It would be sort of weird if we turn back into having sort of 'company towns' where your employer provides a lot of what you need except they pay for it. It's not just Google this would be beneficial for, even if you run a factory you could pay employees a tiny bit less, but provide food/services for them that would make up for it. And because of the taxes/bulk situation it could be economically beneficial for both sides.

Meals on the business' premises for the benefit of the business are not taxable income for employees (but are a deductible expense of the business). This is a black-letter IRS regulation; https://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b/ar02.html#en_US_2016_p...

Meals are a sideshow, though; healthcare is where the real action is. If work buys you a Playstation you get taxed on ~$300 in imputed income; if work pays $12k~$25k a year for your health insurance, that isn't taxed.

I used to work for a subsidiary of an auto company, and I got a new company car every year. But those cars were used partly as test vehicles; they were maintained at the company garage by company employees, so they had a benchmark on maintenance problems. The company could make a tax case for that not being income. This only works if your employees are using your own product.

"Employer-sponsored health insurance plans dramatically expanded as a direct result of wage controls imposed by the federal government during World War II. The labor market was tight because of the increased demand for goods and decreased supply of workers during the war. Federally imposed wage and price controls prohibited manufacturers and other employers from raising wages enough to attract workers. When the War Labor Board declared that fringe benefits, such as sick leave and health insurance, did not count as wages for the purpose of wage controls, employers responded with significantly increased offers of fringe benefits, especially health care coverage, to attract workers."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_United...

I expect that it's a mix of two things:

1. You can make a case that keeping them in the office (rather than making trips out) is a business need, and it might hold up to scrutiny. This probably covers things like coffee, juice, snacks, etc. The company legitimately does benefit from (some key) employees not constantly leaving the office for small necessities.

2. There's a lot of low-level tax fraud the IRS is too understaffed to deal with (and is directed away from corporate fraud like that, anyway). So you probably are supposed to report the value of the meals you get, but no one tracks it, and each employee is only committing a small error, so the IRS can't justify dealing with every case.

The IRS actually has a great PDF on when giving an employee a free meal is a taxable benefit or not. (I found it a couple years back when starting a small corp, but can't seem to find it now.)

Ed:

According to this document [1], Google providing meals probably falls under a nontaxable status because they provide them on campus and there isn't a lot of food near the campus. (Section starts on page 43.)

[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p5137.pdf

For example, if a free lunch allows an employees to have a lunch meeting, the IRS considers that for the company's benefit.

Whether all of Google's perks actually satisfy that test is a different issue, but that is the IRS's rule.

Sounds like a rule that is hard to impossible for the IRS to enforce. I hate rules like that, we ought to create a better rule or get rid of it altogether. Because I'm guessing if a factory lowered their wages while providing the same perks as google the IRS would probably say something.

You'd be amazed how much exercise helps with concentration and reduces stress.

With that logic you could fund your employees entire lifestyle if you made the case that it helps them be more productive.

Yes, potentially though it'd probably help to have data supporting that. But things like company housing or sleep pods can materially benefit the company (for one thing, if you can take a nap at work you'll work longer hours).

> Should they pay for a nanny because help with child care makes you more productive?

Sure, potentially. In fact, employer-provided childcare is a tax-free benefit.

This even goes for things like salaries. If a company pays salaries that are way above the market rate, this could be seen as [corporate] tax fraud. But there often isn't a bright line in law, which is frustrating to us engineers who think deterministically.

It would be weird but it would make sense, in the same way that theoretically the 'best' government in a benevolent dictator. When it's good, it's great, when it's bad, it's BAAAD.

I know that may seem like a small thing, but providing jobs for the less educated off sets at least some of the problems these companies face with gentrification, gender and racial diversity etc.

Yes. Amazon has, by far, the highest turnover amongst tech companies. [0]

[0] https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/amazon-rewards-emp...

If that was really the case then why do so many companies offer no perks to their employees?

Sidenote, and completely off topic:

Is there a non-high-horse way to word this? I understand the meaning, but the same phrase can be used to be completely dismissive as well. It's a potential moral high ground, where if you don't agree you must be uninformed.

I'm not saying OP meant it that way, it just brought up the honest question from me.

To answer the parent, I wasn't trying to say everyone who knows what Google does with their data would not actually consent. There are people who argue that "privacy is over" and that it's entirely okay for Google to know everything about them. Most Googlers fall into that category, along with a large number of extremely liberal tech people. I'd say most people on HN understand at least in large part how Google operates.

But I'd argue the majority of society does not understand the extent to which Google collects and uses their information, nor grasps how that may affect their lives in the future.

Appreciate your reply.

If you use Android, virtually all apps rely on Google Play Services, and interestingly you it will autoupdate even when you explicitly tell it not to.

Using google maps to navigate (now even Waze is theirs), people sending links to google docs, google pictures etc.

While some data is stored, no cookies are sent, plus there's heavy caching involved: "The result is that website visitors send very few requests to Google: We only see 1 CSS request per font family, per day, per browser."

All in all, those services (IIRC the JS library CDN is similar) don't seem to be designed to be a tracking data source except for some popularity stats about the data hosted there.

How is any of the data private when you willingly use their tools, sites, servers, etc? You open up google.com and type things in, what privacy do you expect? Or am I missing something you are referring to?

I'll gladly cite examples: Search ad dark patterns. I remember a time when G was _proud_ of that their ads were entirely distinct from native search results, and never caused native results to fall beneath the fold. Now when I search on even a moderately sized monitor, literally half of the first page results are sponsored or ads (native content being entirely beneath the fold), to boot in a manner increasingly less distinct from the native results. (there used to be a separate ad box, and then a line between ads and native, and now just a tiny little 'ad' or grey 'sponsored' blip)

I've seen these encroachments across the board; youtube/G+ integrated logins was another, dark patterns for data-gathering approval on droid ("do you want to share data; yes/cancel"), which I'd best summarize as a slow collapse of any legitimacy to their "don't be evil" mantra from early on.

The one concrete point I can think of for "scraping data without approval" is that when various new data policies were established and yes/no controls added to your G profile settings, I believe some of them defaulted on? I've heard mumblings both ways in the HN discussions on this topic so it's a less strong point than my previous, but may be a basis for a more established argument of that aspect of dark patterns in private data acquisition that the parent was trying to pose.

yuhong: Responding to your question as an edit to my own comment since two -4 comments is probably enough for one day. Silently implementing opt-out features, and automatically opting everyone into new ways to violate their privacy, granting themselves the right to change their terms of service or privacy policy without notification. Using confusing terminology to make it difficult to discern what is the "more private" option. (Opting out of Google+'s "Featured Photos" feature, for example, requires you to switch ON the option to shut OFF Google stealing your intellectual property.) As existencebox noted, making ads on search look as close to search results as possible to mislead people into clicking on scam and malware laden Google Ads rather than real results...

But true, Google can't be stopped as long as software developers and companies continue to sell out for ad money.

They've also taken a public stand for privacy, whether out of self-interest or not, that's something Google will probably never do.

Are you a self appointed privacy vigilante or were you elected by the people to protect them? Do you also protect people from Credit Card companies, ISP's, Cable Companies, e-Commerce sites and Cell Phone companies or are you just infatuated with Google?

I do speak about Google more than average, largely because the volume of fanboyism around the company is so massive, and their PR department generates so much fiction. I don't have to tell you AT&T is a terrible company, you already know, so I don't waste a lot of time doting on it. Combatting the sort of psychological warfare Google employs requires drastically more effort.

Kicking the person trying to protect others because of some nitpicking.

Who are you protecting, Google? Must be hard protecting poor G against some individuals on forums.

Or making Android Location History on by default and then using it for things like http://searchengineland.com/hood-google-adwords-measures-sto... -- yes, they're reporting anonymized data to the advertisers, but of course they're storing your actual location data, with a well-hidden knob to turn it off.

Doing things people probably wouldn't like done to them if they knew about them with a well-hidden knob to turn it off is fairly dark-patterny as far as I'm concerned.

This is exactly what we need, exposing antisocial behavior for what it is.

Yes, Google was doing that sort of thing for Chrome distribution for a while. They've stopped since, which is better than nothing, I guess. [Edit: apparently they haven't stopped, according to ocdtrekkie's comment! Or maybe they have started again.]

Point is, a lot of people are NOT using Google's products willingly. They may be using them because someone else set them up with the product and they don't know how to change, they may be using it because they're required to for work (Google docs, e.g.).

It's worth noting that Sundar Pichai's claim to fame at Google, prior to Chrome itself, was getting the Google Toolbar installed on everyone's PCs whether they wanted it or not. The CEO of Google isn't just a fan of software installation dark patterns like this, he's the guy responsible for it at Google.

You can't use acrobat with the browser you're trying to download it with.

https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/display-pdf-in-browser...

I visit that same link using Firefox on Linux and don't get a Chrome install checkbox on the page, but maybe someone else is?

Also, Adobe Reader is a standalone program, you don't install it to embed in the browser. (Both Edge and Chrome can display PDF files natively.)

This has nothing to do with "recommended" apps. Chrome is pushed with Adobe Reader because Google pays them to do so. Similarly, McAfee pays to have their software installed with the Adobe Flash plugin installer.

You linked to the Adobe Reader download page, which asks you to install chrome if you don't have a supported browser. Which you didn't.

I get that you have an axe to grind here, but it seems like you're cherry picking an example of where Edge doesn't support something so Adobe is recommending a supported download.

Adobe doesn't recommend the Chrome download when visiting with Firefox, for example.

You're creating an incredible work of fiction to avoid a long-standing well-known truth: That Google pays Adobe to bundle Chrome in their installer when the user is coming from a Microsoft browser. (If I come from Firefox, it offers McAfee's Security Scan Plus, which also pays Adobe for the privilege.) This isn't a technical or compatibility issue, and it never has been. This is where Adobe makes money on Adobe Reader downloads.

This started in 2011, long before Microsoft Edge existed: http://www.chromestory.com/2011/09/google-chrome-is-now-bund...

We don't know the dollar amount of the deal, as Google keeps those sorts of things confidential. But it is very similar to the figure an Oracle lawyer dropped, that Google paid Apple a billion dollars to keep Google as the iPhone's default search: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-22/google-pa...

Note that until recently, Google also paid to be default on Firefox, also rumored in the one billion dollar range: http://money.cnn.com/2014/11/20/technology/firefox-mozilla-g...

Some additional reading on this strategy, is that Chrome came about as a fear that Microsoft might disable or cripple the Google Toolbar, which was used to push people over to Google Search and collect their browsing data. (And was also heavily promoted as a bundle item in other installers like Java.) Sundar Pichai, now Google's CEO, spearheaded the toolbar and then Chrome: http://fortune.com/2014/10/27/google-rise-of-sundar-pichai/

If you believe Google got where it was by being "the best", it may be hard to realize this, or easy to overlook the facts. But Google's market share is largely a result of paying for other companies to push their products, with or without user permission.

With IE11, which does support ActiveX, it shows ... a Chrome download checkbox. And the Google toolbar.

But in terms of the ethical question, we're now talking about how if I break into your house to steal all your unhealthy potato chips that's better than if I break into your house to steal your money. The fundamental problem is breaking into your house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A