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Comment by Bhilai | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to break it to you folks but if you hated your data being with Google, you are in for a surprise on how atrociously bad Microsoft is at privacy and security. Multiple close friends who have worked at Microsoft tell me that search history data - who is searching what, is basically sitting in systems with ACLs so bad that 20-30K employees have access through transitive membership of groups. To access a customer's data you just need to know token which is logged everywhere and is apparently very easy to generate. I have heard horror stories from them about privacy incidents which never went public.

From what I know about Google, they are serious about least privilege type of stuff internally and employees dont get arbitrary unbound access to systems or data.

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Both are evil but I agree that Google is less evil than Microsoft.

Just like the OP I have first hand info on how atrocious Microsoft’s internal privacy controls are.

The later versions of Windows are just ad space for Microsoft to advertise.

Azure is the worst of the 3 cloud providers. Horrible developer experience and documentation and reliability.

That said, I would still take Satya’s Microsoft over Balmers any day

Both are driven by a profit motive, but Google takes some forms of privacy more seriously.

Lets not use emotionally driven, ambiguous terms like 'evil' to describe these kinds of things. Google is not, for instance, conspiring to commit genocides, nor is Microsoft planning a coup in an Eastern European nation with the goal of colonizing them to use as indentured technical support.

One does not simply coup who they wish.

> Both are driven by a profit motive

What do you want a corporation/company/business (of any size) to be driven by?

- Some environmental metrics (could be solved by pricing environmental harm)

- Ethical Metrics (could be solved by allowing corporations, directors, boards to face similar punishments to humans committing crime).

– Something that measured employee treatment.

Profit is such a shitty motive... it's effective, but still shitty.

Profit is ethical in abstract if you're intelligent and can see how reputation is valuable. You will have a hard time getting people to buy your product if people hate you. We're not in the state we're in because of profit motive.

It's the short sightedness that causes the most unethical behavior from the top down. 10-Qs... a man considered changing that timeline to help fix that problem but he was ostracized. Maybe one day la naranja will return.

I would be interested to see what an ethics motive looks like that gets people out of the bed in the morning to do a job they barely care about.

The purpose of the government is to legislate in order to align those kinds of goals with profit. Ex. taxes on emissions, fines for human rights abuses etc. This is what Adam Smith meant when he wrote about the invisible hand.

I'd prefer if it was driven by reputation, honor and status achieved by helping humanity.

The primary driver for humans is status. Status in the military is achieved through leadership and honor. Status in academia is achieved through capability. These sectors provably show that people can be driven by things other than money.

The sad thing here is that there are tradeoffs. Nothing is as efficient or as effective of a motivator as money. But money is the driving force that is most detached from ethics.

The media likes to make a big deal out of privacy but mostly people only give a shit up to a point... so it doesn't effect googles bottom line and therefore google also doesn't give a shit.

The dominant ideology revolves around the profit motive and markets being inherently ethical and the most effective way for progress.

There’s something to it. Ideas and implementations are pressure tested through market competition, so they get refined and adapted.

The issue with advertising specifically is that it’s inherently manipulative and often condescending. On the web it has a infectious nature, making everything a bit worse.

> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.

> Banksy

> But money is the driving force that is most detached from ethics.

Power is. Look at all the powerful dictators in the past, and what they did. Do you think Stalin was motivated by money? Napoleon? Mussolini?

Power is a form of status.

>> Lets not use emotionally driven, ambiguous terms like 'evil' to describe these kinds of things

How about "malevolent?"

> Both are evil but I agree that Google is less evil than Microsoft.

I'd agree they are both evil in that they both seek to leverage your personal data against you for their own gain, but it sounds like Google does it while being more protective of what they've taken from you while MS also leaves you vulnerable in new ways through carelessness.

I'm not too worried about Bing though. That's nothing compared to Microsoft's access to your computer at the OS level. We know anything we do online will be seen by others, but being able to snoop on our personal files and log our keystrokes is a whole lot worse than knowing what we type into a search engine.

However improved/more popular Bing becomes, eventually Bing will end up in the same position Google is in now where they'll have to make their web search worse in order to constantly shove ads in your face instead of returning results that are useful, and slowly SEO spam will adapt to pollute Bing's results further. Google may not even mind if Bing starts gaining users. At this point Google can collect so much data from android devices that I doubt they need google search to peer into our lives like they used to anyway.

Yes, exactly, I already swallowed the poisoned pill when I installed Windows. Although arguably some ChatGPT queries are far more personal than even having access to your entire filesystem.

> Azure is the worst of the 3 cloud providers. Horrible developer experience and documentation and reliability.

Really? I find Microsoft's documentation for Azure (in English) to be quite thorough and helpful. Their tools are well-designed and quite powerful.

Perhaps those of AWS and GCP are even more amazing, but I wouldn't call Azure "horrible" by any stretch of the imagination.

> Both are evil but I agree that Google is less evil than Microsoft.

Microsoft is evil v1. Google and everyone post 2000 is evil v2.

They are just as evil as Microsoft but they've learned that amongst other things, you need to a) seem nicer and b) lobby politicians.

I'd argue that made them more evil.

Though it has to be said that Microsoft has learned, too, so at this point they're pretty much the same thing.

It’s not the company so much as it’s the corporate conformists that swarmed the valley. What happens when the carpetbaggers are left holding the bag? Will they actually build things that matter?

> Azure is the worst of the 3 cloud providers. Horrible developer experience and documentation and reliability

Don't forget security! Multiple serious and extremely trivial cross-tenant security exploits only in the past couple of years. AWS and GCP have had none ever, the much smaller OCI has had one.

It's a slightly different from of eeeevil, up to you to decide which is lesser, or if the distinction has any meaning at all.

Microsoft is the capitalist evil. Google is the technocratic AI evil. The first wants your money, as much of it as they can hoover, using dark patterns if useful for it. The second wants to optimize your life using _their_ metrics, without ever engaging with you (humanity is the problem - engaging with it never scales).

I would argue that Google is the worst of the 3 cloud providers.

Why?

I have spent a significant amount of time on each and would suggest it's the only actual cloud. The others are data centers masquerading as a cloud, notice when us-east has issues for AWS, Azure had a spof dependency on a datacenter that didn't even have AZs... GCP is architecturally on another level. The others seem to be unaware of what 'cloud native' means, so if you are attempting cloud native on non clouds, you inherit their lack of foresight.

Google Cloud seemed to be in a forever beta state. It was not uncommon to find out that the sdk version I was using was no longer working so I had to update it and of course the new version had different flags with different configuration files. Just a like start-up/beta product. The worst part was if you got caught in a locked-in/proprietary product(i.e google datastore) because there was no way to get out without massive costs(i.e you can't install google datastore on a compute instance)

I wouldn't be extraordinarily surprised if this is the case, but I do not expect it to be as lax as you suggest and given how it's presented to us it reads like someone trying to get people to not look at something. If you have things you can present as evidence that would carry water for your argument, otherwise it's random inflammatory claim on in the internet.

And I agree, Google does take security more seriously than most places.

Of the major three cloud providers, Azure is by far the one whose security bugs I hear most about. Not that this necessarily has much relevance to search, but it doesn't inspire confidence in their culture.

Agreed, but parent poster made fabulous claims based on hearsay. It could be true. But it also might be a motivated competitor trying to distract their rival as well.

Related question, if security is so bad, how did they win Project J.E.D.I? (honestly curious)

Cloud security is different, especially for these government contracts. Everything has to be certified to a higher standard and the staff all have to have clearances. A clearance gives you a nice comp boost, so dorking around looking at stuff because you can is a good way to get it yanked.

Ditto. I work with all three on a daily basis and Azure is the worst

> Azure is by far the one whose security bugs I hear most about.

Only* about. GCP and AWS haven't had cross-tenant security bugs, meanwhile Azure have had multiple, and trivial ones to boot. If a multitenant service can have such poor security, it's doubtful internal only stuff is any better.

Oh yeah IIRC I used to look at Bing search logs in Microsoft and I wasn't on Bing team. This was 2014. Things probably have changed.

IIRC there was some basic safeguards though, like a query must have had like 10 unique occurrences or something. I also have no idea if you could tie searches to people.

I was just looking at aggregate numbers. That was really cool. It was like Google Trends but with real numbers!

I hate Big Data(tm) as the next guy in line, but if I have to choose between Google and Microsoft nomming my data I'll happily pick Microsoft every time.

Why?

For one, I've had a Microsoft account for over 20 years now (anyone remember Hotmail?). It's long past due for me to be complaining, and Microsoft hasn't wronged me in that time anyway. By comparison, my oldest Google account only goes back just over 10 years, and horror stories abound even if I've been fortunate so far. I keep all my truly important correspondance and login tie-ins with Microsoft (read: my Hotmail).

For another, Microsoft nurtured over 30 years' worth of good will from me with Windows and Office; even though I hate many things about Windows from 8 and up, among other things, I will ultimately be a friend to Microsoft simply because they were a significant and positive part of my childhood and now my adult life.

Your entire argument is based on nostalgia.

These are companies, not family friends.

Part of it is, but I wouldn't happily pick Microsoft even today if they were as horrible as Google. As far as I'm concerned, Microsoft is the lesser (and more familiar) of two evils so I'll happily pick them.

> Microsoft account for over 20 years now (anyone remember Hotmail?)

From memory, Microsoft used to be absolute bastards when it came to your data. They did everything they could to keep you gated in and without any control. Things like: refusing any export tools for your emails so you couldn't migrate to another provider; or, not allowing any non-web access to your email.

Then Google came along with GMail and revolutionised things: amazingly generous free data allowance, IMAP access, data download options, open standards, liberal approach to letting people set up various hacky app access, and so on. It was hugely successful for them, and forced MS to moderate their approach.

Google abandoned their Don't Be Evil strategy and sacrificed a lot of their principles (and, I would argue, a lot of their success with it), but at one point they had a positive impact and they've never been as evil as early-era Microsoft.

I remember when Hotmail still had an allowance of "only" 25MB worth of emails including attachments. No doubt a lot of the QoL improvements the free email provider scene has had stems from Google forcing a paradigm shift.

But on the other hand, Gmail was an absolute bitch to get early on unless you were lucky enough to be friends with someone who had an address already. Maybe it was justified, but I don't remember that period fondly.

And ultimately, whereas Microsoft at best improved and at worst stayed as EEEvil as before, Google went from hero to zero in just the last decade burning away all the good will they nurtured. As things stand, I'll happily throw my hat in with Microsoft here.

Dunno if it was incompetence or malice, but the straw that finally broke me over to Linux permanently was a privacy setting in Windows that appeared to work until you re-entered the menu and it wouldn't persist. In my time at YouTube though, privacy issues were an immediately fireable offense, and even when my role required data, use was gated and then still logged, and misuse was handled. That's an n=1 apples-to-oranges data point, but I personally trust Google a bit more than MS with my data.

I don’t hate Google for having my data because they have worse internal controls.

The monopolistic dominance is the issue. They have too much data and too much power, and leverage that to swallow other market categories. Today they have a deeply unhealthy dominance over the tech industry.

Google could do everything right and still be an existential problem. You say MS has data security issues, okay sure. I’d still rather have them or anyone at 25%+ of the market.

Apple isn't a monopoly yet it has huge power and domnance with safari. Do you avoid Android because it's the most common or Linux since it's got a monopoly on servers?

Google isn't forcing someone to use it. It's monopoly can disappear when something better it's there.

This is an interesting point. In relation to this, I’m starting to wonder which OS is less detrimental here—ChromeOS or Windows 11.

That anecdote reflects the data protection part, everyone dealing with Windows trying to disable tracking experienced their horrible data collection attitude

It's not much about Microsoft. At least it improved human life in serious ways (Typescript, VSCode,...). What did Google bring to my life ? Nothing except for spam stuffs from Ad, Email,...

You're responsible for your data, not Google, not Microsoft.

While it might be fashionable to hate on Google, the question "What did Google bring to my life" seems really odd. I can't believe I have to say this but search, and more importantly good/fast search, is to Google's credit. Typescript and VSCode all have, and will continue to have alternatives, but for a long time, Google was (some may argue it still is) the bleeding edge of search. Anyway, there might be a generational thing at play here, if so, I meant no condescension.

You're making assumptions. I listed facts.

Yeah, I'm gonna need to see some citation on how Typescript and VSCode improved life for humanity. Break out some of them facts you're talking about.

I specify "my life", not other's life, and it's a fact. Why bother then (i'm curious)?

Um no...

> At least it improved human life in serious ways (Typescript, VSCode,...).

You mean "fast bullshit ads" ? I mean "meaningful search results". They're different.

... Did you reply to the wrong individual?

You said it "improved human life" my dude. Everyone can scroll up and read.

So you think that Google doesn't do fast search? OK.

You don't seem to be interested in a debate.

I can't imagine thinking typescript improved human life more than Google Search

Peak HN.

This made my day.

What an absurd statement. I don't have especially strong feelings for Google in any direction, but I can't deny that, even if Google had only done search or Maps, that alone would be a massive boon for society.

Uh... Maps? Open, Permissive phone OS compared to the alternative? Greatest entertainment/information system, especially one that's democraticsed producing media?

In terms dev-related stuff, TensorFlow - literally something that's made today's ML possible, Kubernetes, BigTable, MapReduce, and yknow, that good old thing called Chrome..

I understand hating on Google. They're not that great, but none of the FAANG are "great".. They all have some terrible bits, some good bits. However, to say that Google has not provided anything except "spam stuffs" is very wrong.

Search alone has changed the entire way that humans consume information. I would say that today's internet landscape, for better or worse, would not exist without Google.

I don't use Phone, nor Maps, nor Youtube, nor Kubernetes, all the things you listed.

They're helpful to you, not me.

this setup and response seem a little silly to me. "what did the romans ever do for me?" "roads? aquaducts?" "ha! I don't go anywhere and drink well water!"

It's fine right ? Life gives you many choices.

But no man is an island, the minimum reproductive unit of homo sapiens is a village, etc.

You may not use those things directly, but you're dependent on those who do.

Just because Google has it, it doesn't mean a mean to an end.

There're choices for you to make. It's your choice.

You literally said "made human life better" ... it doesn't matter if you use them or not.

Also, you don't use a Phone? or Maps? Really? Do you use Chrome? Do you use Firefox, because Google's contributed a massive amount to the web standards that are implemented in both Firefox, and Chrome.

As far as i know, all serious libraries now always have first class TS library client. Is it an improvement, to Java, JS, or C,.... ?

"I don't use phone"

You have already lost the argument. I'm sorry but nobody would care about anything you say because that almost just does not apply to anyone else.

Also the fact that those products have no effects on you has nothing to do with whether a company is important or if their products are significant or helpful to the vast majority of human population.

And to be a bit cynical, it feels the only purpose of this comment is to show that you have a unique lifestyle, not to contribute to the discussion constructively or based on consensus. (Of which there are many on HN)

Actually i can answer more clearly on the why Typescript (example) improved human life.

I used it, and also guided other juniors to implement real world products which're running in production to help others human life in a very short time, in a maintainable way.

This was impossible before with old toolings.

Is it more clear to you ? I'm also sorry for not so clearly said, but that's how conversation works ;)

in the long history of ML, tensorflow is not that significant. realistically, nearly everything it did was available in other systems before. It was really just a grab for Google to try to get everybody to use their framework. But it wasn't a good framework, and it evolved terribly.

MapReduce was not and isn't something that made ML possible. It made data engineering at scale possible.

> in the long history of ML, tensorflow is not that significant.

I don't necessarily disagree, but that's only from a technical pov. However, I think the release of it as a open-source library made it so that it's far easier to learn the tech that already existed. Vast majority of university courses use it to teach lots of different concepts that were far more "mathy" before.

> MapReduce was not and isn't something that made ML possible. It made data engineering at scale possible.

Yeah. Maybe I worded that wrong. I wasn't saying it made ML possible. Just that it's a huge contribution to the Open-Source tech overall.

mapreduce wasn't a contribution to open source tech, except in the sense that it was published with enough detail for Doug Cutting to make an open source version.

Both MR and TF are net-negative for the outside world. I think more unis teach pytorch than TF now.

Real Question: What is wrong with Netflix? (The "N" in FAANG, right?) The only thing I can think of: Work life balance does not sound good. It sounds like you need to be "pro-athlete" level and are constantly at risk of being laid-off or replaced by someone better. That said, they pay silly good money. But are they evil to their customers? I don't see that.

People sometimes fault them for removing content (not their fault, everyone saw Netflix works and made a streaming service of their own) and cancelling series too quickly and erratically (true). Also people have a problem with the average quality, but seem to misunderstand Netflix's business - they need to have lots of content, one very good series per year isn't going to keep subscribers on the service. They have great quality stuff, and meh filler that some enjoy.

So all in all, disagreements with direction, but nothing wrong/evil on the level of any of the FAAN.

>What is wrong with Netflix? (The "N" in FAANG, right?)

They are not like the other. I wouldnt include big entertainment company among technology behemoths

Search alone has changed the entire way that humans consume information.

I believe this thread would have a much less dramatic headline if Google didn’t itself kill Google Search ten+ years ago.

Also, it bought most of the examples listed, not made these. It just saw an ads/dm opportunity.

I also remember using Opera on its last original engine and those “Get Chrome” banners which made a whole browser freeze and stutter on anything but Chrome. I’ve pointed that out a few times back then on forums, but not too many people noticed it, it seems. The “our ads our performance” trick fled completely under the radar.

Yeah it would. Where there is a gap someone it something will fill it. It's just a matter of tech maturing and someone rubbing some coins together

You forgot to mention Google's contribution in open source projects. Even their hardwares are OEM unlock-able. If it wasn't for Google, smartphone market wouldn't be what it is today.

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