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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Is it feasibility, or just laziness?

My car has a little blurb that explains that they collect data to use for training and gives me the choice to participate or not. Opting out doesn’t affect any functionality. Why can’t Google do the same thing?

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That should never be an opt-out. It is both ethically and in some regions legally required to be opt-in.

Or just an opt, where you have to make a choice during setup.

Because Google's first allegiance is to the shareholders and data has value so it's not in their best interest to make it easy not to share your data.

The shareholder value theory is rubbish, because it has no predictive or descriptive powers for why one decision was made over another.

I can just as easily say that the best way to maximize shareholder value is to minimize public scandal, scrutiny, and potential for legislature.

Nearly every single decision, including contradictory ones, made by every single company, everywhere, can be retroactively justified to have been done in the name of shareholder value.

Right! All the companies doing it differently are also trying to satisfy their shareholders.

That's what is so great about capitalism. If one company starts to take advantage of its users for profit, it opens up a niche for another company to take a different approach.

> I can just as easily say that the best way to maximize shareholder value is to minimize public scandal, scrutiny, and potential for legislature.

Scandals can get free marketing, for example, Nike and Colin Kaepernick. Attention is always better than no attention at all for a business. Every single decision is made to increase profit but there might be many things that need to be accomplished first so its hard to see the big picture. For example, a developer might want to improve a feature because they want more people to use their product. A manager gets approval to pay that developer because the investment is deemed a profitable one. What does the person who gave them that money care about the number of users. It's not their invention and they don't even use the service? They give the money because they know that More users = more market share = more ads to sell = a return greater than the initial investment. Until a business can run with people working for free, the person paying for things always dictates what is bought and thus the direction the company is headed.

Let's say that direction is contrary to the direction of another prominent member of the business wants it to go. Whether you want to believe it or not, the same calculus goes on in every person's mind: Is this the potential payoff of Option A greater than the potential loss of Option B given the risk?

This is a wonderfully condescending response but it answers nothing. The question was, why can’t google do it differently? This doesn’t answer the question. We can plainly see this from the fact that other companies, operating under the same conditions you describe, make different choices.

This is the business equivalent of saying “because physics.” It’s not wrong, it’s just not useful.

Sorry, I didn't mean to be condescending. To answer your question, the reason Google can't do things differently is that they have already established themselves as first and formost and advertisement company and the way to do that best is to know their audience very intimately. Other businesses like Apple have established themselves as a hardware company first so they aren't dependent on user data as much so they took advantage of that and established themselves as the "Secure" phone. Google is too large and it makes too much money from its core business which is ad drive. As long as search and ads are their cash cow they cannot change in the way you hope.

No it’s not.

Google has many primary concerns it needs to manage. That’s how you get big - by managing lots of concerns successfully.

If they drop one too long, they start going backwards very quickly.

Then explain why they changed to Alphabet. Shareholders were sick of things like project loon, siphoning cash from google search. You are extremely naive if you think there are many concerns of higher importance than profit. Everything else is about maintaining and growing profit even if that means doing an ad campaign convincing people you are fighting the good fight..for profit.

> Then explain why they changed to Alphabet. Shareholders were sick of things like project loon, siphoning cash from google search.

Alphabet is still spending billions from Google into "other bets" like Loon, so I don't see how this explains the change.

Because now they have to report it to their shareholders where the money is going so that if the board doesn't like it they can replace the CEO. Before since it was all google, the money went where they said it went, there was no oversight. They had this massive R&D budget that was opaque to the investors. Money that could have been paid to shareholders as a dividend or return was instead spent on projects they had no idea about.

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