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> Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt appearing on CNBC once said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

It's always funny when Eric Schmidt says stuff like that.

I've shared it before but I'll inline this evergreen quote from a book called In The Plex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27479152

> One day Denise Griffin got a call from Eric Schmidt’s assistant. “There’s this information about Eric in the indexes,” she told Griffin. “And we want it out.” In Griffin’s recollection, it dealt with donor information from a political campaign, exactly the type of public information that Google dedicated itself to making accessible. Griffin explained that it wasn’t Google policy to take things like that out of the index just because people didn’t want it there. Principles always make sense until it’s personal,” she says.

> Then in July 2005, a CNET reporter used Schmidt as an example of how much personal information Google search could expose. Though she used only information that anyone would see if they typed Schmidt’s name into his company’s search box, Schmidt was so furious that he blackballed the news organization for a year.

> “My personal view is that private information that is really private, you should be able to delete from history,” Schmidt once said. But that wasn’t Google’s policy...

Great quotes.

Privacy for google, other corporations and the government is a one way street. You give it to them. There is no reciprocity. That's it. And that's how it's staying. The end.

This is how tyrants are able to talk the talk (but not the walk) and bark out moral high ground orders to those they rule, while doing whatever degenerate acts they like behind closed doors. That's what power is and does.

Google will decide what people should and shouldnt do. Google will decide whether people deserve privacy in their lives for certain things or not. Language of the abusers.

I al hoping that one day American society will wake up to the fact that Tyranny can, and has been privatised. It is not only the state that you should be afraid of.

Surveillance capitalism is several orders of fucked up, but to call it tyranny is pretty dismissive of the plight of people living under actual tyranny.

Maybe it's not dismissive. Both are evil on a spectrum. One does not negate the plightgs of the other.

> it's not dismissive. Both are evil on a spectrum. One does not negate the plightgs [sic] of the other.

There are generational labor camps in North Korea and a litany of horrible ongoing civil wars in Africa. They are evil. So is industry pushback against unleaded aviation fuel [1][2]. But comparing the evils of the civil war in Somalia to those of leaded avgas is, at best, pointless.

[1] https://news.sccgov.org/news-release/findings-county-commiss...

[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/20/aviation-lead-fuel-...

Yes, but your point is? This is a thread about Google and their abuses, so it makes sense that is what is being discussed (not invalidating that there are much worse things happening in the world).

Cool. I'm going to stop calling the guy who killed one of my friends a murderer, or the Sacklers. It's really disrespectful to the people who were killed by Hitler or Pol Pot.

No one has compared them except you. Using a word doesn't automatically mean someone is equating everything under the umbrella. You would do better to focus on the definition of the word if you're so inclined on arguing - "cruel and oppressive government or rule.". I think this holds with the original point that Google can be seen as oppressive rule since they decide the rules, which don't necessarily align with what the people think is right.

There’s a point where the difference disappears, we aren’t there yet, but in a way walking in that direction happy as sheep. Grass is green and there’s only a couple dogs around and they don’t bite, mostly, so all is fine.

I understand Tyranny as abusing your power in a manner thats cruel, unreasonable, hypocritical and unaccountable.

Like you could have a tyranical father, it's not exclusive to Gulags

> Funny how Google can ignore the privacy of internet users' conversations but when it comes to their employees' conversations, Google does not want to share those with the Government. According to the Government's memo supporting sanctions, Google is deleting conversations within 24h despite being under litigation holds.

It's kind of weird that we've turned formerly ephemeral things into "evidence" just because they could optionally be stored.

If it was a few decades ago, the kind of things happening in these chats would have happened in person or on the telephone with nobody necessarily recording it. Whether to store them or for how long is an arbitrary choice.

You probably have your phone with you all the time. It has a microphone in it. Is not recording your every conversation "destruction of evidence"? What if the microphone is always on (because it's listening for voice commands) so the audio is stored temporarily in memory before being deleted?

The precedents cases like this set don't just apply to huge corporations.

This doesn’t seem right to me. There was a relatively short period of time when phone conversations were ubiquitous, cheap and fleeting, but for the the majority of history, business communication was performed in writing, and we’ve basically gone back to that with the advent of ubiquitous email and messaging.

> If it was a few decades ago, the kind of things happening in these chats would have happened in person or on the telephone with nobody necessarily recording it.

Or on paper, maybe by memo. And they would have destroyed the paper evidence just the same, and claimed helplessness in the face of so much paper that had to be kept, and that the suspicion of their motives amounts to being convicted before trial. Same sort of arguments, except for the people handling paper holding on to data wasn't a matter of getting a few people to click around for a few days, it was wrangling dozens of banker's boxes of paper. Trucks and warehouses.

> It's kind of weird that we've turned formerly ephemeral things into "evidence" just because they could optionally be stored.

This is literally what evidence is. It's something that you carefully collect and store to review later in connection with something else. You don't have to "store" the knife you stabbed somebody with or the gun you shot someone with (you've already got enough use out of them) but if somebody destroys them, they're destroying evidence. Even if you threw it out with the kitchen trash, and you always take out the trash on Thursdays.

> Or on paper, maybe by memo.

You're not getting out of the problem that the distinction is essentially arbitrary. You could record everything you say in private. Every single frame that appears on any screen in the company was in some piece of memory at some point in time. What principled distinction are you proposing between what is and isn't a crime to not actively retain?

If the feds essentially want to wiretap you, why should that happen at your expense instead of theirs? Even in cases when you're innocent?

> This is literally what evidence is. It's something that you carefully collect and store to review later in connection with something else. You don't have to "store" the knife you stabbed somebody with or the gun you shot someone with (you've already got enough use out of them) but if somebody destroys them, they're destroying evidence.

There is a distinction between physical objects and information. If you have a knife, destroying it isn't an ordinary thing to do. Meanwhile we have serious concerns about TLC solid state drives which make them unsuitable for many purposes because you can only erase and rewrite them about a thousand times.

Computers inherently operate by rearranging bits. Writing something new coincides with erasing what was there before. Keeping everything forever isn't feasible. So where's the line?

"Rules for thee, but not for me" may actually be the oldest trick in the book. Google's hypocrisy here is disappointing, but not surprising in the least.

Also, the CIA destroyed the torture video tapes to prevent embarrassment and further prosecutions of it's employees. So it kinda goes both ways.

that doesn't male either right.

My point is that I have a hard time see the Justice Department bring charges for destroying evidence when they didn't do a darn thing against those that did do evil things under the name of the US.

Justice for nobody then! What a great philosophy.

More like people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

They should prioritize prosecuting other parts of the government for known offenses. Then when those high level officials are serving long prison sentences they can take the same action against private entities without looking like hypocrites.

If they're the good guys.

You are demonstrating scary level of Moral Confusion.

CIA operates in the National interest, at least hypothetically. Google can operate against national interest to make money, or 'whoever pays most' interest.

The people of USA have granted CIA privileges of secrecy and legal protections explicitly to do ShadyShit. No-one ever gave Google permission to do ShadyShit.

CIA employees go through background checks, US Gov can fire head of CIA for being a dick. Google hires whoever the fuck they want and US government can't fire head of Google no matter what he does.

If Google is ever found doing 1% of what CIA does legally (and there ain't much!), they need to be in jail real fast.

Morality and legality are the same, when you consider yourself to be on the same side as the law.

Black and white thinking doesn't work in the real world.

How much do your morals swing as you travel different countries or even states? Age of consent being an example of morality - the legal age varies by country but it would be sociopathetic if someone were to “shop around.” Morality is not legality; the law _aspires_ to codify the spirit of a society’s morals - therefore it is morality that dictates to law, and law aims to catch up to morality when zeitgeists change. Equating the two things would be a poor understanding of sociology and civic politics.

Governments have other ways of removing people. Capitalists and corporations are supper easy to get along with, all they care about is money. Bits of paper with powerful geometry, well known faces and numbers on them. The bigger the number the better! No need to assassinate or accident the capitalist. Any vision for the future of mankind, even the most modest of ideals, they come after profit. The slightest nudge from law makers could shake the biggest corporations. The CEO would quit himself to prevent further disruption of the cosy relationship.

> US Gov can fire head of CIA for being a dick.

Just don't go driving around Dallas in an open top limo if you do.

Even on your own terms, why is this a "scary" moral confusion? If its just a matter of being in a different country with the wrong economics to end up being surveiled and harrased and ultimately dead in the jungle with the rest of my family, out of as you say U.S. "National interest", that's much more arbritrary than it is moral. Not everyone is American.

But I guess, those countries "shouldn't have been doing it in the first place" right?

No. Destruction of evidence of wrongdoing is illegal whether the government does it or Google. CIA is not exempt from US laws.

Otherwise they would be more like the Iranian Republican Guard -- where raping their own citizens apparently is okay.

Do you support that? I don't.

Given the blacklists of google leak[1], I am betting they don't want a congressional subpoena to find out the boatloads of ridiculously politicized censorship they do either.

[1]https://www.zachvorhies.com/blacklists/

What do you think about the assertion that these blacklists are for ads?

From the linked internal discussion on the shooting: "changes to ad serving and changes to search ranking are done completely independently, and by different teams". Isn't it a good idea not to serve ads on sites that are discussing a recent national trauma? Or at the very least not really related to politics?

> Isn't it a good idea not to serve ads on sites that are discussing a recent national trauma? Or at the very least not really related to politics?

I say no, because that devalues truthful reporting on real and important events, in favour of safe pablum that will pass the censors. Real news is important, but who is paying for news if it's not funded by ads?

I mean bad as in “the people paying for the ad slots wouldn’t want it” not “it’s better for society”. Obviously the only morally good answer here is to abolish capitalist profit-seeking organizations altogether, but I’m Assuming I’m preaching to the choir. If you have a company that’s bound by law to seek as much profit as possible, can you really get mad at them for not wanting to show their dumb mobile game ads next to stories about a recent massacre?

Power is basically dictated by the ability to make an exception to the rule.

Power makes it easy to do the wrong thing, and harder to do the right thing.

As Carl Schmitt wrote in 1922, "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception." Schmitt is somewhat out of favor, but his protege Leo Strauss basically created the times we now suffer.

> To Schmidt, and 130,000+ other people on Google's corporate welfare

You are probably using the wrong expression.

Corporate Welfare means Welfare for Corporations. So it's when a government bestows money grants, tax breaks, or other special favourable treatment for corporations.

It is nothing to do with employees, not paying excessive salaries, or keeping unproductive ones around.

It does not imply that main beneficiaries are employees, typically it's about C-suite and shareholders.

Google’s the primary beneficiary of the DMCA, and also the US’s criminally lax privacy laws.

Sounds like corporate welfare to me.

The way I understood that sentence, was that Google is providing Corporate Welfare to 130,000+ of it's employees.

A better term is adult daycare.

I'd say Disney is the primary beneficiary of the DMCA, and copyright law in general

But that's more just a condemnation on how sickeningly large American media empires are now

The DMCA lets google crowdsource “upload disney’s catalog to youtube, slap ads on them, and profit while cementing our monopoly”. It also let’s them arbitrarily hobble open source web browsers and android forks with DRM.

Disney was much better off under the old regime, where they could have collected statutory damages from Google each time a movie was uploaded to YouTube.

Remember, Google is evil now.

Even the Devil himself believes he’s doing the right thing because “doing right” is completely subjective.

Anything is possible when values are pliable.

https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

"Do the right thing" was the motto of the perpetrator of every great evil in human history.

Okay sure, perhaps some serial killers knew they were doing the wrong thing but you don't commit genocide unless you've convinced yourself that you're doing the right thing.

To do evil on a grand scale you must have righteousness and conviction in abundance.

"Don't be evil" at least admits the possibility of asking "Wait. are we the baddies?" and answering it with something other than "Of course not, we Do the Right Thing".

Exactly this.

> You see the devil don't mean to be evil, He just regrettably forgets to set expectations

Google Chat autodeletes ALL conversations after 24 hours. Not a legal thing. Not only a Google thing--it would do this for any other company using GSuite.

It's a bit of a stretch for the government to assume this feature exists solely to piss off the government.

In Schmidt’s first tv interview on Bitcoin he also said concern over unchecked criminality was overblown.

He suggested that criminals make enough opsec mistakes that would be recorded that the government need not be worried.

Which has mostly been born out, at least about criminals making opsec mistakes.

> Funny how Google can ignore the privacy of internet users' conversations but when it comes to their employees' conversations, Google does not want to share those with the Government.

The hypocrisy is maddening.

Compare it with Zuckerberg plugging his mic with a dud 3.5mm connector.

Some years ago I got glad and impressed by a friend landing a job as a SWE at Google. Nowadays I just feel pity and disgust for him working there.

I would write "how times change" but the thing is I just hadn't realized how bad Google was 5 years ago.

> Google collects and surveils internet users' conversations on a mass scale without a subpoena, for whatever purpose(s) it chooses, for profit. To Schmidt, and 130,000+ other people on Google's corporate welfare, that's apparently acceptable.

There are 300 million people that live in the United States. Do you think they all agree with the country’s policies with regards to surveillance? How about pretty much any other country?

Rules for thee, but not for me. Many companies try to get away with that. The problem is that we let them.

It's because many kinds of lawsuits (not only the government's) can go into discovery and when you have 130k+ employees generating discoverable materials it becomes very costly to search and provide these for lawsuits. It's easier to set an auto-delete policy and attempt to avoid certain things from being available for it.

You aren't necessarily trying to hid conversations. You are trying to reduce the amount of content you have to search through during discovery.

> It's because many kinds of lawsuits (not only the government's) can go into discovery and when you have 130k+ employees generating discoverable materials it becomes very costly to search and provide these for lawsuits.

If only they have technology that would help them doing such searches...

Heh Heh Heh

If it's anything like their current search tech, then it's not really fit for purpose eh?

Maybe they should outsource this "it needs to work otherwise gov fines!" search piece to something more effective. Like maybe Yahoo? ;)

Literally every tech company does this.

Discovery was different when most communications were in person and company memos we're on paper. Even then companies shredded memos after a while, they're not worth the cost to store them.

Now with computers and everyone working via slack all day it's cheap to store everything everyone has said in your company and the laws around discovery haven't been updated so all of that content now has to be checked at the cost of the one being sued.

They should train Bard on their internal emails.

Not only that, the things that could be perceived as incriminating but are not given an adversary is not insignificant. It’s not an uncommon practice.

Um, no. You're wrong about that. And I was there.

In the beginning, all instant messages were saved. This was handy because a lot of useful, non-sensitive information was sent over IM.

Then, lawsuits and Discovery happened, and "Off The Record" became the default. You could turn things On The Record if your conversation was non-sensitive.

> You are trying to reduce the amount of content you have to search through

This is Google we're talking about here.

It changed circa 2015-2016.

No, this is what the legal team would say when people asked them why they instituted a short retention policy and they didn’t want to say “we keep having crimes show up when people do discovery against us”. This would also result in an attempt to reduce the amount of content needed to search through during discovery.

> No, this is what the legal team would say when people asked them why they instituted a short retention policy and they didn’t want to say “we keep having crimes show up when people do discovery against us”.

This is the corporate response to the modern "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" legal system.

Everybody is always breaking the law, often because following it is impossible (e.g. different laws require mutually incompatible actions), but mostly because nobody knows all the laws and people regularly break them unintentionally.

Corporate lawyers have no ability to change this since it would require making the laws clear and consistent and simple enough for people to understand, so instead they try to make it harder for anyone to find which laws their clients broke.

Then we have to try not to cheer when the victim is somebody we don't like.