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Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

> Posting through Tor for obvious reasons.

Because the protest is such a matter of indifference at Google that... you need to take extreme measures not to be identified talking about it?

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In fairness, they wrote something that could end up in the media. Who wants that kind of attention?

Googler in Bay Area here, non-throwaway account. Don't know enough about the situation to comment on any of the details or form an opinion, but I can attest to the fact that I didn't really notice the sit-in, for better or worse.

Not to detract from or endorse anyone's opinion, I'm just bothered by the weird conspiracy vibe in this thread. I signed the Dragonfly letter so it feels like posting a small anecdote to Hacker News is relatively benign, but maybe I'm naive :)

(My opinions here, not my employers. You know the drill.)

But no media article will be able to identify the poster through their IP address. So unless you re-use your username, Tor or not shouldn't make any difference.

Sure, but Tor is overkill for any real or imagined threat in this case. So frankly, I don’t see the reason to single that aspect out.

I don't work for Google. My company has strict policies to discourage employees talking to the public about internal affairs. That was the case with my previous two employers too. Frankly, it makes sense from their POV to not have their dirty laundry made public. And I take similar precautions as a matter of self-preservation anyway. I don't want anything I write here to be used against me either by my current employer or any of my future employers.

Google could be keeping track of which of their internal IPs visited which HN pages, etc.

How would they do this? HN is served over https, which would make this a massive and deliberate undertaking. The only possibilities I know of would be an intercepting proxy (don't know whether Google uses this, I doubt it) or tracking the size of payloads (which would require infrastructure explicitly and only for this purpose).

Payload size would be very helpful, but they don't need that to shortlist candidates. Correlating the timestamps of when the comment appeared on HN and when the domain name was accessed from an internal IP may be enough, subject to luck. Considering that Google is already tracking (crawling) the entire web for its core business, adding a few tweaks should not make much of a difference to their system load.

There's no reason for them to even tell us that they're using Tor, except to raise the specter of some retaliatory bogeyman.

Social media is hardly rational on topics like this.

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