Comment by williamDafoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by williamDafoe | Hacker News Reader

Google has a console called panopticon where they can see every Chromebook in the world. This monitoring facility is used to measure bug / crash prevalence in e.g. 802.11 driver software and to determine how much of each fleet is running the latest ChromeOS security patches.

They can do this because Unlike Microsoft Google ports ChromeOS onto new laptops and tests the crap out of them (including the verification that the manufacturer meets about 25 min performance requirement standards for Chrome hardware like LCD viewing angles and speaker volume). They also test the laptops by giving them to employees and then demand hardware improvements of the manufacturers to get the Chrome branding logo.

I bet the have a similar system for for their HTC phones. So your Pixel is probably registering with a panopticon type system because 99.9% of customers are gonna use the stock OS. They do this so their users perceive and experience higher hardware reliability. So it may sound creepy but the goal (100% fleet registration) is hard to meet without forcing 1 internet connection at the 1st boot. It will be hard to meet your freedom goals and google's reliability goals at the same time ..

Source for this?

There is a well known tool named Panopticon (abbreviated pcon) internally and this is not at all what you describe.

(I work at Google)

I was in the chrome dogfooding program at Google, testing pre release hardware and I used panopticon. They locked it down a short while later. I could see all the acer Chromebooks in the wild before the lockdown. I imagine they renamed it and/or came up with a new tool named panopticon since it's a common term for a special type of prison where from one location you can observe every prisoner at once.

> it's a common term for a special type of prison where from one location you can observe every prisoner at once.

Which is kinda unsettling. At least it makes it clear how they view their users.

>They can do this because Unlike Microsoft

You'll be SHOCKED that Microsoft has been aggregating global crash data for more than a decade. Lmao. Google isn't breaking any new ground here. All Windows BSODs and even app crashes get uploaded to Microsoft as far back as XP. Microsoft has even written a blog post on them fixing a 0day before it even got deployed because it got errantly caught as a crash from an attacker's development machine.

> Google has a console called panopticon where they can see every Chromebook in the world.

I bet Apple has this for iPhones, as does Microsoft for Windows 10 internet connected devices. It would be important to have for "Find My Device", disabling stolen devices, etc.

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