I turned down a job offer from Facebook because after a lot of thought I decided I couldn’t work at such a company. I didn’t even apply to Google because Google’s attitude towards privacy and data collection is just insane. Does the average person with an Android phone really know their location is being uploaded minute by minute to Google? Was asking if they want to “make Android better” really a good faith effort to obtain consent?
> From my perspective, Google's goals are aligned with improving the world by offering information services. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate, basically all of the Other Bets, etc.--it's easy to imagine that the people behind them are more concerned with impact on the world than on generating profit or consolidating Google's power. > To me, Facebook has no such world-improving aspirations.
Again, come on. Clearly most Facebook employees and most Google employees are not evil moustache-twirling sociopaths. As grating as it can sound, Facebook’s stated goal of “connecting the world” is at least as valuable as “offering information services,” your idealized version of Google’s goal.
Let’s be realistic. I don’t think people should work at Google or Facebook, but I know that there are lots of factors that can go into choosing where to work, so I am hesitant to publicly say “haha, you couldn’t pay me enough to work at Facebook/Google!”
Seeing Google employees saying exactly that about Facebook is just laughable.
> Does the average person with an Android phone really know their location is being uploaded minute by minute to Google?
It doesn't seem like you have any idea how Google actually captures user's location data. Not only does Google give you the full ability to control and delete your location data [1] but the data collection is not on by default (though applications like Maps will prompt for it) and the data is always anonymized when used and most importantly the data is never shared with commercial third parties (though I believe Google may make anonymized data available to researchers whose projects pass certain ethical checks).
This data is used to drive projects like Maps and 'Popular Times' and real-time directions that people really, really like.
So while you seem to want to paint Google as manipulating people to harvest their data and sell it to the highest bidder (what Facebook basically does) nothing could be further from the truth. Facts matter.
I would personally say when it comes to handling user data Google is probably the most ethical and rigorous company in the world. I can't think of any other company that goes to such great lengths to protect user data as much as Goog does. It's been remarked many times that your data stored in Google's network is more secure than your data stored in NSA's network. Certainly you'll never see anything like private employees tracking their spouses using Google's data [2].
And here's the thing: Facebook is also pretty damn secure when it comes to user's data. Obviously they fucked up with their API but again I think a sober review of most American tech companies will show Facebook doing more to protect user data. You should be much more concerned with many of the fly-by-night websites that pump out fake news or sell cheap Chinese goods to people who don't know better. In fact it's these websites whose sole purpose is to suck up user data for profit.
The real point here of course is that while it may feel good to bash Google and Facebook it is not the best use of energy. What the US needs is what the EU is doing: real privacy regulation with real teeth that applies to any organization whose site serves American citizens.
But somehow I don't see that happening any time soon, right?
[1] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...
Google collects your location by default. I know so because I bought an Android phone just this month. Here is the setup screen, shown with default settings. [1]
Google encourages developers to use the Play Services SDK for location services. This means that it is impossible to provide your location to just one app (say, Lyft) without also providing it to Google. [2]
You can disable location services and Google will still find ways to monitor your location. For example, if you use gmail, Google will read any flight and hotel confirmations emails. It does this by default. [3] Install Google Trips and it will show you a list of every city you've been in.
They collect your location so much they even find ways to do it by accident. [4]
> I can't think of any other company that goes to such great lengths to protect user data as much as Goog does
Better protection is to not collect it in the first place.
For example, Apple Maps doesn't have a sign-in, and its server requests are associated with randomized rotating IDs, not your user account. Directions are broken up into multiple segments with different identifiers so that Apple can't reconstruct your trip.
> Certainly you'll never see anything like private employees tracking their spouses using Google's data
Old but it happened. [5]
[2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/12/turn_off_location_se...
[4] https://qz.com/1131515/google-collects-android-users-locatio...
[5] http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...
This is a straight up lie. Yes, Google encourages fused location because it provides better experience (it bootstraps location via cell towers / bluetooth / wifi which requires data from Google servers). However it does NOT make it "impossible" to directly request data from location services on the phone which DOES NOT go through Google servers.
Please don't lie.
> For example, Apple Maps doesn't have a sign-in, and its server requests are associated with randomized rotating IDs, not your user account. Directions are broken up into multiple segments with different identifiers so that Apple can't reconstruct your trip.
Apple location services use pretty much the exact same system to provide fused location - they still call back to Apple servers to request information about your neighbouring wifis / cell towers which leaks your location to their cloud as well. Plus, Apple will sell out iCloud data of their customers to Chinese government (which makes me wonder if they're selling it out to NSA as well).
Can a Lyft user disable fused location and force Lyft to request location data directly without going through Google? I'm not an Android user so this is not a rhetorical question.
By the way, "lying" is to _knowingly_ make a false statement.
No and no. Not only is the data collection on by default, even if you turn it off some Google apps (e.g. Maps) just don't give a damn.
I recently updated Google Maps on my Android phone (a move I regret). A couple days later I went into town. I checked my phone after I was back home and it suggested I leave reviews for the stores I visited (it listed them). That creeped the heck out of me.
> So while you seem to want to paint Google as manipulating people to harvest their data and sell it to the highest bidder (what Facebook basically does) nothing could be further from the truth. Facts matter.
The fact is that last winter, when reinstalling Android, I realized my phone was uploading location data to Google constantly as soon as I had clicked the misleadingly labeled “help make Android/Google Maps better” button. Curious, I decided to ask my friends and family if they knew about this—none did.
Google does ask for “permission” in the sense that it shows a misleading dialog box where the default option (visually indicated—see the Dark Patterns website for examples of this tactic) is to share everything. This is not a good faith effort to ask for consent: that is the empirical, objective truth, no matter what good intentions you might hope to ascribe to Google. Again, I invite you to see if a majority of normal people know what they are agreeing to when they set up their Android phones.
> Not only does Google give you the full ability to control and delete your location data [1] but the data collection is not on by default (though applications like Maps will prompt for it) and the data is always anonymized when used and most importantly the data is never shared with commercial third parties (though I believe Google may make anonymized data available to researchers whose projects pass certain ethical checks)
Whether data is shared with third parties is a good point, but this isn’t really meaningful when “Google” encompasses search, maps, phones, video, office software, etc. But it’s noteworth my friends at Facebook told me the exact same things about Facebook’s policies towards data—researchers need to go through approved processes there, too—it’s just that here those processes approved someone who was actually not ethical at all.
Facts matter, and to paraphrase you, although it may feel good to think that Facebook is worse than Google (and correspondingly that it’s ok to work at one but not the other), we need to look at what companies actually do, not what we think they believe they are doing.
Also, it seems you think that my claim about the average person not being aware of the extent of Google’s data collection is false. This is what I concluded after asking the people close to me, most who are not in technology. I invite you to actually go out and ask people before claiming otherwise about the results of what is well-acknowledged as a dark pattern.
Giving them your data is the price you pay for their service. If this doesn't seem fair to you then find an alternative. Enough of this scary business.
Maybe with the Equifax and Cambridge analytica incidents the broader public will start thinking about privacy more seriously. And in turn companies may start pushing privacy assurances as selling points. (Just reaching for a bit of optimism in these unnerving circumstances, I don't like it either)
I've never understood how people can have such a religious-like faith in a corporation they have never seen the inside of and in which they know not a single person who works there. Gullibility perhaps?
>This guilty until proven innocent attitude that many people hold is getting kinda old.
Do you care at all about security? Because that is the fundamental assumption behind taking any security precaution whatsoever in life, whether it's putting a lock on your door or not trusting a faceless corporation with billions of the most detailed psychological profiles in history.
My response to this was that from 2005 to about 2015, most people defaulted to an overly rosy view of tech businesses. People like us may always have warned about privacy dangers and the like, but among ordinary people the "Google is my friend!" mentality was widespread and it seemed like no one ever grasped that these are businesses first and foremost.
The current trend is merely the pendulum swinging the other way, and perhaps it might overshoot or already have done so, but the rose-colored glasses were never going to last forever. If you are in a tech business and this bothers you, I would gently suggest that you may have gotten accustomed to the overly cushy treatment and are now overreacting.
Youtube is serving as a major driver of different forms of radicalization (ISIS, alt right, etc).
I'm not saying that you should resign. But I do think we all have the tendency to not evenly attempt to assuage technology risks. Partially there's an attention bias towards specific concerns (e.g. free speech / censorship), partially a negative attention bias towards things that pay our bills.
Now with that in mind, Facebook compiled to the Vietnamese government's requests to put their servers in Vietnam (alongside with Google) [1]. The problem is, while Google was never blocked, in the past in Vietnam, Facebook was blocked (more precisely, blocked intermittently). I don't imagine it was hard for the government to block it completely. Let's be honest, no one will join a social network if it requires you to have a VPN to access it. Why wasn't Facebook blocked anymore, all out of the sudden? The whole buddy buddy/kowtow gesture of Zuckerberg to Xi didn't help my confidence and trust either. It's very chilling to see a person with little ethical compass like him to have such an enormous amount of power.
I don't know what is more horrible, them turning in to the government the data of "dumb fucks" following dissidents' news and manipulating them, or people having to figure out how to access news via VPNs like it was in the past. At least, I know not every VPN providers give enough fucks about that country to comply with its government's request. Google was known to be kicked out of China for not complying. Can't say the same thing about Facebook.
But then, I can't do anything about any of that stuff, so I might be ok with it.
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...
Anyways, its interesting to see how people frequently forget about progress and hold on to old ideas. They forget the importance of continuously fixing problems. They also forget that usually the solution to a problem is usually the simplest one (especially one that's been proven).
Because we should aim to be more like china, russia, europe, middle east, africa, etc. No thanks. You guys can have your tyranny. We'll stick to our rights.
I completely believe that the people behind them are more concerned with impact than on generating profit or consolidating Google's power, but good intentions only get you so far. Google is still abusing it's power, whether that is the goal of the people behind it or not. Google could build those systems in a way that protects their user's privacy, but choose not to, simply because they are optimizing for profit, rather than for empowering their users.
Most people aren't scared of the intentions of the good people at Google, it's that Google clearly has too many people with bad intentions in the mix as well, based on the actions that the company takes as a whole.
Ah yes. From "Don't be evil" to "Improve the world"? Who asked google to "improve" anything?
> To me, Facebook has no such world-improving aspirations.
Which is why they are being attacked. They are neutral.
> Plus, I keep seeing studies of how increased Facebook usage correlates negatively with peoples' moods
The same applies to google. The more you use youtube/google/google news/etc, the more depress you are. This also translates to news media itself.
> so Zuckerberg's evident goal of "get everyone on Earth on Facebook" feels gross.
Google is even worse. Censorship + agenda peddling + discrimination + google has far stronger monopoly on people's attention and far more information.
No offense, but I wouldn't work for either google or facebook. Both are terrible for society and freedom and mental health.
To respond to your points quickly: I'd rather support a company with a moral stance I agreed with than one that was neutral. I think news media in general has a problem with sensationalism/optimizing-for-clicks/echo chambers, but I don't perceive that Google is particularly bad as an news aggregator. I think a lot of complaints about Google/Youtube overlook that most policy decisions about removals/demonetization are driven not by politics or agendas, but by advertisers, without which Google/Youtube would not exist. (And again, if you disagree and believe that targeted advertising is itself a net bad for the world, oh well.)
Personally, I think viewpoint polarization and the internet's enabling of echo chambers is the biggest problem facing the world. I know Google is often accused of making the problem worse, but I don't agree. Google News, for example, won't stop showing me Fox/Breitbart articles, even though they have to have enough data on me to know I'm super far-left.
Anyway, I did some searching (on Google, ha), but can't find any articles linking Google/Youtube usage to mental health problems, so I'd be interested if I'm wrong. The only one I remember seeing said Youtube had a positive effect on mental health. (https://www.psychalive.org/worst-mental-health-instagram-fac...)
If you seriously think that "people behind them are more concerned with impact on the world than on generating profit" then I have a bridge to sell. Oh, and shareholders would like a word with you, too.
There's nothing wrong with generating profit, and I would trust people motivated by profit fart more than ones motivated by the whole "making the world a better place" -- the latter tend to be genocidal maniacs -- but for companies that's exactly what they are supposed to do, generate profit. It just would be nice if they were a bit more transparent about how they do it, whether Facebook, or Google.
I'm not trying to be rude, but I think you have to take a very narrow and convenient view of Google to end up thinking your employer is any "better" than Facebook (who I otherwise agree is awful).
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/06/google-is-quietly-provid...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/04/05/silicon-valley-be...
https://thebaffler.com/latest/oakland-surveillance-levine
https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/967509077591867392?lang=...
You know who should be proud of themselves for working at a company that doesn’t make money off of people’s private information, and is actually creating cutting edge technology and services that people just pay for? Amazon. Amazon has made the world a better place than Google and Facebook put together.
From my perspective, Google's goals are aligned with improving the world by offering information services. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate, basically all of the Other Bets, etc.--it's easy to imagine that the people behind them are more concerned with impact on the world than on generating profit or consolidating Google's power.
To me, Facebook has no such world-improving aspirations. The extent to which I'm aware of Facebook's attempt to improve the world was the initiative to bring free internet to India, which was perceived as a play to lock more people into Facebook. Plus, I keep seeing studies of how increased Facebook usage correlates negatively with peoples' moods, so Zuckerberg's evident goal of "get everyone on Earth on Facebook" feels gross.
Things obviously aren't just this black and white, and both companies collect user data in order to generate buckets of advertising wealth (which, if you find disagreeable, probably biases you against both companies), but from a personal perspective, I'm quite happy working for Google while I don't think you could pay me enough to work for Facebook.