Google has another secret browser

Yeah, that's my read. Basically the first line of support said "parental controls and screen pinning don't count as security boundaries", and the author is upset not because of an abstract argument about impact but because they want to get paid.

Should they be security boundaries? Honestly I'm mixed on this. First because the threat mode is totally different when the attacker is your teenager (i.e. who exactly is the harmed victim? The parent?).

But mostly because the whole idea behind bug bounties is to encourage disclosure of vulnerabilities that would otherwise be sold and deployed against the public at large. That is, the bugs have "value", and we're all better off if the purchase price is borne by the software developer than the criminal. There's no market for parental controls bypasses in that sense.

I’d like to shift this a little:

Support who’s primary metric is handle time is in a game of hot potato.

From a business perspective the managers and leaders always feel like there’s too many fires which inevitably leads to either pressure on front-lines to “go faster” and “stop doing unnecessary work” (aka “taking time away from the fires”) or some level of management that’s intentionally blocking higher-ups from seeing those fires so that they look like they are managing the department well (and in this case not only is there the same pressure on the front-lines, but there’s additional pressure about not reaching out to anyone except through that manager.

When the primary metric is handle time, the issues pile up, there’s never enough people to handle it, and the business slowly sinks as no one with a budget sees the “ounce of prevention [that can prevent a pound of cure]”.

However: If the metric is minimum number of departments an issue touches before it’s resolved it’s a whole different thing. Suddenly playing hot potato is a problem and “problem ownership” is praised. There are other metrics too that produce different support cultures (and sometimes different games), but the reason hot potato is so popular is that those other metrics all require top-level execs to be comfortable with spending now to save down the road.

Parental controls is essentially maintenance mode and has 1 dev nominally responsible for it, maybe their workload is divided between that and a bunch of other stuff that they deem their "real" work. The way the component works means that bugs typically get assigned elsewhere in the system very far away from parental controls; you, the owner of Contacts, land a bug like "Your feature XXX has the following failure in parental controls mode." The team responsible is like ... "Why do I care about this? Why should I take a code change for this? Isn't that your problem?" Whoever is responsible for parental controls might not care, but if they do, they don't have political leverage over the owner of the Contacts app or whatever. Therefore, won't fix.

The problem as I see it is that Google came to be dominated by an egalitarizing culture which at first wasn't necessarily a problem. This was an explicit choice by Larry and Sergey, that your manager should not be able to unilaterally fire you just because of a personal disagreement, nor stiff you out of financial rewards, none of that. So, your manager lacks any formal authority over your day-to-day work: they have to use politics and soft power. Instead, performance is reviewed by a committee of your manager’s peers, who can “calibrate” that manager’s opinion of you against others and against empirical data.

The result of being judged by a faceless committee is that implicitly, some things generate the empirical data that they look at, and other things don't. It's helpful to oversimplify this to a common currency of “perfcoin” Ⓟ even though that was never explicit at Google. Some activities generate Ⓟ, some don't. Google has built dozens of new chat apps because whenever you can have a good excuse for how this aligns with your business priorities, they generate lots of Ⓟ. The design documents are rich in Ⓟ, the tracking issues for each feature are rich in Ⓟ, getting the thing privacy-analyzed and internationalized can get you some Ⓟ, the inevitable work to merge it into another chat app is also worth Ⓟ. But please understand that the existence of Ⓟ is a result of semi-hierarchy. The manager exists (hierarchy) but has to point to an objective measure (Ⓟ) to say that you're not doing what you're supposed to (semi-), it is almost a mathematical deduction that this has to exist given that structure.

Now networking with people outside of your team, will never get you any Ⓟ. And this is not for lack of trying! When I was there it was a job responsibility to do some things that were not your job responsibility (“community contributions”) to try and associate Ⓟ with some form of networking! And everyone hated it, and it didn't work anyways. Manager-committees immediately decided that Ⓟ would not be awarded for excessive networking, just that you had to prove a little bit of networking or else Ⓟ would be deducted. Furthermore the most reliable community contributions were noncommunal—conducting hiring interviews being the easiest: probably this person will not be hired, but even if they are, you will never interact with this person ever again. But, you conducted N interviews in the quarter and that is just barely enough to not get docked some Ⓟ for being a shut-in.

I am giving somewhat of a negative portrait and it is not all negative, see Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules for the better parts. I'm just saying that the culture of not-my-department has been created by, and is sustained by, incentivization.

If your infosec team does not have a contact email (or preferably, several, e.g. "incident@", "security@", etc), slack/teams/webex channel, or escalation process for reporting security issues, that is decently well-known to employees, they are not doing their jobs well.

Quarterly infosec bulletins? Infosec day? "Cool incidents" annual recaps?

I cannot imagine working on an infosec team that doesn't make itself very visible, and very *available*, to other groups, and always position themselves as the 'catch-all' place for any security issues (which these bugs clearly are).

I had to hunt for servers that had gopher/lynx on them which didn’t have any login. I vaguely remember having to do something similar to this post to navigate somewhere that would allow me to bring up search or enter a URL.

This was all done on a C64 and a 1200 baud modem, along with this incredible software I was able to find on local BBSes called NovaTerm - an 80 column terminal on a Commodore 64 was black magic at the time. That disk was my prized possession and I almost wore it out.

The VPN is one of the few reasons why I pay $5 for proton unlimited and I could make do without it.

My only alternative is to set up my own wireguard exit node at home with a raspberry

Except when they slapped on that badge, it linked to netscape.com which had a search engine.

With time and pressure.

Right now you have a fun new technology which people are still infatuated with, bought by one of the biggest companies to ever exist, in a country which openly permits business-to-politician payments through lobbying.

The wild west won't look anything like it does 50 years from now

Just like Meta/Instagram, they're playing lip-service to the concept, but not really taking action.

Frustratingly, out of all the platforms & BigCorps, Microsoft's parental controls and support for child accounts seems the best.

For many parents this might be no big deal. But there are genuinely children who've ventured into self-harm, eating disorder, etc. content on account of the wild-westness of the Internet combined with weakness of this crap. And it's absolutely maddening to see how pathetic they all (including Apple) are treating this.

Over the air broadcasts do. The broadcast spectrum is considered publicly owned and is leased to television operators.

I guess you could say the same about the cellular spectrum. But how deep do you want government regulation to go since Google operates over the internet? Do you really want the government controlling internet content “for the children”?

And if they regulate app stores, especially on Android, do they also regulate what you can distribute from your own website?

Which could very likely go undetected, therefore unpunished. It's not like it's a family-room computer that's easily monitored.

> After all, they're parental controls, not NSA-proof security. Making them technically bulletproof would arguably be worse for everyone.

It sounds like they're about as bulletproof as as screen door. I would be much better to have them as strong as an locked exterior door, maybe not "NSA-proof" (the door is vulnerable to locksmiths and battering rams) but strong enough to keep a kid out.

I think that tells me something about the actual priorities of the people building all those systems.

Microsoft has e.g. actual child Hotmail accounts, where the parent can whitelist who they can email and who can contact them. Gmail does not and has no intention adding such a thing. They did eventually add child accounts as part of the Family Link effort, but there's really no controls at that level. I recall seeing internally at Google that instead of adding such facilities to Gmail, they just preferred to a) cover their eyes and pretend that <13 year olds didn't have accounts by tossing that into the agreement and asking for a birthday b) proposing some blue sky alternative communication system for children (I forget the name of this effort, but it was I think 2016ish time frame?), but it had mock-ups and hand waving and big discussions and PRDs etc but was guaranteed to go nowhere because it was a giant vision parallel to y'know... actual-reality...

Microsoft also has global time limits across all devices. And far more granular control.

Anyways, you're substantially right about all this. It drove me nuts that we struggled to deal with access to harmful content and had no control over it, and the worst part of it was working at Google at the time and seeing just how not--seriously this is taken or at least the level of organizational paralysis that was preventing action.

Apple's system isn't much better than Google's FWIW.

90% of the time product lays out a minimal rushed vision, engineering huffs and puffs that it might be impossible, then people work about 20-30 hours a week complaining that the designers didn't tell them exactly what to do and the teams they need to integrate with won't help, and you deliver 80-90% of the original minimal "vision" and slap eachother on the back.

And that was _before_: A) spent 18 months firing people, while some managers took advantage of that situation to punch down. B) they nuked the performance review system, 80% are exactly the same with their Significant Impact, another 10-15% have scarlet letters, and 5-10% get rewards.

Any deviation from that and someone perceives you as being on their turf and finds a way to punch down.

And good luck getting management to care, just like the real world, no one wants to get within 100 feet of trouble.

Then you're faced with the invitation to appeal to a VP, a coin flip where you have to guess at if they're going to back you, and even if they do, facing the fact you nuked your career anyway because you broke omerta.

Every parent can use a little help. There's so much that your child sees and hears, you want to be there to help explain it to them when they have questions.

Hand them a device that shows anything happening anywhere in the world? Maybe a little help there, limiting what they can easily stumble upon, is a good thing.

phone has many utilities I want kids to use: make calls, check mail, maps, weather etc.

The issue is that they are using it for secretly watching tiktok for example.

Regarding YouTube, the YouTube Kids app lets me block videos and whole channels, and it's great. But there is no equivalent functionality in the main YouTube app. On various devices (e.g., Roku, Google Nest) the kid sometimes manages to find some YouTube channels I'd rather they didn't watch. But I have to manually intervene each time, I can't just block those channels from being watched or recommended in the future. YouTube/Google obviously know that it's valuable to block videos/channels, since that feature exists in the kids app, yet they omit the feature from the main app, even for a paying customer like me. It is obnoxious.

I doubt that it was intentional. Although careful deploying systems, I have often a feeling that we must have forgotten something that is trivially exploitable by someone. I wonder if there are provably secure systems in use somewhere...