A good reminder that Google's customers are actually advertisers, whereas Apple's customers are the end-user.
I'd say it's a lot more complicated than that.
If you are paying Google, you are definitely a customer. This would be anything from GSuite/cloud, Fi, Play store, Express, and many others. Google isn't just Ads, there are a lot of products and lot of teams that have different priorities and concerns.
Product teams here that you don't pay still care about their users. It's good to remember that there are still engineers behind these products. Many of them have similar opinions to those expressed on HN. When an unpopular decision is made, people are vocal with their concerns.
You're not Google's customer. You're just a product that they convinced to give them money in addition to what they get by leveraging your personal information to sell ads.
You're a customer of X if you pay for goods/services from X. As customers, we're just not nearly as valuable as a big advertiser.
1) If you are a consumer user taking advantage of free things, information about you has value to the provider. In this case, it has value to Google as an adtech company. But it's also true that Google historically has been very happy to provide free services to users for altruistic purposes, and continues to do so. This can lead to their early demise, but c'est la vie. How things are prioritized for development, much less scheduled for launch or deprecated at Google, are some of the most misunderstood processes/lore in tech.
2) If you are paying Google for product access, that is completely different and a) your data is not mined for advertising nor are ads displayed to you, and b) you have access to paid support.
The problem is that you can be both of those things at the same time, it takes time and an understanding of legalese to untangle when you're a customer vs. when you're a product, and Google makes basically all of its money from surveillance. If you have multiple PREF cookies (product), will Google use G Suite (customer) info to merge those profiles?
That said, I also completely believe that Executives at Google are driven by what drives the majority of Google's revenue, i.e. the people that pay them the most money, their customers, advertisers.
Engineers can have the best of intentions but what Google or any company, especially a publicly listed company beholden to their shareholders, ultimately ends up doing is what ultimately benefits their shareholders as decreed by their leadership.
I'm not saying you should trust any corporation to ultimately have your best interests at heart. I'm saying you should trust what is on their balance sheets to determine what values they will hold and protect when they decide their lobbying budgets in Washington, Brussels, etc. for the year. After that, you can vote with your wallet, time, attention, or whatever asset it is you hold that a given corporation covets.
So can you say with certainty that if I pay for GSuite that Google won't mine my hosted data/metadata or other information any more or less than someone that doesn't? Does Google only track my purchases in the Play Store to keep track of what I have in fact purchased as a good storefront would, and not to store it in a larger profile they've constructed of me or just sell the info on to a broker? I pay for YouTube Red, so does Google not use any information from my YouTube profile for advertising purposes on its other properties?
This leads to issues for anyone who has tried to use a Google account setup through GSuite for consumer apps where they basically don't work at all.
Can you imagine the stupid amounts of lawsuits that could be generated if Google were in the habit of scanning business documents and reselling information about them to third parties? I know they have a ToS, but the aggregate legal departments of all their GSuite customers are preeeetty big.
I can say this as a former G Suite buyer who signed the contract & ToS, a current googler working with G Suite and Cloud resellers, and as someone who has been a part of Google's internal GDPR readiness programs.
I cannot address the rest of your questions authoritatively, but I don't particularly care about those, either, comparatively.
however, anything they can get from your browsing habits via google.com search and other ways of tracking you via data you may expose from non-G Suite Core Services, are fair game.
i have been a personal and corporate admin of G Suite nee Google Apps for 5 years. i believe the policy is adhered to by Google through my own anecdotal use as user and engineer over many domains and companies. and i believe who claim they can prove Google is scanning paid G Suite account data and using it to target are not realising that non-cloudsearch ie regular google.com searches and everything connected to your G Suite profile based on those searches is what is getting you targeted.
not the use of G Suite.
(For the curious, this has been repeatedly disproven.)
https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security/security-white...
Does it have exceptions somewhere / am I not reading close enough?
It is not clear to me from papers up through, say, 2016, whether you’ve achieved a guaranteed (compliant by technical architecture rather than by policy) level of access and data separation. Direct conversations had also made it clear it was not yet achieved.
You mentioned GDPR which indeed should require you to have to do the right thing soon, but it allows policy vs. technical controls. Bad actors don’t care about your policy, and good actors make inadvertent errors.
I’d like to know if/how the tech under the hood has changed o support the last couple years’ contract changes and upcoming EU compliance.
If anyone can point me to more recent papers or talks that evidence how it’s now impossible for, say, even a motivated bad actor in support or bad actor in SRE teams to violate data policy, I’d appreciate it.
Even if you can only talk to me off he record, I’d appreciate it.
You guys were honest, not ready for our level. About right amount of time’s passed, helpful to learn progress? I’m at new job, still interested.
At this bank I don’t have paper with you, we’d have to do that. Mail in Profile.
I want to believe the software engineers are good people, but how do I square that with the things they are not just making, but enthusiastically supporting?
Then yes, you can. Your argument, applied broadly, has you applauding the pride of IBM engineers who developed systems to assist the Nazis in identifying people to slaughter. The idea that engineering exists apart from moral principle is absurd.
You're a customer for a different product/service than the one under discussion. What does that change about the one that's under discussion? Nothing. They're different relationships that imply no in relation to each other.
Doesn't say much. Engineers are even behind ransomware products. You guys may need new justifications to feel good.
The question is not if you're a customer, but if you're a customer that matters. By "matter", I mean respected and cared for as a singular entity.
When I worked for Oracle, I was told only 150-to-200 customers formed the lion's share of Oracle's revenue. Think three letter agencies, foreign governments, national banks, and the like.
The other tens-of-thousands of customers contributed to a smaller share of the pie and so they only mattered in aggregate.
Without crunching the numbers, I'd say that Google probably operates on the same, if hidebound, business logic.
Additionally, if I were Google I would care a lot more about the millions of small advertisers as they represent a much safer way to make billions of dollars (less support required and you are less beholden to a small number of agencies/advertisers who would tend to be difficult to deal with).
For example, I believe the AMP team, at a low level, thinks they are doing a good thing. Their leadership, however, is pulling the strings. Kinda wish the team was more aware of how they are being manipulated.
In the exact same way that someone who pays Comcast for internet & television service is a customer, and continues to receive commercials, to have their behavior tracked and sold, and to have their privacy rights lobbied against.
> We generate substantially all of our revenues from advertising, and reduced spending by advertisers or a loss of partners could harm our advertising business.
> We generated over 86% of total revenues from advertising in 2017. Many of our advertisers, companies that distribute our products and services, digital publishers, and content partners can terminate their contracts with us at any time. Those partners may not continue to do business with us if we do not create more value (such as increased numbers of users or customers, new sales leads, increased brand awareness, or more effective monetization) than their available alternatives. If we do not provide superior value or deliver advertisements efficiently and competitively, we could see a decrease in revenue and other adverse impacts to our business. In addition, expenditures by advertisers tend to be cyclical, reflecting overall economic conditions and budgeting and buying patterns. Adverse macroeconomic conditions can also have a material negative impact on user activity and the demand for advertising and cause our advertisers to reduce the amounts they spend on advertising, which could adversely affect our revenues and advertising business.
> New and existing technologies could block ads online, which would harm our business.
> Technologies have been developed that enable users to block the display of ads altogether and some providers of online services have integrated technologies that could potentially impair the core functionality of third-party digital advertising. Most of our Google revenues are derived from fees paid to us in connection with the display of ads online. As a result, such technologies and tools could adversely affect our operating results.
B) Why should any of us care if there are human engineers doing human things behind any of this? Are you trying to throw a pity party here? "People are vocal about their concerns." That sounds like whole lot of, well, concerned people. Good for you. The occupy Wall Street clowns were also very concerned. And a minor irritation for a lot of people who were not the 1% but were just trying to get to work.
I honestly put about 0% of interest into people who say they are concerned about anything. If it's really that important to you, get off your ass and do something about it. Otherwise I really don't care. And here's the sad truth for you: no one cares about what people are concerned about. Not a single person. No one at Google, and no one anywhere else. No one. No one cares who is vocal about their concerns. Not us, and not the management at Google.
I walked away from the highest paying job of my career 6 months ago because I thought they were making bad decisions that damaged people's lives. I was vocal about the bad decisions before I quit. I was ignored. And that's all fine. I lived off savings for a while, and then I ran out and had to do odd jobs and even some manual labor to float me until I landed a new gig a couple weeks ago.
You can do that too. You don't have to do what I did and walk out of a meeting and not go back, but you can do this. If you really think that bad decisions are being made, the only meaningful way of making your voice heard is to not work there anymore.
Until people start doing that, literally no one cares about what you think or if you're concerned or voicing your opinions. The only things that matter are the product decisions your leadership team makes.
I suspect you are a sincere and caring person who doesn't like every choice that Google makes. That's wonderful. So do something meaningful about it. Stop making those things happen.
This whole "you're the product" thing gets repeated over and over again with no thought or analysis. Being the product instead of the customer has plusses and minuses. Have you worked with a recruiter? You're definitely the product there: they're selling you to employers, who are their customers. I've dealt with recruiters both as the product (prospective employee) and the customer (employer). In general, I prefer to be the product, though neither is entirely comfortable.
By far the more important dynamic is are you a valuable product/customer. That's what gets you treated well. The answer to that for any mass-market company is "no."
But there is a huge difference between recruiting for a factory employing 100'000 people (or in Googles case billions) or recruiting a more important person. I guess you were the latter.
Nonetheless, it changes nothing. Google needs good services so that is has products to sell (i.e. users). Apple skips a step by creating things for which their customer is the user. It's a subtle difference, but it's worth discussing.
Wow, that's a strong statement. If anything, your inital comment reeks of thoughtless-soundbite-repetition - I also find that statement meaningless and annoying in most contexts. What is it supposed to prove? That Google cares less about its users than it cares about advertisers? Obviously a company needs to take care of its products, or it'll lose the customers too. In fact, most companies invest more in their products than they "invest" in their customers - arguably, as soon as they get a monopoly (or lock you into their ecosystem) they stop caring about you as a customer, at all - and start thinking how to extract more value from you (as opposed to "provide more value to you")
> It's a subtle difference, but it's worth discussing.
Well, discuss it, don't just state it as if it means something obvious.
Another point - Apple has 100s of millions of customers, whereas Google has billions. Google literally has a 10x scaling problem, and correspondingly a far lower revenue per customer (or product as you like).
I love Google services, but I interact with them knowing I'm one of billions.
In any event there's no way that Google can provide the level of support that any company who's revenue is directly tied to the products that are purchased.
And it's obvious support is extremely expensive because companies that spend a lot on it give great support (like Apple) and companies that spend a little give very little or very limited support (like Google).
Well, yeah, if there was any thought or analysis, people would say “supplier” not “product”.
Even still, apple is still collecting data on you. If their business ever suffers, they can still sell your data. Apple still owns your data even if they aren't currently selling it.
Apple uses their data to make better product to sell to you. They don't sell their data to advertisers because they don't need to.
What is going to happen if iphones, ipads, etc don't sell as well?
Given their track record on privacy, particularly using it as a selling point, they'd be poisoning the well pretty badly if they did this. It's more likely they'd burn through their cash before even thinking of selling user data.
I can't see it happening on Tim Cook's watch or any of the existing executive team, but maybe an external hire.
The data that Maps collects while you use the app — like search terms, navigation routing, and traffic information — is associated with random identifiers so it can’t be tied to your Apple ID.
Or Apple Pay:
When you use Apple Pay we don’t track what you’re buying, so we can’t build a purchase history to serve you ads.
Or Siri:
If you give your explicit consent, Apple can improve Siri and other intelligent features by analyzing how you use iCloud and the data from your account. Analysis happens only after the data has gone through privacy-enhancing techniques so that it cannot be associated with you or your account
Note the word "can't" that appears over and over. Yes Apple necessarily records some data, e.g. for streaming services. But broadly speaking, Apple couldn't sell the data to advertisers even if they chose to, because they don't have the data.
A good way to see this in action is to try to get end user technical support from both companies.
How does a user get assistance from a human being at Google when they have problems with their personal Gmail account, for example?
Apple gives it's customers the ability to walk into it's stores and get one on one help, or to talk to actual human beings in technical support over the telephone.