Search is on for Google workers leaking secrets | Hacker News Reader

Search is on for Google workers leaking secrets

thetimes.co.uk

116 pointsfallingfrog99 comments

There are two kinds of leaks.

The first kind is leaks for glory, profit, etc, ie: we're about to release this hot new product and I'm sneakily letting TechNews.whatever know about it ahead of time. Maybe you get paid for this leak. Maybe you just do it because you're excited or want to feel important. It's rule-breaking behavior for personal gain, monetary or otherwise.

The second kind is the moral, ethical leak. Whistle-blowing. My company/government is doing something that I find horrendous, that violates my ethics, that I think is or should be illegal, and I want the world to know about it. I also don't want to lose my job because despite not liking what my organization is doing, I also like my life as it is. This is rule-breaking behavior not for personal gain, but for a sense of morality.

We should not let ourselves believe these are the same thing. The first is a selfish act, while the second is (to some extent) a selfless one. Those who yell "F--- you leakers" are trying to convince you its the same thing and use the negative emotions directed at the first to convince people not to do the second.

About the 1st one, it's often done "off-the-record" by the company itself.

Apple is notorious for this, it's an "unofficial announcement", given to select members of the press as to create hype and test the waters. Officially it still remains a secret.

Having represented whistleblowers, though, I can say it's difficult to find any pure cases. There's almost always something to crticize about the leaker's motive.

The evil is often an order of magnitude of difference between the leaker and the leakee. But Americans hate disloyalty, unless it's a clear crime --- and even then, we don't want to reward a snitch.

If you want a culture of transparency, you need to be comfortable rewarding some level of disloyalty or gain.

> But Americans hate disloyalty, unless it's a clear crime --- and even then, we don't want to reward a snitch.

If by we you mean people, maybe. But there's at least a case where the US government with qui-tam and other stuff can make whistleblower pretty rich: https://www.phillipsandcohen.com/whistleblower-rewards/

Can! But judges and the government can take steps to limit or torpedo recovery by less virtuous (or disfavored) whistleblowers.

They can both have the same negative consequence: a company's open culture becoming more secretive.

If the second type is occurring, the company is screwed, and the employee is screwed a anyway. Without the leaker it is very rare for the company to come out and say

"Oh ya, our profit at all costs behavior is immoral"

all on their own.

the problem at google is there are radical activities believing everything is type 2. there’s something to be said about solving problems internally. And in many cases no real problem exists but the person “whistle blowing” just wants to feel special or be an activist

Do you have any examples of this?

The second one is also personal gain, as you yourself explained. It's a way to protest the organization or harm coworkers without making a personal sacrifice. Morality is self interest as much as money is.

But protesting against your employer is very rarely for personal gain. You are at minimum putting your job at risk. Of course there's personal sacrifice involved: you'll more than likely be fired if you are discovered.

But it's for the society's best interest that such people keep their jobs, don't you agree?

When you are leaking something illegal there are laws usually in place to protect your job or compensate you if it can't be protected. However there is no way to protect you when leak what you think is unethical but is not illegal (yet). The recommended course action in that case participate in legal actions which help make such unethical actions illegal i.e. change the law, until then you are essentially committing a crime.

You may consider committing a such crime lesser cost morally than actually partaking in the unethical activity, this by design comes at a cost. Morality to reflect in laws comes at a great cost. Slavery was not made illegal just because it the right thing, it was made illegal because people fought and died for it.

You, as an employee, should attempt to change the laws such that the unethical actions become illegal? That sounds so farcical. Bringing light to the unethical practices (leaking) is the quickest way to get them under public scrutiny and possibly begin the process of legal change.

>You, as an employee, should attempt to change the laws such that the unethical actions become illegal?

This is something that large-scale strikes have historically accomplished. The 8-hour workday and the existence of the weekend are both results of that approach.

It doesn’t always fit, and whistleblowing can be powerful too.

The best way to mobilize large-scale demonstration and action is by informing the public. Try to do that through "legal" channels and see how far you get. Strikes and other worker-organized rallies were ruthlessly suppressed by the law before we arrived where we are today. Massive corporate entities will use every legal avenue available to silence you

i didn’t say it didn’t come without sacrifice. I said it worked.

The law is the legitimate consensus of the people on the matter of morality. If you think an action is unethical and the majority does not think that, then perhaps that action isn't unethical after all. In such a situation, you have every right to refraim from that action, but no excuse to force others to do so or to leak.

Nah whistleblowing is a simple way to bring light to unethical behavior and put these actions in front of the public so laws can be created and changed. Many of the unethical behaviors are completely new ground from the pov of the court system as we've trailblazed our way into the information age, mass surveillance, and data-mining. Maybe the majority doesn't think it's unethical yet because they simply don't know that it's occurring or the scale of the problem

Civil disobedience is always an option, but those who use this tactic need to accept that the law will temporarily punish them pending some societal realignment. It's a big bet. It's still unreasonable to expect an exemption from the law because one feels that one's cause is just.

> The recommended course action in that case participate in legal actions which help make such unethical actions illegal i.e. change the law, until then you are essentially committing a crime.

> Slavery was not made illegal just because it the right thing, it was made illegal because people fought and died for it.

These are two wildly incompatible assertions. All of those people fighting to end slavery in the US before the Emancipation Proclamation were committing crimes. Should the underground railroad not have started until they got the OK from the president?

The assumption that leaking, in the OPs second example, is always for personal gain is incorrect. There is always risk involved in some manner and there are plenty of historical examples wherein people will put an exceptional amount of personal sacrifice on the line. Sacrifice can easily outstrip any gains realized by the greater good than for the individual. I, personally, don't believe conflating them is accurate. Maybe it's convent if you're the large organization or government that is in the crosshairs.

One must take responsibility for one’s morals. Our given set of societal/legal norms impart a certain level of responsibility. Because of the law, one must be responsible whether one likes it or not. The individual sits at the mercy of the society in which the individual exists. I suppose the only recourse for the individual is to help change society (this is slow, and requires even more responsibility) OR move to a different society.

Upholding an ethical morality is not the same as following the law. The law frequently does not follow the values or mores of the people themselves. And often even if it is close it lags behind in time and it is only the actions of people contrary to the law which changes it. So, I believe that your claims are unsound. Indeed it is irresponsible to follow an unjust law comma because then you will just be reinforcing injustices. See the American civil rights movement for good examples of this.

We can't have a society if disagreement with the law frees one from the consequences of failing to obey it.

morals != laws. Re-read and you will see no association made in the grammar. Words tend to reflect back the ideas and beliefs of the reader.

it appears to be the same thing in your comment, because you say that because there is a law people have a responsibility. And that responsibility to the law becomes a moral responsibility according to the way I have read what you say that makes sense as a response to the original comment. If you would like to explain it some another way then please do!

The law forces one be responsible (without choice). If a law is passed to “kick the leakers”, then if one leaks, they will be held responsible by having a good kicking for not bearing the responsibility of upholding the law. Morally, the individual is opposed to the law. Fine. Great. Even without the law, one is still responsible for their morals. Maybe the society doesn’t “kick” people, maybe society supports leakers. Doesn’t matter. There have been countless individuals acting “morally” (in their view), and we as a society have held them responsible. One should balance one’s actions against their morals, and society’s law.

Well there's the conflict then. Many people believe that morals are more important than the law, not the other way around.

And really, what you're talking about is a balance. Very few people actually believe that anyone has a total responsibility to always submit to punishments for laws. Nobody argues that people who helped slaves escape from their masters should have turned themselves into the state afterwards. Nobody argues that a North Korean dissonant should hang a sign on their door announcing their intentions to defect. Nobody argues that before the Boston Tea Party everyone involved should have said, "well there's no need for these disguises, the point will be the same regardless of whether we go to jail afterwards."

And of course in the opposite direction, nobody argues, "well, you had a good reason for running that red light, so it's perfectly reasonable to run from the police when they try to pull you over."

What you're really arguing is that leaks about a company's immoral behavior don't cross the line where people have a right to defend themselves from having their lives ruined. The reason GP disagrees with you isn't because they don't understand that orderly societies require laws. It's because they think it does cross that line.

Personally, I trend towards agreeing with them. It is very easy to tell other people that they should just buck up and accept unjust consequences as a result of helping me. The reality is I (and society as a whole) benefit a lot from whistleblowers. Given that whistleblowing is already a very dangerous process, it's not clear to me why it's in my best interest to heap additional social condemnation on top of that.

Breaking a rule can involve many things at once: bravery in adhering to your moral code, cowardice in avoiding alternative paths, disrespect for your commitments to a society or team, empathy for people your society or team is harming. Leakers must weigh these things against each other and so must anyone looking at them - even if they weigh those things differently.

Believing either (a) that people should hold the law abover their own values, or (b) that people should only be judged on adherence to their own code, are not ways out of the conundrum - they're just a particular set of values.

> I suppose the only recourse for the individual is to help change society (this is slow, and requires even more responsibility) OR move to a different society.

Neither of these things is reasonable. Am I supposed to start an election campaign if I don't like the law? Am I supposed to move my whole life elsewhere?

No, undermining the powers that be -in this case by leaking- is the right thing to do.

No. But stating the Delimma allows us to talk about how to solve it.

I think there are a few omissions here.

1. There are three (not two) choices in modern life: follow the law, break the law, break the law with anonymity. The last still carries risk, but not nearly with the certainty of the second.

2. Between this and your replies downthread, we have to be clear that "society" consists of three parts: government, citizens, and capital (aka corporations). All of these influence the creation and enforcement of laws.

Because of the last, I would assert that in modern capitalist democracies, it is possible to break the law yet be in complete moral alignment with the citizens of your society.

An example would have been the original protests against the Tea Act of 1773.

When I started working at Google 14 years ago its most striking feature was the contrast between its external secrecy and its internal transparency. Essentially all engineering information was accessible to all engineers. Obviously the company has grown a lot since then, and there are numerous legal constraints on its internal transparency (contracts, national laws, commercial sensitivity, etc) but it is still has a culture of internal openness unusual for a company of its size. Many rank-and-file employees, myself included, would like to preserve that internal openness even though we may oppose recent leadership decisions regarding Maven, China, and sexual harassment, or support stronger government regulation of privacy. Hence employees' ambivalence about leaking: it has helped shine a light on important issues, but it risks important future decisions being made in secret.

One of the problems with leaks is that the natural management reaction to leaks is to decrease the free flow of information within the company.

When I joined Google in early 2013 it seemed like there was a lot more information and technical details shared at internal forums like TGIF than there was by the time I left in mid 2015. In fact, we used to joke that the internal go/stopleaks web page where people reported leaks was the new way to find out what was happening in the company, since TGIF had become basically a press release..

Of course, this is classic authoritarian behaviour manipulation by the management. Stop people doing the just and correct thing by punishing everybody, so that the rank and file start to believe thatthe question of leaking should be seen in terms of their own working conditions. And they start to watch other people and turn against whistleblowing because it makes their own lives less interesting at work. This makes for more peer-to-peer surveillance in the interests of the authorities. The workers themselves start to align themselves hegemonically with the authorities, quite possibly against their and their society's interests.

My view on it it's Google has a vastly more open culture than any other place I've worked and some leaks contribute to making the culture more open but on the other hand there are people leaking pretty much everything and it's hard to have candid internal discussions when literally everything is being leaked. It's not like they all dislike leaks because management told them to, it actually has practical affect on internal discourse that are bad for the culture

By 2013 TGIF was a virtually information-free internal propaganda session compared to what it had been.

To my Noogler ears, the 2013 TGIFs were fascinating. But things seem to get more an more polished with less and less content as time went on. So I can only imagine what it was like in 2003.

My impression is that it is not so much that management wants to stop leaks (though I'm sure they do) as it is that the vast majority of rank-and-file employees want the leaking to stop because past leaks have so very badly damaged the previously-open culture of communication within the company.

The NYT should not be my main source of information about what is going on in my workplace.

>The NYT should not be my main source of information about what is going on in my workplace.

...and I assume your position is, by implication, that no-one outside of Google has any business knowing what is going on inside it by any means, even as it sucks up unprecedented levels of information about their own lives.

That's an excellent point. There's a delicious irony about the world's nosiest company complaining about its privacy being violated.

Sounds like you should be upset that management was keeping projects like Dragonfly or the ambitions of the DOD contract a secret internally then.

Yeah I seriously dont understand the point being made.

Op likes the culture because it's so open and transparent, but doesn't like that the transparency is shattered by having the nyt report on things internally?

Does op just want to be kept blinded by ignorance? I'm seriously confused by the point, and think I'm missing something really basic and fundamental.

Historically, google has been open internally but closed externally. I as an employee could expect transparency from leadership about a lot of things. If something was interesting you could expect detailed, technical answers. This is no longer the case if the thing is controversial (but for many non-controversial things, there's a lot of transparency still).

One way of putting it might be that historically, employees had enough informayto generally keep the company in check. I'm not convinced that's the case anymore, and I can't blame the leadership when their attempts to be transparent result in live leaks to the nyt.

Ok so you weren't saying you were learning things about your company in the NYT, you're saying you are reading things you knew about your company in the NYT?

Do I have that correct?

(note that I'm not the ggp).

I don't think that's quite it. Let me simplify and suggest that, broadly speaking, there were three classes of information: need to know, confidential, and public. Public is obvious, need to know is also fairly self explanatory, and confidential information would be that which is broadly available to those who wish to know within the company, but shouldn't be shared externally.

Leaks shift the confidential stuff toward need to know. So upcoming product launches are need to know, and I end up learning about new things when they're announced on a blog instead of internally ahead of time (this is for both controversial and uncontroversial things, like "here's what we're announcing next week")

But the more annoying and perhaps damaging part is that when controversy is raised, leadership can't respond to it with nuanced, confidential answers. Everything has to be in pr speak because it will get leaked, so the response is made with that in mind, or worse the response is directly to the press instead of to employees because a concern was raised via the press.

It's a bit of a viscious cycle. But to directly respond, it's both. It's seeing things I already knew that probably shouldn't be public, and learning things that I'd previously have learned from a meeting on the internet and knowing that as a result, I have less of the story than I would have before.

I mean I understand what you're saying, I just find it a bit... disappointing? That you'd accept PR speak to be used at all.

Honesty should be the rule, and any PR speak, by anyone, should be denounced.

I do see your point, I'm just disappointed that the company doesn't feel like it can tell you the truth because the truth hurts.

By PR speak really what I mean is "an answer for people who don't have enough context for a deep answer". Or iow, an answer which abstracts something away.

I have the context to peel back the abstraction. Someone external doesn't. That's not going to change. So PR answers have to exist. It's not that the truth hurts (there's lots of stuff that isn't bad but that is easy to misunderstand, or that people have missing context on: see the chrome login controversy which was from a team who I personally deeply trust to make good decisions for privacy and security, but who many people took to be an anti-privacy measure).

The context for a nuanced answer often relies on understanding organizational structure or history that often can't or shouldn't be public and even if it could be, most people won't care. You won't care. You say you will, but you're not going to spend the days or weeks to really understand all the context.

So no, the truth doesn't always hurt, pr speak is still sometimes necessary, but giving the pr answers to people who have the context to understand everything is really annoying to those people.

And yes this is me not so subtly saying that there's often context to decisions that you don't have. There are often perfectly valid reasons for not making that context public (Insofar as making things public will cause harm to end users). The classic example of this is making the exact algorithms for search quality evaluation public.

Never answering these questions makes Google look bad: conspiracies about favoring or disfavoring certain results develop. But the actual answer can be highly complex, and the only people who are going to care about more than a minute portion of the system ("why my site went down two spots") are those who want to find a avenues for abuse (dark seo).

(Probably worth stressing that these are my personal opinions and I have no real insider knowledge of search or anything I mention here).

So I think your disappointment is misplaced, ironically because you lack the context to understand some of these decisions.

So your argument is I'm too simple to understand nuance, so you have to speak to me with lies and half truths so I understand.

This answer is incredibly condescending.

No, and I'd appreciate if you make an effort to actually understand what I'm saying instead of repeatedly reaching for negative interpretations

It has nothing to do with your intelligence and everything with information you have access to. Often understanding the real answer requires information you don't have and can't be given. It has nothing to do with intelligence.

But you aren't going to get that information, and it's not because it's bad, it's because it cant be given to anyone. So you can't have the full explanation either.

I do understand. You just don't like the conclusion I drew as it paints the company in a bad light.

We fundamentally disagree on how companies should behave. That's all.

That you think my explanation relies on your naivete strongly implies that you didn't actually take the time to understand my response.

Here's three statements, tell me where you disagree:

There are certain things it would be unethical for a company to make public.

Companies often make decisions based on these things.

Justifying these decisions in public requires either acting unethically, or lying and providing PR bases answers about why a company is doing a thing.

Keep in mind that even saying that a decision was made or on what private information it was made can reveal information. Going back to the abuse example, nefarious actors will try to reverse engineer abuse models when you tell them what was involved in the decision to ban them.

Nothing you said is relevant to Dragonfly, or any other of a number of bad decisions by Google.

Not everyone is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt any more. I'm sorry that bothers you, but that's reality. You can be mad about it, or you can attempt to understand and mitigate the issue. That's on you.

I have never worked at Google but I have worked at several large firms. They are without exception constituted by dozens or perhaps hundreds of tiny fiefdoms. Within each fiefdom the senior most manager has their own policies, culture and values.

If this is true of Google — which if you think about, has to be the case — then I would read this as one particular manager got very worked up about leakers.

The article doesn’t really read like that to me. There’s a global “stopleaks” email address to report leakers to, and leakers have been fired when reported.

> If this is true of Google — which if you think about, has to be the case

I don't necessarily disagree with this re: google but you're not making the strongest case here

An interesting shift.

'Don't be evil' becomes

'Don't let people know we are evil'

I think this is just Google growing up. When you're a smallish company with little influence, what you say and who you talk to just don't matter. But when you're a big company, with big responsibilities and a big footprint, everything you say and do are closely watched, and therefore matter. You just can't run a multi-billion dollar enterprise like a free&easy five-person startup.

Isn't that a false dichotomy? Large organizations can have organizing principles other than profit at all costs. The groups of people that comprise these organizations just choose not to.

"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

I don't know of any employer I've ever had that would be ok with me sharing strategic information. This sounds entirely normal to me.

I don't know of any employer I've ever had that would be ok with me sharing strategic information.

Letting the press know of an upcoming product is a leak of strategic information.

Letting the press know that your company aids government repression of basic human rights is not a leak of strategic information.

Google obviously sees China as an important growth opportunity. Perhaps their strategy is to launch a search service in China that is ‘compliant’ with local regulations and they thought they could do that in a balanced way (e.g. warning users upfront before searching) but now that the story is out of the bag and they can’t control the narrative it’s tainted their approach and the opportunity.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear~

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." - Eric Schmidt

Hahaha! Indeed. Perhaps they’ll take user privacy more seriously after this.

I hope to god that phrase comes back to bite you in the ass.

I sympathize with the sentiment, but I was being sarcastic.

Hello hackernews, what's going on here? I commented on a businessinsider* story about this. It is now a times.co.uk story that a) I can't read in full and b) is not the story I originally commented on.

I'm not particularly happy about having my comments attached to a different article than the one I originally commented on, especially one I can't read.

* i wrote bloomberg here originally; it was actually businessinsider.com.au. i'd say i regret the error but i don't really

A moderator updated the link to the original source (from https://www.businessinsider.com.au/jack-poulson-ex-google-sa...), which is standard practice (mentioned in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Sorry, we usually post about this right away but sometimes there's a bit of lag.

Thanks for the update. I'll admit to not reading the guidelines closely until now, but since they don't actually outline a list of websites considered 'non-original', this does essentially mean that HN can apparently shift comments you make for any arbitrary URL to another, and you have no way to know beforehand.

Sorry, I don't mean to sound irritable, but attaching my comments to an article I didn't intend is way too close to putting words in my mouth.

A list of sites doesn't make a whole lot of sense IMO because they regularly borrow reports from each other, and the list will always be incomplete. The key in this case was this line, which links to the Times article:

> In comments reported on Saturday by The Times of London, Poulson cited as an example of the anti-leak culture an an unnamed senior engineer taking the microphone at an all-hands meeting to yell “F— you leakers” at his colleagues.

@dang I know this isn't done often or without cause, and it certainly serves a value.

But as we grow and the necessity of url subs increase... parent does have a valid point. Particularly if changes are UI-invisible. Even a "[changed]" tag suffix might help.

We usually post a comment about it, but not all the moderators are in a position to do that.

I understand the sentiment in favor, but am not inclined to add moderation tags or widgets to HN's UI. Features like that add complexity, and take up space that might otherwise go to more valuable features.

Please insist on dropping comments if you're going to keep doing this. Imagine commenting encouragingly on some programming article, and then HN merges it with another one, and now you're on record as being at all positive to ESR

I know Hacker News doesn't like change, finding value in keeping the UI simple. And I really really like that. But maybe there should be some little dot one can click that shows a history of original post titles / URLs.

This doesn't directly address your valid complaint. But I think it might be a palatable remedy.

Yeah I’m the original poster and it wasn’t me who made the change; not sure how it happened.

Mods will sometimes change a link or combine comment threads with just one link. Especially if one if the articles is using the other as its source. Also, to prevent multipule threads about the same story.

Comment deleted as the URL linked changed after I wrote it.

Would you like to offer up your version of events? An anonymous person saying "no, that's not accurate, in some ways, you don't need to know which," doesn't ... well, I don't know to extrapolate any meaning from that at all.

Deleted, see parent.

The description must be sufficiently similar to something that did happen, though, for you to be confident that you recognise the incident.

See parent.

So what did happen then?

Can you share more about what really happened?

No, that would be leaking lol!

You deleted all of your comments because some threads were merged to reduce clutter...?

i deleted my comments because i was addressing points in a story that this thread no longer links to

What exactly is odd or wrong about a company wanting to stop leaks?

Is Google the next target of the press, once they are done trashing Facebook?

It should be if the press isn't afraid to do their job because of Google's far reaching influence.

In general? Nothing.

But, if the leaks are about unethical bluestones practices or illegal action? Google might be better served living by their own original motto than hunting leakers.

Google and Facebook are the two biggest violators of user privacy on the internet. You call it "trashing", I call it long-overdue public scrutiny.

It's really not about simply violating privacy. It's about the actions one takes after one violates all the privacy ever.

Big data is power. Facebook and Google know that. Everyone else had better learn. These reactions telegraph that Google and Facebook have been eagerly making use of the power they've gained, and it's obviously backfired… or, the first things they've tried to do have been totally evil and reprehensible, and successful.

Part of the goal of the GDPR is to turn massive stores of user data from a corporate asset into a legal liability. If we can get internet companies to treat user data the way brick-and-mortar companies treat hazardous chemicals--occasionally necessary for some industrial process, but best avoided where possible, and always treated with respect--then that would be a big win for society IMO.

You think the press is trashing Facebook? That makes no sense. Facebook is committing trash behaviors and the press is just reporting on them.

Why are they so frantic if they're on the up and up?

From the attitude, it sounds like they've gone full-on 'be evil' and are legitimately panicked that they will be found out before they can get the kind of power that would render them immune from any consequence to their actions. They must surely understand international politics, and a lot is happening right now in international politics.

I would say Facebook and Google are likely to be smack in the center of what's going wrong, and that in both cases they figured they could learn to control the monsters they unleashed, and stood to benefit.

That would justify any degree of paranoia and hysteria over leaks. There is no purpose in being this frantic over leaks if they know they've not done terrible things.

I’m sure that there is someone at google working on an AI solution for this. And I’m not even joking

The leak about the Google winge fest after the Trump victory is an interesting data point.

On the one hand, the company claims not to be acting in a partisan way; on the other hand this comes out.

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...

The company continues to claim, despite the contents of the video giving an appearance partisanship, that they are not biased in any way.

Then they launch the leak hunt.

If the video is no big deal, then why the big hunt and the paranoia?

Google is not just some private company out there - it is a large monopoly with the power to sway elections. They need oversight.

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