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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Privacy, where it exists, creates impedance in Google's cash flow because it requires designing for some n sigma tail where n does not entail statistical significance and the case analysis must be very fine grained.

Google doesn't have a category labeled "private" information". It never has and creating one is not planned. Privacy is not amenable to computer science. It is a social concept not a technical one. The closest technical concern is security. It scales and so that is where Google devotes resources.

As far as Google is concerned: All your bit are belong to us.

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Do you have a source for this? I've worked on user data and privacy-related stuff (I work on Maps, not Calendar) and everyone involved took it extremely seriously. We sent PMs back to the drawing board more than once when we found edge cases with potential privacy issues.

Google's single identity policy is an obvious example.

Sharing that Google identity with other websites when that identity is logged into Google is a less obvious one.

Analytics, cookies, personalized search results, etc. take it to Google's very core.

Driving around collecting WiFi data, storing WiFi passwords, reading documents via Docs and email via Gmail, and just plain crawling the web don't embody any common language notion of privacy.

Instead security stands in for it. Two factor authentication for a Google account is an example. It keeps a person's account secure but does not enhance privacy because Google will still share and slice and analyze everything that can possibly be associated with that account.

Yes, but how does this particular privacy leak benefit Google? Google wants to have all your information themselves. Why would they want to give that info to your boss?

This sounds like somebody being really clever and whipping up a fancy feature, but forgetting to finish it with proper meeting requests and a freaking confirmation box and whatnot.

The idea itself is good - check for email addresses in meeting information and tying those to a Google account as invites. The problem is that the user isn't asked.

The user isn't asked because questions about sharing do not arise in the design of the software because Google's vision is that everything is shared.

This is why it's not a privacy leak. "Privacy" has no meaning when the context is Google. It only has meaning outside their operations.

"it requires designing for some n sigma tail where n does not entail statistical significance and the case analysis must be very fine grained"

What does this mean?

Generally speaking you might be right, but I fail to see the profit motive behind this specific case. It's just a UX disagreement it seems.

This is simply one expression of the corporate protocols in which privacy does not exist. It's not a bug. It's not an honest mistake. It is an implementation detail of a higher level abstraction.

Of Course this isn't a bug- It's a feature. the only problem is that there isn't a confirmation screen when it detects that you have put a person's email address in the incorrect spot. All that is needed is for a popup to ask "Would you like to send this event to email@example.com?".

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