Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

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> Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes.

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.

> Did I misunderstand it?

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.

Google PR confirmed, to a reporter, on record. Not covered by nda.

Once you publicly disclose, the nda makes no sense.

"Google PR confirmed, to a reporter, on record. Not covered by nda. "

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)

i'm not a lawyer and not interested in becoming a lawyer.

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.

>Google PR confirmed

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.

If it was "Google PR" that confirmed, speaking to her as a reporter, yes. But it's not entirely clear what "Google's press shop" means. If she spoke with Google staff in her role as a Forbes employee, it arguably wasn't really a public disclosure. Because said Google staff arguably wouldn't have disclosed that information to some random reporter.

"speaking to her as a reporter, yes. "

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.

OK, thanks. It's the two-hat aspect that keeps confusing me. If, for example, some random reporter, not covered by the NDA, had infiltrated the Forbes-Google meeting, they could have reported it. But the Forbes employee can't escape the NDA by changing hats.

Since when did we in the US start caring about technical matters over whats right?

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.

You're a Google lawyer, right?

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.

Was this really a "clever hack"? From the article:

> 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.

"You're a Google lawyer, right?"

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.

Interesting. Based on your response to the Gemstash licensing kerfuffle[0] a couple weeks ago I would have guessed you were still lawyering in some capacity for Google. Are you still involved in the opensource licensing policies at Google in a non-lawyering capacity?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15085100

Forget about the NDA situation. What's evil is penalizing traffic that doesn't promote Google with buttons. That's far worse.

Ah, thanks for clarifying. That makes more sense. It did seem like a misunderstanding. The reporter was never told by her superiors at Forbes that the meeting was under NDA. And she was "wearing two hats" at the time so to speak, which explains why she was invited to the meeting, but it wasn't as a "reporter" it seems:

"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.

No one has disputed the evil bit, which is that google is leveraging their search monopoly to force publishers to use Google Plus. It serves Google very well to turn this into a debate about whether this reporter was or wasn't under nda. Regardless, the reporter's claim about plus is very newsworthy.

Things that happened 6 years ago aren't really considered news...

When there are new revelations, they certainly are.

Just for the record, the parent comment comes from a Google employee.

Why does that matter?

They have a vested interest literally (RSUs). I'll let you decide whether they should disclose that before making comments defending them.

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