Hacker News Reader

Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

Most businesses focus on the business mission and suppress distractions from that mission. Debates about ethics, politics and public policy are seen as unwelcome distractions.

But Google is a different kind of company. Google was founded on a set of ethical and moral principles that go beyond the immediate business mission. As described in the IPO founders' letter [0], their objective is to do "good things for the world even if we forgo short-term gains".

You may be skeptical about this and see it as either naïveté or as a cynical ploy, but the drive to do the right thing independent from financial results is deeply ingrained in Google's culture.

So it should be no surprise that there's constant and vigorous debate at Google about what's right and wrong. Seems to be working pretty well for them [1].

[0] https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004/ipo-letter.ht...

[1] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4165541-alphabet-q1-2018-ea...

View on HN

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -CS Lewis

Politics/religion and business don't mix, you will alienate half your potential audience and piss off your employees. When was the last time your car insurance company imposed a political opinion on you?

With the power that Google has as a conduit for information, having any sort of political bias in presenting information is frighteningly Orwellian. Their recent egregious transgressions has caused me to avoid their products wherever possible. The most ironic thing IMO is their willingness to neuter one of the most amazing free speech platforms that has ever been created, YouTube. I've switched off their search engine and now primarily use duckduckgo and bing. I'm also using the brave browser. I am distancing myself from that company as fast as alternatives present themselves.

“Half” is a joke. If you look at the entire market (i.e the entire world) that Google is addressing, the segment of American Republicans who support gun rights and are concerned about equal time for the extreme right wing is vanishingly small.

About half of Americans are right of center. What I'm saying is EVERY political stance google takes alienates a segment of their customers and employees. This includes stances which alienate left leaning people too.

Does anyone remember that the YouTube shooter was a PETA activist who was enraged over the demonetization and de-circulation of her videos?

right != extreme right.

That the overton window has shifted doesn't mean what's on display is just "right wing" - it's extreme.

So what is "center" anyways? The single-axis political scale is a very flawed way of looking at

I guess center is the median? Therefore by definition half will always be right of center.

The center is it's own political direction which seeks to apply proposals from both left and right, pragmatism is a driving force.

> When was the last time your car insurance company imposed a political opinion on you?

https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=F09

The idea that any apolitical company exists is fanciful. Simply giving employees the right to political opinions is hardly a reason to boycott the company; it's a reason to support it.

That said, Google's tolerance-but-only-for-tolerable-opinions is itself problematic.

OK, but google's approach is more akin to your car insurance company denying your business because they disagree with your political opinion bumper sticker and then refusing to tell you why.

Their position in the video market is such that they don't need to compete for content providers and that is a problem.

Lobbying is different. Democracy is for finding how to define common policy, lobbying can be (though not always is) a legitimate part of this. This is different, for example, from refusing to do business with people holding certain political opinion or actively trying to silence them.

> Google's tolerance-but-only-for-tolerable-opinions

It's not even that. It's "tolerance only for opinion which nobody out of the list of groups that are allowed to object finds objectionable". The groups of course are defined by Google HR politics. So if you are animal rights activist and group in power dislikes you - you're not tolerated and even people in Google that want to hear you can't. If this is "tolerance" then what is intolerance, I wonder?

the second half of the quote might even be more relevant:

>"This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”"

I don't see any justification for the claim made in that quote. It sounds cool but that doesn't make it true.

> When was the last time your car insurance company imposed a political opinion on you

Is it still common in the US that car insurance company look at gender and race when determining a individuals premium? That gender or race matters when determining a individual person risk for accidents seems very political.

You've never heard of Progressive Insurance? The name is not an accident - it's a very deliberate expression of their pretty much communist values...

Kinda like progressive web apps?

Hehe, made me laugh.

(FTR: I make good money making web apps. I'm also an honest person who, if asked or given a chance to tell, will tell people that they'll often reach their goals faster and save money by building and old fashioned solution with minimal Javascript.)

I generally agree with you but I genuinely believe PWAs are an improvement over balkanized native mobile development.

We can agree on that too : )

I want to point out that Larry Page himself thought advertising-funded search engines had an inherent conflict of interest, and that search needed to be in the realm of academia: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html (Appendix A)

Amazingly, several billion dollars, and a few private yachts later, nobody at Google calls into question the fact that the company's very existence is unethical.

Hardly unethical. If academia could produce a search engine of equal quality but without ads, people would use it.

You may not like the ads, but they pay for the product. Which let's face it, is really quite good. There is probably no other software product I've been as loyal to for as long. Even linux, which is amazing, I haven't used for as long. I started out on Windows. I almost always find what I'm looking for on the first page of Google results, if it's to be found at all. That's remarkable when you think of how much information is out there.

I believe it could or it could produce something of similar quality, but the incentives aren't there. You can spend years in academia trying to build something like that or you can just go to Google and mmake bank. It's an easy choice. That doesn't mean it's not possible, it is just that our incentives are distorted.

If academia could produce a search engine of equal quality but without ads, people would use it.

Well...but it did, and they did. But you (and Larry Page) raise a good question: is it necessary for web search to be profitable?

> is it necessary for web search to be profitable?

Well, then you got two choices: run by a non-profit or run by the government.

The first one is unsustainable and the second one ... well, that would turn into even worse politics. Can you say "Welcome to TrumpSearch" or "Welcome to SearchHill"?

Every four/eight years the search database would be completely upended/suppressed/repressed/uplifted to reflect current political thinking, favoritism, lobbying, fears, hopes, hatred, etc.

It would make gerrymandering look paltry.

Even worse because you couldn't guarantee that the politicians in charge would be competent to understand a spreadsheet, much less a search engine.

The Postal Service continues delivering me magazines and solicitations for donations from politicians and interest groups opposed to the party in power.

Profits drive competition and competition discourages stasis. So it is necessary? Probably not. But we probably get a better result with it being outside of academia.

>Profits drive competition and competition discourages stasis.

In industry, yes. Academia, no.

> is it necessary for web search to be profitable?

Yes. What's not necessary is for those profits to come from advertisers instead of users.

If Google really wanted to do good for the world, it could show the world how a product like their search engine, or maps, or any of their mainstay apps, could be monetized by revenue directly from users. That's how for-profit is supposed to work: you find out what users want by finding out what they will pay for. And if there's any company that could do that, it's Google. But instead, they're monetizing our ad clicks. What the ...?

"X isn't an unethical way of doing business because the only successful people in the industry are doing it in X way" is a very bad principle. It can trivially be used to defent slavery, child labor, bribery and corruption, fraud, market manipulation, organized crime, etc.

The question is, if X were prohibited by law / social pressure, a) would anyone else show up in the market who's currently being crushed and b) if not, is the benefit to society of avoiding X practice worth not having anyone in this industry?

I'd bet that (a) is true in this case, especially considering that Google did come out of academia originally.

>Hardly unethical. If academia could produce a search engine of equal quality but without ads, people would use it.

Specious reasoning. Quality has no implied positive correlation with with ethics.

On the contrary, you can easily become very competitive by giving up on ethics (see Volkswagen diesels for example). So the best search product might belong to Google but that hardly implies its an ethical company.

True. However, the argument that advertising in search results is unethical seems weak, I don't see it. There is some conflict of interest, but Google walks the line pretty well. I don't think it necessarily follows that a conflict of interest mandates unethical behavior.

I correct my stance to be that the trade-off of having better search quality in exchange for ads in the search results and the associated tracking is still worth it to me. If I felt otherwise I would use a more privacy friendly search engine.

You may not like the ads, but they pay for the product.

Please don't think the audience here on HN is naïve enough to believe rhetoric like "Search is the product." It isn't, and it never has been. The product is the ads; they pay for the mechanisms that display the ads, whether that's search, YouTube, GMail, or whatever. Those things are undoubtedly useful services, but the product Google makes is ads. Everything else is marketing.

What does this even mean? There are a lot more engineers, designers and product managers at Google devoted to what you deem “marketing” than ads. (Source: I’m a xoogler). People on those teams believe strongly in their missions and their KPIs are mostly not revenue-related. In general, there was a strong underlying philosophy while I was there that “if you do right for the user it will work out in the long term.”

Take GMail as an typical service. GMail exists solely to show me ads. It's not Google's product, Google doesn't sell it to me, it's a free tool that exists to display Google's real product, the ads. It's a billboard. A brilliant, useful, and clever billboard, but still a billboard nonetheless. This is true of every Google service that they give away for free.

This is rewriting history. GMail was created by Google engineers (as an internal only project) way back in the day because they wanted a better email client (Gmail was, originally, a 20% project). Eventually they added ads because well, sure, companies want to monetize things. But to say that it exists solely to show you ads is a disservice to the people who originally created the tool. It was not made to, and does not exist to show ads. It was made to, and exists to be a better email client. To do that sustainably, it now show ads.

Also I'm pretty sure you can disable all promotions within Gmail, and I'm fairly sure that Inbox has, to my knowledge, never shown ads. So as billboards go, I think it's anything but brilliant, since it has never shown me an advertisement!

Much like how CoLab[1] apparently exists solely to show you ads and how hangouts and Google Voice are there just to show you ads (I'm not sure where though). Duo is just a video chat app to show ads. Clearly.

This argument is so silly. Indeed there are people at Google whose job it is to do things with ads. That doesn't mean that everything that Google does for free is intended to be monetized with ads (see, again: CoLab, which gives away free GPU compute). There are a variety of reasons for a company of Google's size to make products freely available. Showing ads is one of those reasons, but by no means the only one.

Note: I work, tangentially, on Gmail.

[1]: https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/welcome.ipynb

Wait, I thought "You are the product"?

It's a different aspect of the same. Your attention to ads or the ads themselves are the product. In the end if it sells it doesn't really matter what you call it.

This is such a silly proxy-argument altogether.

For a very contrived definition of "product", search isn't a product, and for other definitions, it surely is.

You're trying to make a point that as search engine users, we are a means to an end for Google, like cattle on a farm.

And I agree with that.

But we can discuss this directly, there is no need for a passiv-agressive proxy discussion about what definition of product is right. And there is no need to draw the whole HN audience into this.

How is that different from say broadcast TV or any other media though? Or are you saying that ads are their product as well?

Yes.

Whatever creates the revenue is the product that is being sold. Broadcast TV creates content for the purpose of attracting viewers that watch the ads that are sold as ad space/time for revenue. Product placement within the content plays a role as well.

I don't understand how this isn't clearly understood. That's been the business model for broadcast TV since pretty much the beginning. It hasn't been a secret, the networks have been rather clear about it.

> If academia could produce a search engine of equal quality but without ads

Um, isn't that exactly what Larry Page and Sergey Brin produced while they were in academia?

I also use Google daily (startpage actually) but your reasoning is flawed a little. You always find the result in first page not because Google's product is that good because you're very familiar with the product and know how it behaves on what input. When I can't find the result in the first page I don't go to the second page, instead I change my input and find the result in some other first page. But ultimately Google failed to give me this result on my first try.

We don't need academia to do this. Those of us old enough to remember know that Infoseek was once a far, far better search engine than Google, but sadly, it was borged by Disney, emasculated as Go.com, and eventually, killed. (It's also worth remembering that Excite turned down Brin and Page's offer to sell Google for $750K!) Bing is the only real competition to Google today, and to its credit, it is approaching parity with Google...

Here's another take: someone was going to control the advertising space. Would you prefer it be a place like Google where there's vigorous debate about right and wrong, or someplace that isn't investing in that debate?

Back before Google, other search engines would let advertisers pay to boost their search ranking. Google promised not to do that. Ads are labeled and advertising is a separate division from search ranking.

These days, most of the first page for some queries may be covered with ads, but they are still labeled as ads. It appears that technically Google hasn't broken that promise for the actual search results.

(But if you know otherwise, please share.)

They may be labeled as ads, but they still appear at the top of the search results as if they were search results. The only difference is that there's a small word with the url line that says "ad"; otherwise looks exactly the same as the results. Having ads presented in such a way I choose to interpret that as breaking that promise. Especially considering with an ad blocker the Google experience feels much different.

If they were boosting actual search results, your ad blocker wouldn't work, because there would be no way to distinguish them.

The fact I have to use an ad blocker to avoid having them pollute the search results proves my point I believe.

20 years ago I'd have believed that a government funded or non-profit search engine would show honest results. Now I would just assume the results would be determined by political and legal pressures.

A for profit company at least faces the fear that people will just switch to an alternative.

I'm not asking this to be snarky, but for anyone who might be privy to these discussions, is there constant and vigorous debate within Google about the ethics of targeted advertising, media/tech consolidation, and other ethically ambiguous drivers of revenue?

I was an Ads PM at Google several years ago. While there are many reasons I personally disliked working there, how Google handles the ethical concern of advertising and Search is not one of them. Google cares about being Search first. Ads are seen as a happy side effect of being able to fully and correctly answer a user's question. Search is often used with commercial intent, after all. One piece of thing most people don't realise is that showing an ad doesn't make Google money. In fact, showing an ad that doesn't convert into a purchase can often lose Google money by depressing the value of an impression. So Google invests a lot in the "targeted" part of the advertising, and making sure that the ad actually provides value.

That's an interesting way of stating that Google goes through great effort to discover how best to convince a user to click on an ad.

A long time ago, ads on google search were clearly distinct from organic results. Nowadays, they're mixed so well that only those who know they should check for the difference notice it.

I particularly don't like when the first result is the paid result from company X, and the second result is the organic result of company X, which is only paying to outbid competitors that could appear as #1 when people search for "X".

I'll use very strong words here, but that paid ad for me is not different from "protection money" you pay to a racket so they ensure nothing bad happens to your business. It's highly unethical, but, I'm sure, incredibly profitable: in these cases I make the conscious choice to click the organic result, and NOT the paid one, but I'm pretty sure I'm one in 100.

So, I don't doubt that there are ethical debates inside Google, but it's clear that, the more it becomes just another public company for which the overriding concern can only be increasing shareholder value, the less any ethical consideration that has an impact on the bottom line can have an effect.

> I particularly don't like when the first result is the paid result from company X, and the second result is the organic result of company X, which is only paying to outbid competitors that could appear as #1 when people search for "X".

Haha that annoys me too, and I can totally follow the logic for choosing the organic result, but I use the reasoning that I want to "stick it" to the company whose advertising and force them to pay for the ad they are showing me, so I actually intentionally click the paid result.

Well, some advertisers for sure deserve that, but think about, eg, SomeGoodCompany.com which is organically and legitimately the top result if I search "SomeGoodCompany" in my url bar.

If SomeBadCompany comes and starts bidding for the keyword "SomeGoodCompany", and SomeGoodCompany doesn't, when Joe Average searches "SomeGoodCompany", he will see "SomeBadCompany.com - we're even better than SomeGoodCompany..." as his top result - guaranteed by Google, the expert Joe trusts to find the best websites for any subject!

How can SomeGoodCompany NOT pay Google to stop that from happening, supposing they have the means to do it?

When "SomeBadCompany" had their results displayed on the right column, that wasn't an existential threat. Now, it is.

Edits: clarified language

many of us are well aware of the massive efforts google puts into tracking every detail of our lives whether we want them to or not. your spin on this is downright hilarious

tbh the fact that you made a throwaway to bully a random person on the internet is even more hilarious

Not really no. I think at this stage, anyone at Google knows how it works. If you are ethically opposed to advertising, then Google may not the place you should choose to work at.

Google does not build a dossier up on individuals nor sell your data directly to advertisers. It collects signals about random cookie GUIDs and uses those to show ads about shoes that is trivial to opt out of and block.It does not know "who you are" (no names, no dates of birth etc - only guessed-at genders and ages brackets that are usually laughably out of whack) it just knows that a cookie has some vague city-level geo-location, watched some fashion videos on YouTube and searched for "shoes". Then advertisers can chose to show ads to people in New York who might want to buy a new handbag and that cookie is part of that potential audience.

Personally I do not see an ethical problem with cookie IDs. Please elaborate on what your ethical issues to random GUIDs are?

> is there constant and vigorous debate within Google about the ethics of targeted advertising, media/tech consolidation, and other ethically ambiguous drivers of revenue?

Yes. Sometimes it's overshadowed by debate on other issues.

I don't always agree with it, but there is a diversity of opinion expressed, at least among the people who engage in said debate.

> Google was founded on a set of ethical and moral principles that go beyond the immediate business mission.

Those would be the ethical and moral principles that Google has since broken?

> As described in the IPO founders' letter [0], their objective is to do "good things for the world even if we forgo short-term gains".

Which apparently includes: entrenching the ad-supported business model regardless of the damage it does; killing apps that were extremely popular with and beneficial to users, because they weren't generating enough ad revenue; locking people into walled gardens; etc.

> the drive to do the right thing independent from financial results is deeply ingrained in Google's culture.

Is it? Because it's sure hard to tell from the user's perspective.

> Seems to be working pretty well for them

For those who are benefiting from Google's profits and stock price, sure. But doing good for the world?

Google is not the only company that believes it has a moral compass or has a mission beyond profit.

If you can find another company Google's size with a similar cultural drive to be a force for good in the world, you'll probably find their employees also have vigorous debates about what's right and wrong.

Very few people think they are doing evil, most people think they are doing good. Humans first and foremost justify their actions.

Google's overriding value is money. That's what they care about. If it wasn't that way they would operate differently. What it appears like is Google operates in a way that prioritizes money and then later justifies it with this notion of "doing good", but that's vague enough to literally mean anything.

You think I'm exaggerating, but look at any number of organizations that have done things which nobody considers good and then look at how their members justify it. It always happens. How easy it to justify making 300k a year while pumping out walled garden mediocrity? It's really easy.

Chiming in feels like sour grapes, but this notion that a massive corporation gives a fuck about anything but it's own existence doesn't seem realistic.

Isn't that like saying that a person's overriding value is food because they spend so much time and money on it, eating repeatedly throughout the day? When instead that's more a necessity for doing anything else. I agree that Google cares about making money, because without it they wouldn't have a company. But isn't it strong to say their overriding value is money?

Contrast them with, say, the pre-Google search companies. Google was able to kick their asses because Google ignored higher short-term revenue (e.g., display ads) and focused on generating much more search value. Look at GMail, which was a money-loser for years. Or all of their blue-sky projects, the canceling of which would immediately improve their profitability.

This is not to say that they're all buttercups and moonbeams. But I think they could be much greedier, and much more awful.

>and focused on generating much more search value.

That's just a competitive strategy any company takes to displace incumbents. Hardly a moral high ground.

I partly disagree, and I think you've created a false dichotomy.

We can look at any economic activity through two lenses: "serves others" and "fills my pockets". The more companies focus only on the latter, the more they are scammy, extractive, or exploitative. The more companies focus on the former, the more value they create for their customers.

But these things aren't mutually exclusive. They're independent. Companies that focus only on creating value while ignoring profit usually fail, as they aren't sustainable. Companies that focus only on profit usually fail, as customers realize they are getting taken for a ride.

Some companies can do both well. I think Google is in that category. They create massive value without worrying too much about extracting every penny of cash. Which means that their overriding value isn't really money.

They have much more money than necessity. If we're talking about eating they are foodies that spend $200 at every meal and give the scraps to the homeless guy on the way out.

It's not that they don't do good, but how do you quantify that even? The singular value that drives it (beyond the differing political values and the variety of tech they put out) is a desire to make money. What value does the organization have that is more central to that? If it was otherwise they wouldn't have hired a CFO who was in Wall Street at the height of its misbehavior.

It's been nearly 20 years since Google was the little guy. They're a massive corporation and many people have come and gone. The only constant is the need to make stockholders happy.

That might be cynical, but I just think it's realistic about how the modern world operates. They could be worse but they could also be much more and describing basic business behavior as "doing good" kind of dilutes the term and covers up what is really just a big corp being a big corp, the same way that MS's commercials with Common talking about "changing the world" is really just a way of selling stuff. It's a meaningless mantra.

I don't think they are nearly as good as they think they are. But in the universe of companies, I think they're much better than average.

I think your mistake here is to see business as zero sum. It isn't. As I mention in a nearby comment, businesses create value for customers and then extract cash from the result. Plenty of other organizations are less focused on creating value and more focused on extracting cash.

I agree that the machinery of American corporate capitalism is very focused on the latter, and personally think that MBAs are an infection vector for an ideology to justify that. However, I think Google has been so good at long-term investment because they have a strong competing strain of focusing on value delivery for customers and users. That is part of engineering culture, and also part of design culture.

So yes, Google's a large company. But it's a large company where engineers and designers have a lot of power. Where many of the senior people have fuck-you money, and can go do whatever they want once it stops being fun. Plenty of other companies don't even argue about mission. Power is concentrated at the top in the hands of execs, mostly with MBA training, who just tell everybody else what to do in hopes of juicing profit numbers for the next 1-3 quarters.

If you want to look at an organization who's overriding value really is profit, take a look at Yahoo. They used to be a beloved company with a lot of good people. But they honored the traditional American model of "rush after short-term profits". They rarely built anything truly useful, and when the they did get ahold of something good (e.g., Flickr), their lack of a sense of purpose meant they just flailed around, wasting their lead. Or you could look at many companies in the financial sector, who can only think in extractive terms.

I'm not sure. Bosch does fit the bill imho. It is mostly owned by a foundation [0] which tries "to be a force for good in the world". This global company has strong values [1] and 400k employees. I only joined it three months ago, but I already witnessed one case, where we denied a customer (car company) request because of end user security. It escalated quite a few levels up the management.

On the other hand, Bosch had to pay a few millions in fines [2] recently. So you can as well argue that they are evil.

Anyways, I don't see "vigorous debates" about moral issues as described in the article.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bosch_Stiftung [1] http://wearebosch.com [2] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-18-962_en.htm

The fact that Google and employees at Google believe this is scary to me.

I strongly prefer a Google that tries to do the right thing to a Google that doesn't.

Depends on what they consider "the right thing" I guess. If that doesn't match what you consider the right thing you may want to change your preference :)

I strongly prefer a Google that focuses entirely on maximizing profit to a Google that tries to do the right thing -- for its definition of "the right thing", which includes things like giving a Google doodle to Yuri Kochiyama.

>the drive to do the right thing independent from financial results is deeply ingrained in Google's culture.

That's the most highbrow way I've ever heard to describe googlers arguing internally about the day's hot button political issues while turning a blind eye to the ethical monsters in their own basement.

> their objective is to do "good things for the world"

And if some people disagree that what Google is doing are "good things", too bad for them. Also, they are so fired.

> see it as either naïveté or as a cynical ploy

I see it as intolerance and blindness to even a possibility of one's position being wrong or incomplete. If you define what you are doing as "good thing", then automatically everybody who disagrees is "bad", and what shouldn't you do to not allow bad persons to ruin a good thing?

> Seems to be working pretty well for them

Except those who get disinvited, or not hired, or fired, for taking a wrong side (which is, any side that somebody in power disagrees with) in the debate. But yeah, they are making a boatload of money, so I guess that's a "good thing" too.

>Google was founded on a set of ethical and moral principles

is that what you call Pentagon funded military research (DLI, NSA and CIA under MDDS) ?

So is flying to Silicon Valley per an invite from Google regarding your blood/sweat/tears/dreams to discuss supposedly buying your app/technology only to then be baited by them in the meeting for your secret sauce which you divulge because this is your dream ... once divulged they kick you out and say the race is on.

Is that ethical... moral... just?

That's what happened to me in April 2013 when I was invited and met with Motorola/Google ATAP(https://ryanspahn.com/my-google-NDA-experience.html) re: my dream/blood/sweat/tears. Also they recently were awarded a patent for the exact same thing I created/met them about(https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/google-patent-speaker-m...).

Don't be evil ... HA

While I sympathize with your concern, and agree with you, pasting the same comment repeatedly in a thread is likely to get you slapped by the admins. They don't like it, and most of us need not read the same comment three or more times.

Link doesn’t work. Anyways: is it evil to teach something about intellectual property? You failed to properly prepare the meeting, hire a lawyer and patent your invention. What exactly did you think you were selling to them? Don’t be evil doesn’t entail: don’t conduct proper business.

I think I would disagree with the notion of teaching about intellectual property by stealing somebody's intellectual property. For a company to publicly express "we are about doing the right thing", I would hope that wouldn't include conducting "proper business" of taking advantage of people. I would think "doing the right thing" would more along the lines of "great idea you have there, let's help you get that patent and work together to get it market".

You don’t steal it when someone gives it away and is careless with it.

Umm it’s you who has no money vs. multi-billion dollar Google who out of nowhere is chasing you saying would you consider selling your tech to us? Let’s meet to discuss.

I filed a provisional patent before the meeting and later a non-provisional. I chased money and those who have strong ties to Google and their competitors in terms of working together, investment, etc. with no success. I’ve been at this for 11 years.

So the biggest company on the planet is pursuing you for your blood/sweat/tears/dreams(all u ever wanted to do was to create amazing technology for a living and u believe you have a knack for it)... what else would you have done?

Again your one dude with no money or strong connections vs. Google. A company whose motto is Do No Evil!

The relative size or your beliefs on technical prowess does not add an ounce to your right on calling the company evil.

Personally, I feel that calling a company evil because it exploits ignorance, carelessness, impatience and greed (and it has a track history of doing that) is in itself an unethical act.

How am I ignorant .. is there a class that teaches you how to get powerful ppl behind you when your talent is innovation vs. people skills? Is there a class that teaches you how to make a meeting with the biggest company on the planet a win for you?

It’s all about money and getting those with it to get behind you. That’s not my strong suit .. innovation is.

As you can read above the sheer disregard for my tech partner and I was downright wrong .. rude... disrespectful and more negative adjectives ... all done at the hands of a company whose motto is don’t be evil. Kicking us in the face and then getting a patent runs in the total opposite direction from their motto!

Overall my dream has been to build amazing technology and be paid well for it. Not greedy .. nor impatient I’ve been at this for 11 years . Overal We’d love to have worked with Google!

Love to hear how non ignorant you who also has no money or connections to google would have handled it.

> is there a class that teaches you...

No, there isn't really. But I do know that going into the bowels of one of the most powerful companies in the world requires due diligence. Preparation. Patience. For example, start with hiring an IP lawyer. Write down exactly what you want to divulge and what stays secret. Draw a strong line between intellectual property and functional application. Personally, I would never do business directly with Google, since I am simply not qualified enough. If I can afford it, I would hire a representative. If I cannot, I would probably simply refrain from doing business. There are other companies and investors out there.

Patience: I think you're mixing it up with perseverance. Both are laudable, but the former is what needs to be expressed when a big multi-billion dollar company knocks on your door. You had a patent application pending!

You knew from the start that it was your innovation they were after. When they invite you, they'll be interested in it tomorrow, in two months or a year from now.

But there is another thing I find interesting. If you work at something for 11 years, how can you possibly divulge everything in one meeting?

Anyways, from someone who was careless with his own ideas and innovations in the past, I know how hard it is to get over this. Value your brain, not your things :)

Lastly, I'd like to add that being good at innovation is definitely not enough to make a marketable product. In my opinion, innovation happens at the crossroads of intellectual thought and business sense.

How do you call patenting public domain research (ANS)?

Opportunity for proving prior art?

Very rigorous as long as it doesn’t stray beyond the narrow-minded politics of Silicon Valley.

> Donations by its employees to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign outnumbered contributions to President Trump’s campaign 62 to 1

Trump isn't the most popular presidential candidate in recent history, but there does seem to be a left-wing bias at Google. Being left wing is clearly different from doing "good things for the world even if we forgo short-term gains".

Neither wing of politics has a particular claim to being more moral; and both left and right wing philosophies have seen great success stories and great tragedies when they are in the ascendant.

If the politics of Google is that biased from the mainstream (which, I remind you, is about a 50-50 split, not plausibly as extreme as 80-20) then there is a risk that their data and power will be used for political ends. The half of America that votes republican should not be sleeping easily on this one.

This seems to be almost completely irrelevant to what is being discussed here - you yourself admit the point you are raising has no particular impact on the morality of there actions.

Also, it is not accurate to say that politics in the US are split 50/50. It is more like closer to 40/30/30[1]

1. http://news.gallup.com/poll/180440/new-record-political-inde...

It is extremely relevant; the original article is literally titled "Google vs. Google: How Nonstop Political Arguments Rule Its Workplace". The thread started with an observation that deciding what is right and wrong is fundamentally a question of "ethics, politics and public policy".

If Google is going to be seen as a politically active entity, aligned with the left, then that is a problem. Particularly because aligning with one wing, with high probability, means that Google isn't going to be focused on the good deeds part of politics but on the political campaigning part of politics. That should honestly be a worry to everyone, but particularly the political right.

Also 40/30/30 isn't even close to a figure like 61-1. Even if Google were leaning 40/40/20 it would still be markedly biased. I'm from Australia where voting is compulsory, and the undecided 40% usually splits about 20%-20% both ways when made to decide.

EDIT I looked it up for your interest ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_federal_ele... ) - our most decisive federal-level election was 41.5% to 58.5% on a rough left-right split, aka 2-party-preferred, back in 1931. 55% to 45% would be a landslide in a modern election. America will be different, but realistically I doubt the split would be as bad as 65-35. Probably more like 55-45.

Roughly, our vote is split between can't, don't, left, and right.

Vigorous discussion and then firing if you're on the wrong side of the discussion like what happened to James Damore?

Is that ethical... moral... just?

Don't be evil ... HA

Your blog says they decided not to use the tech after talking to you… Also could you link the patent? The above link is dead.

Think this was the link: https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/google-patent-speaker-m...

Edit: after reading the article I have very little sympathy for OP. Samsung clearly developed their technology without you, and Google was rewarded a patent 5 years after meeting you. Which likely means you didn't even file an affordable provisional patent.

No we filed our provisional before the meeting and later filed our non provisional that is slowly making its way thru the patent office due to resources.

Ummm yes they did not include SpeakerBlast/audio sync between phone capabilities into the Moto X. Yet they sure as hell got patents for it!

For me the worst thing was how they treated us so wrongly.. kicked us out and said, "The race is on."

Obviously our work had value to them as they patented it.

We do not have any high powered connections to Google and if you don't this is what they will do to the little innovator guys/girls. An invite from a Fortune 500 without any high powered connections is an invitation to get kicked in the face and they say that's how it goes. But no that's not how it should go!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com