Google didn’t play as fast and loose with sharing data as Facebook did. That helps.

The sales pitches to partners were quite different, from what I can see.

Google have always been selling advertising first and foremost. Their pitch is "we will put you in front of the right people".

Facebook, an other social network providers, seem to have modernised this badly. The social graph and access to it was the key offering, so their pitch was "we will give you access to the right people".

How did it go on like that for so long? There were four sets of entities involved who for their own reasons did nothing:

1. Those buying the access knew the difference and eagerly lapped up as much as they could.

2. The general public was blissfully unaware until the recent furore so there was no push to change anything from that side. To quite an extent, IMO, many were not just unaware but deliberately ignorant - many of us, techies like myself and active members of privacy groups, were aware and talking loudly about the issues but the majority didn't care because they didn't see how it might significantly affect them personally.

3. Commercial entities, even direct competitors, said nothing because they thought it better to try take a piece of the pie for themselves instead of sprinkling laxatives over someone else's and risk the pie shop being closed down. They are of course right now either being investigated too, or hurriedly making sure they were not (or that it can not be proven that they were) directly and knowingly culpable of the same things.

4. While there was no public or commercial push against what facebook and others were doing, the politicians had no interest. No point siring up potential commercial sponsors for their future funding drives unnecessarily...

They never got caught doing it. That doesn't mean they never have.

You've never been caught murdering anyone, I assume.

Not the second time, and that’s really the important part.

That we know of so far.

Maybe they didn't, but it's not like we know exactly what Google is doing with data.

Google wasn't ambiguous at all about how they manage location data.

It happens that I was working on the essay right as Cambridge Analytica was hitting the news.

Even if you don’t like what Google does vis a vis privacy (and I don’t) I think you’d have to completely agree with your assessment. Public congressional hearings are almost always political circuses, and you’re not going to “win” one of them. Congress needs to legislate the issue of privacy (something like GDPR would be nice) not do a piece of meaningless and self-serving theater.

nailed it

Not showing up here was the opposite of keeping a low profile though.

It's really not, because showing up at such a high-profile event makes it nearly impossible to return to obscurity. There are too many legitimate follow up issues that are impossible to ignore. Especially if something comes out later that is even a tiny bit in conflict with the testimony.

If this were chess, Page sacrificed a pawn for critical board control/position. It hurt, but Google is playing the long game.

This is the first article I came across that was about Google's absence. Every other article about the hearings talked about what Sandberg and Dorsey said.

> Facebook’s horrendous management of the issue

Part of that "horrendous management" involved sending surrogates to apologize instead of leaders. Google is repeating Facebook’s mistakes.

> From a PR point of view Google has handled this whole privacy debacle very well.

Yes, but only because Google allegedly aided the media's preferred candidate, while Facebook allegedly aided the candidate that was successful and that the media hated. Google not showing up means the media can sort of just sweep their behavior under the rug, which is good for Google's PR in the minds of Americans who supported the media's favorite candidate....but it's terrible PR for the other half of the country who voted for the other one and sees the bias. You're just not hearing about it much because most of the media leans the same direction Google as a company does.

Can you imagine if Mark Zuckerberg hadn't shown up? How big of a story that would have been in almost every single media outlet?

Google's only sliding under the radar because the media is helping them slide under the radar. I assure you if Google's policies had aided the winning candidate's campaign - intentionally or not - that would not be the case.