When is privacy button not a privacy button? When Google runs it, claims lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

When is privacy button not a privacy button? When Google runs it, claims lawsuit

theregister.com

111 pointsbeardyw50 comments

> Jonathan Hochman, an expert witness for the plaintiffs, provided a technical analysis of Google data collection, but his report remains under seal. As is common in such cases, Google has pushed for sensitive documents obtained during the discovery process to be redacted or sealed. This has become an issue in the US government's ongoing antitrust trial against Google, where much of the testimony and many of the documents have been withheld from the public.

You know, I'd figure it'd be in the public interest for people whose privacy has been violated to have access to the relevant documents... I wonder if anything there could be requested under FOIA?

No, if it's sealed via valid court order, FOIA has no power there.

The lesson for me from this case is that these privacy controls are like a steering wheel on a child's stroller. They give you the illusion of control.

Elevator door close button

Walk button on crosswalk panel

These... actually work? (In my experience)

We're lying to ourselves if we believe anything Google claims about respecting privacy. Unless your data is encrypted when you give it to the monster, and you can know with certainty that it is, then it's not private. The monster will know what the data is, and it will sell it or trade it for power from governments, etc.

Who else has taken note that you can no longer create a Google account without a mobile phone? Google is linking accounts to individuals. Anonymity and privacy are no longer a reality when dealing with Google.

Bummer for beginning devs who spin up Firebase without understanding the implications. (To be fair, it sounds like even Google leadership doesn't understand).

> "It looks like even Sundar Pichai is confused about how this control works because he testified in front of Congress and told them something that is just wrong from a technical perspective…," he said.

If that's true, is that a jailable perjury offense for an individual?

Or, as an executive representing a company, is there some analogous penalty for the corporate-person, such as the company losing its revenue and certain rights for a period?

"Confused" and perjury aren't the same thing.

What is the penalty/remedy for "confused", then, when it's representing the company and providing incorrect information in testimony before Congress?

The remedy is other testimony or congressional research that shows the original testimony was in error.

There is no penalty for being wrong.

Do you think it's reasonable to expect Google's CEO to know the exact inner workings of one particular toggle switch buried in their privacy settings, to the point of punishment for getting them wrong?

Punishment means Congressional hearings - which are, to be fair, generally useless - become nothing but "I don't know but I can check with our teams later" responses.

I don't know about OP, but I definitely do. If you do not know enough to answer correctly, do not answer. If you do not know enough to know if you are certain, adjust what you say to be accurate. If every answer becomes "I don't know but I can check with our teams", the Congressional response should be "We subpoena the team to answer these questions".

Allowing the CEO of any company to present a factually false answer to Congress while representing the company and speaking from a position of expertise provides awfully perverse incentives for _every single CEO_ to misrepresent his company if there are no repercussions for provably false testimony.

What if you think you know, and are certain that your testimony is correct, but are wrong nonetheless?

That's what a trial is for. There should still be a trial!

The alternative seems worse. If there's never punishment for lies every unscrupulous person called to testify will provide whatever is in their best interests instead of providing the truth.

There is punishment for lying. We're talking about if you are being honest but are wrong.

Also, this particular case is about testifying to congress. It's not a criminal trial in a court of law.

If you are being summoned as a corporate representative to testify to Congress, you should be sure about your answers. Do you think these people are wrong so regularly about the business they run?

I didn't think I was being particularly obtuse but you seem to have missed the point: Providing provably false answers to Congress as part of sworn testimony should trigger prosecutors to look into perjury charges. Perjury is what we are talking about here and that has a mechanism: the legal system.

Yes, I think that a C level executive who comes to Congress and testifies confidently about something his business does and is wrong about it should trigger a potential prosecution.

This is about testifying to Congress and what happens when you say something provably false as an expert under Oath. If you are not certain of what you are testifying about, do not testify to it. If you are certain and wrong, you should be afraid of repercussions. Anything else opens up Pandora's Box.

> Providing provably false answers to Congress as part of sworn testimony should trigger prosecutors to look into perjury charges.

Well, in this case, it should trigger congress to look into it, but I agree. And we know that happens because congress has done so in the past. Such an initial investigation would certainly (and correctly) be done quietly, and we're not likely to know about it unless that investigation determines that perjury may have actually happened.

> this particular case is about testifying to congress. It's not a criminal trial in a court of law.

But it's still testimony given under oath. AFAIK perjury is still applicable under those circumstances.

It is, but the enforcement mechanism is a bit different.

How so?

In a court, the court determines if something is perjury and what the repercussions will be. That's not the case with congress. With congress, the congressional committee doesn't decide if perjury happened. It has to ask the Department of Justice to investigate and, if it did, the DoJ has the option of bringing charges in an actual court of law.

It may seem like a small difference, but it's pretty large in practice.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1621

> willfully and contrary to such oath states or subscribes any material matter which he does not believe to be true

Intent (“willfully”) matters.

If you believe the statement is true when you say it, it isn’t perjury. It’s just incorrect.

> If you believe the statement is true when you say it, it isn’t perjury. It’s just incorrect.

Yes, but whether you believed the statement was true when you said is not just a matter of your saying so. Other evidence can be brought to bear on the question: for example, as I have said elsewhere in this discussion, asking you how you came to believe that what you said was true, and you either admitting that you just made it up or had no good reason to believe it, or giving obviously false or evasive answers, or answers that are rebutted by other evidence (for example, you say you were told it by someone who denies that they did so). That could lead a jury in a perjury trial to conclude that in fact you were wilfully lying, even though you deny it.

Yes, but when given evidence from which they might draw other conclusions, a trier of fact may not be inclined to heavily favor your testimony about your state of mind when you gave your false but maybe-or-maybe-not willfully false testimony.

Maybe you should not be the one representing your company at a Congress hearing if you have this behavior..

Congress bears some responsibility in that case; they should stop calling in the CEO for the hearing, who they know won't know the nitty-gritty technical implementation. They should request documents from the technical team involved, and subpoena a representative from it who can speak confidently on its function.

So let me get this straight: The CEO can't possibly be expected to know what goes on at their company, and we should allow them to incentivize internal directors to simply lie to the CEO so the CEO can say whatever they want in front of congress and pretend "they were honestly wrong"

The CEO’s job is high-level strategy. It’s like asking the President how to process an application for SSDI; they haven’t a fucking clue. (Nor should they!)

So only people who never make a mistake should be testifying? That's a pretty small pool.

What I expect is that if he doesn't know, then he says so and says he will get the correct answer to the question quickly. I also expect, post-hearing (and soon thereafter, not four years later if ever), that google "update" the record as an addendum that pichai was not correct in his testimony.

There really can't be any penalty for being wrong. That is far too chilling for testimony. Right?

There can be clarifications and follow up questions. Can call someone back in to testify again, if need be. Or work with more expert witnesses.

having your entire testimony declared invalid, unreliable, confused utterances, and thrown out of record, would be a disasterous penalty, for the party attempting to utilize it.

In criminal trials the remedy for "confused" is to have experts who can testify and/or refute the testimony of the "confused" witness.

Being wrong is not the same as lying. Honest, but incorrect, testimony is not perjury.

This is something I fundamentally don't understand; it seems that American jurisprudence optimizes for "ignorance" and "deniability", rather than prudence and responsibility.

Seems the rich and powerful get given carte blanche to lie and ignore any predictable consequences of their decisions. There is no duty to know what is going on, worse, there is a presumption that it is better to not even know.

I don't understand how it could be considered just for someone to be punished for making an honest mistake in their testimony.

> Seems the rich and powerful get given carte blanche to lie and ignore any predictable consequences of their decisions.

They aren't[1]. This doesn't seem to be a case of someone rich and powerful getting away with lying.

[1] They may have the means to fight things in court to reduce their penalty for perjury, but that's not "carte blanche". Rich and powerful people do, in fact, get penalized for lying under oath. Just not 100% of the time.

>I don't understand how it could be considered just for someone to be punished for making an honest mistake in their testimony.

His job is to run the company and take responsibility for it. If he doesn't know something illegal is going on, he is still at fault for not learning about it

This flirts with the is/ought fallacy. The way you wrote, it sounds like you’re saying that in our current legal system they can be found “found at fault” in a legal sense.

But I believe what you meant is that under a different/hypothetical legal system, one which you believe to be closer to optimal, they should be found at fault.

If the person one party has called as an expert doesn't know what they are talking about, that's a wonderful opportunity for the other side to discredit them. If your expert doesn't know what they are talking about, you should not use their testimony (see above). If nobody in the world knows whether a witness or expert knows what they are talking about or not, that's functionally equivalent to them being right, and there is nothing anybody can do about it.

I do not think you're incorrect, but wouldn't this incentivize confidently guessing (making stuff up) if it's less favorable to publicly admit you don't know something? Since you can use the executive excuse of simply being misinformed. Edit: meanwhile, this was discussed in a sibling comment.

Yes, it does incentivize this. But it disincentivizes something even worse (attaching penalties to honest testimony). There is no perfect answer here. All we can do is choose what sort of adverse outcome to want to minimize. US law tends to lean toward it being better to fail to penalize wrongdoing than to penalize innocent people.

That said, if someone is giving testimony that is intentionally deceptive such as lying and saying it was a mistake, making stuff up -- which is lying -- or even being deceptive without uttering an untruth, that is something that can be penalized.

The pros engage in perjury by just saying "I don't remember". It may be a lie, but good luck proving that.

I would argue, from a layman's perspective, that "I do not know" and "I do not remember" have significant differences, and drawing those parallels would only serve to muddy the waters. In this case it could be possible to show that the testimony was given - even if without other deceit or malice - without competence and "any reasonable person" would be aware of their lack of expertise. Just like it could be possible to show, through evidence such as correspondence, that X had knowledge of Y. I wonder if the system is resilient against such speculated abuse.

Edit: these logical inversions made my ESL head spin a bit. The point was that "I do (not) know" is more readily falsifiable than "I do (not) remember".

In a trial for perjury, the person would be asked, under oath, how they came to believe the information they claim they believed when they gave the testimony that is under dispute. If they actually just made it up or guessed, they would either have to say so, or commit perjury by lying about it. And if the lie was, for example, that so and so gave them a briefing and they understood them to be saying X, then so and so would be called as a witness and their testimony about whether such a briefing took place, and what was said if it did, would be given in evidence.

> wouldn't this incentivize confidently guessing (making stuff up)

Making stuff up is not the same as honestly making statements that you believe are correct, but which are actually wrong. In the latter case, the person (Pichai in this case) could give reasons why he held that belief (for example, so and so gave him a briefing on the feature and he understood them to be telling him X). In the former case (guessing), he wouldn't; he would have to admit under oath that he just made the stuff up. I don't know if that technically counts as perjury, but it certainly doesn't seem to be consistent with giving testimony under oath.

> I don't know if that technically counts as perjury

I believe that it does. Making stuff up is lying.

I'm just amazed that people expect any sort of privacy from a product made by a company that has targetting as its core revenue stream.

Bit like being surprised Chevron has a large fossil fuel footprint.

:o no way

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