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Comment by tucnak | Hacker News Reader

Google never gets credit for shit like this, or their results in zero-knowledge maths and implementations, which are genuine public service beyond immediate productization.

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If Google had decided to move on this back when people first started being falsely accused of crimes based on geofence data, they might be more deserving of credit.

For instance, in 2018:

> Avondale Man Sues After Google Data Leads to Wrongful Arrest for Murder

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-locatio...

To be fair... I miss being able to access my location history data via the browser. So it's not a case of "google being evil", it's a case of "sane defaults", "shifting regulations", and "unintended consequences". Google should get the accolades they deserve in this case.

They killed a lot of functionality. For instance, if you opened the details of a place, it used to tell you when all your visits were. I feel the timeline is mostly abandonware these days.

Google doesn't care that their business model is hording data in a manner that puts users at risk from any malicious government official.

They merely bowed to public pressure when the press turned against Google because continuing to horde location data put women seeking abortions in legal jeopardy.

To deserve accolades, they would need to stop hording all the other types of data and adopt a business model not based on spying on everyone as much as possible.

From a factual standpoint it's good to acknowledge that pro-privacy work. From a standpoint of overall evaluating the actions, goals, incentives, and impacts of the company, they mean basically nothing. They are a surveillance advertising company, they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them.

No - they are an advertising company. It is to their advantage to be ahead of the game with something like federated ML if that is where society is headed. To say Google has no positive impact is absurd - engineers there generally care about protecting user data. There is probably better access controls at Google than anywhere else. Sure there are pressures like you said but a gross misplace of user trust is what would destroy them.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

they kind of made the game, they are hardly victims here. I shouldn't have to be in a position to decide whether I trust them with a profile of all of my history and activities, especially when I never had an option to opt out, much less opt in.

I am probably far more sympathetic than you can ever imagine but the antecedents are not really unique to google. The technical destination of targeting advertising just looks like this given privacy laws (well the lack thereof).

See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/eff-congress-heres-wha... or probably any recent publication about privacy rights by the eff.

Like I get it but be mad that congress is a bunch of goofy old people who give zero shits. If you can point at some lobbying by google then by all means so be it - certainly they appeared to have kissed the ring as of late. But keep in mind googlers personally direct money into the eff every year too.

>they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them.

I dislike Google as much as the next guy, but, regardless of its intentions in making Chrome and Android open source and secure, it has a huge positive impact on privacy and human rights.

This is a bizarre take that doesn't account for the impact google has had. Over the last 15 years, Google has steadily and deliberately maximized the commoditization of user data, single handedly driven the adtech industry into an unstoppable enshittification engine, built a moat out of making the internet a much worse place, swung around their money and legal resources to squash small companies, destroyed users lives when they made the mistake of depending on Google for anything important, are enthusiastic participants in global scale political manipulation, censorship, and outright market manipulation.

The purpose of a thing is what it does - android and chrome and everything else Google does serves to maintain or extend their control over the value and flow of user data.

Android and Chrome are net negatives. Google subsumed Firefox, made Mozilla beholden to them, derailed their viability as a competitor to chrome, poached talent, manipulated user exposure, degraded performance targeting competitors, and otherwise engaged in ruthless corporate fuckery to get where they are, with near absolute dominance of the browser market. Android is touted as an alternative to Apple, but they just as enthusiastically build up walled gardens, abuse consumer trust, play into monopolistic market dynamics, empower ISPs and others to force a "you actually rent your device" type model on consumers, and otherwise maximize the amount of money extracted per user without any concurrent return in value.

The internet, smartphones, and browsers are a dystopian, cynical abomination, and if there's any justice in the universe, AI will result in the total dissolution of giant tech companies like Google, and there will be a future free of institutions like it.

Nobody is going to be worried about how you never litter if you're constantly kicking puppies and biting babies on the nose.

People are to busy labeling them and the rest of tech as Far Right to care.

They don't get credit for this particular thing because many, many users lost years of their location data in the transition, and most of the rest had theirs corrupted. It was a poorly-executed transition that screwed a lot of people, so even they themselves don't tout it much.

FWIW, I think Google is overly-hated, but it's hard to frame them as a bleeding-heart altruist. Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.

>Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.

I don't get it. In the first sentence you're claiming that there's "basically no obligation to individual consumers", but when they do a pro-consumer thing, you dismiss it as being "made to cover their own ass". Which one is it? Is this just a lot of words to say that Google isn't as pro-consumer as you'd like it to be?

“Covering their ass” from government pressure. If they can’t provide it they can’t be dinged for not doing so.

I don't think Google genuinely does a lot of these things to truly be pro-consumer. One could see these kind of actions as them not wanting to have to deal with the bad publicity of handling all this data that they overall haven't been able to really monetize well anyways.

The truth is probably somewhere in between if you were to actually sit down and talk with all the people involved with such a decision.

Regardless of the reasons though I do think we should give praise to companies and organizations doing things that ultimately benefit us though. We should give feedback as to the changes we like to let decision-makers know people actually do care.

Companies like Google are too large to have single, clear motives.

I think it is appropriate to judge their actions, but I am not sure any simplistic “good motives/bad motives“ discussion can be fruitful.

Exactly. A lot of people acted like the attacks on Waymos during the ICE protests were random but they were anything but. All the local organizers are well aware of Google's contracts with ICE as well as the tributes Google paid to Trump.

How is this relevant? Just because you disagree with some vague connection between two entities doesn't give you the right to destroy property. That's the definition of a childish tantrum. Inflicting blind pain on random, unrelated people because you don't get your way.

There's a rhetorical dodge in this argument where it transitioned from talking about property destruction to talking about harming people.

One can cause the other, but the burden of proof is on the claimant that wrecking a mass-produced special purpose autonomous vehicle did more tangible harm to a human being than make some engineer sad before they rolled up their sleeves and built a replacement.

The Waymo emphatically did not care it was destroyed.

It's relevant because Waymo is Google

How can you justify anarchist vigilante violence?

Should I be legally allowed to assault you or vandalize your property because I think your political orientation or that of your company is not "on the right side of history" ?

Come on. Not that I support destroying anything, private or public, for rhetorical effect. But assaulting someone or destroying their property has an incomparably larger impact on that individual than destroying a vehicle that won't even show up in Google's balance sheet.

>an incomparably larger impact on that individual than destroying a vehicle that won't even show up in Google's balance sheet.

Same re*arded argument people use to justify shoplifting. Now tell me genius, what happens to the shops in areas with high crime?

I didn't justify anything. Just pointed out the false equivalence. We could also argue about the effect of systemic shoplifting, but that is also neither here nor there.

I worked at google some years back, in the VR team for a while. I can't speak to all of google, but at least in that org, the amount of nonsense we had to go through to make sure there wasn't some way some genius could figure something out related to personal information by correlating various pieces of data that we were storing in good faith to improve the product was absurd.

They were trying really really hard to do the right thing. Lots of people really cared about it, many to the point of it being detrimental to just making the product better.

From my time there, a favorite quip of mine, towards some new startup we bought was: welcome to Google, here is a list of every settlement and consent decree you are now subject to.

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