sending representatives to media organizations to encourage them to add "+1" buttons to their sites. Hill was pulled into one of these meetings, where the Google representative suggested that Forbes would be penalized in Google search results if it didn't add +1 buttons to the site.
I suppose that Google counsel could have thought this through in advance, and realized that they could block press coverage by using NDAs with media organizations. But that seems like an iffy strategy.
No actually, i'm not. As my profile says, at Google i run the C++ language teams. I gave up lawyering in any capacity for Google years ago.
Confirming confidential information something to someone under NDA doesn't violate the NDA.
>to a reporter
One's occupation has nothing to do with the legality or enforceability of an NDA.
> on record.
This is not a legal term, and has no legal value, but a practice in journalism. A journalist can publish things "off the record," it's fully legal it's just a way to ruin their reputation.
>Once you publicly disclose, the nda makes no sense.
Every serious NDA I've signed (dozens of them) has had a clause which basically says, "Once it becomes public it's no longer covered by this NDA."
However, Google didn't make the information public. They were talking to an employee of a business they have an NDA with (an employee which I'm sure has signed an NDA with Forbes and an agreement to honour all of Forbes' NDAs). Again, it's completely irrelevant that they're a reporter - as it should be. Could you imagine if Bezos/Amazon could violate any NDA they wanted as long as they passed the information onto a Washington Post reporter first? From the perspective of them being an employee of a company under NDA, this is clear as day.
Reporter appears to be deeply naive about the ramifications of Forbes violating an NDA.
Reporter also thinks their axe to grind is against Google, when in fact it is against Forbes if anyone, for being a "news" org that signs NDAs.
> Google's e-mail doesn't mention a key part of Hill's story: that she confirmed the information with Google's press shop. If I'd been in Hill's shoes, I would have taken that as a signal that I was free to report the information.
And you would have been wrong. Unless the NDA was nontradirioanlly drafted, this is still an agent of Google's telling an agent of Forbes confidential information. (This is why it is important to consult with lawyers when such contracts are involved.)
I agree, however, that much of the blame rests with Forbes' lack of internal controls.
She still violated an agreement her employer signed. If Google decided to pursue this, it would probably result in censure for Forbes. They, in turn, would seek to exploit the reporter's employment contract. Given the number of unknowns, it is difficult to speculate. She acted reasonably, given what she knew, though her reaction with full information betrays naïveté. TL; DR Forbes asking her to take down the article was perfectly reasonable. Her continuing to discuss it now that she knows it contained confidential information is not.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
I'd also be wildly shocked if the presentation/information given was not stamped "Google Confidential and Proprietary". I have never seen one that isn't in this situation. That is explicitly done to signal that it's a thing covered under an NDA. If your company signs NDA's, and isn't telling people who may receive the information that "getting stuff marked confidential means it's under that NDA", you are eventually in for a world of hurt and contractual damages.
I assume they pressured the author because they don't want to own the responsibility they should.
You are wrong.
"Its impossible to agree to such without being aware of it."
Same goes for laws. You do not need to aware of an law to be subjected to it. Especially tricky in foreign countries.
And yes you do need to be aware of a contract. A meeting of the minds is a specific requirement for a contract to be valid. You can't agree to something you don't know about.
The article doesn't really give context on what information the story that got pulled had, and just that headline of "penalising" sites that didn't add the feature is hard to judge properly without knowing exactly what was said. I can certainly imagine Google trying to sell how big Google+ was going to be, and how adding the +1 button would drive users to Forbes for engagement and conversations. In such a theoretical argument, missing out on this engagement would set Forbes lower on the search results, effectively penalizing them. To me, this would be very different than an explicit punishing of sites that did not adopt the feature, which is obviously an abuse of power.
— Godfather Google when promoting their +1
WHY the hell is this not a bigger deal? This is extortion.
Its easy to see that this could be misused to much worse effect. Personally I intend to migrate my domain, my email away from google.
The best way to avoid evil is not to look on manufactured news, but on actual power, and strife towards distributed powercenters, struggling with one another. Always, without ifs and buts.
HN may be fairly right-wing but there is an implausible amount of apologetics for one of the world's largest and most powerful companies engaging in plainly coercive behaviour.
On the internet, people are far too quick do this because they can't imagine that views which seem (to them) so wrong and dumb could possibly be coming from others in good faith. But the truth is that the opinion diversity of the community wildly exceeds intuitive estimates. The null hypothesis, therefore, when it feels like astroturfing simply must be going on, is that you're underestimating the good faith of others. It's super tempting to reach for the stick (PR! astroturf! shill! how much are they paying you!) but we know from experience that this degrades discussion quickly, and therefore the temptation needs resisting—hence that guideline. Real astroturfing exists, of course, but it's a quite different species than this common astroturfy warbler. If you're worried about it, we can investigate, but you need to email us rather than post comments about it.
In this case Occam is even more active than usual because there's a particularly obvious explanation for what you're seeing: the tendency of the community to respond with objections to whatever gets posted. If the article were slanted the opposite way, so would the comments be, not because different 'astroturfers' would show up but because the people most motivated to comment are the ones who see something to pick holes in. Then others show up to pick holes in the way the first round of holes was picked—invariably leading with "I can't believe this community is so X", not realizing that they're motivated by just the same thing as their predecessors. This dynamic is a problem in its own right but for different reasons.
Btw your assessment of HN as 'right wing' has the same cognitive bias—underestimating the diversity of the community—embedded in it. It's clear (painfully clear, at least to me!) that the opposite wing sees HN just the opposite way and has just as ready a supply of examples to point to. An anarcho-anti-capitalist story has spent the last several hours on the front page, etc.
When asked about the motivations and perspective of a smuggler, Quark explained[1], "No one involved in an extra-legal activity thinks of himself as nefarious."
Bad faith would apply to a "PR team" involved in some sort of premeditated, intentional fraud. That isn't necessary, and I don't believe I've seen that type of accusation. I'm sure both the posts from various known Google-employees and a hypothetical "PR team" are acting in good faith. Is there even any significant difference in what a random "true believing" engineer and a PR agent would say?
Google probably hasn't ordered a team of PR specialist to post on HN, but self-motivated employees defending their business may be functionally similar.
[1] DS9 s06e25 "The Sound of Her Voice"
Do people make accusations of actual fraud (astroturfing, shillage)? You bet, all the time. That's why we added a site guideline saying not to.
Going back to my hobby-horse, I wonder how much user-flagging of posts is caused by similar perceptual biases, and what effect this has on others' perceptions of the site. From the outside, it looks this article was flagged off the front page: http://hnrankings.info/15171291/.
Was it someone who disagreed with the anti-Google slant of the article, or someone who didn't like that many of the comments appeared pro-Google? Even if there was some non-flagging reason for the sudden drop, I'm sure that both "sides" will view the demotion as evidence that the site (admins, users, or both) is biased against them.
But feel free to assume this is a conspiracy if that makes you happy.