That being said, it will be interesting to see what comes out of this investigation. I'm curious to know what practices they are going to zero in on. No company should be immune to the law.

I've seen a lot of Googlers coming here lately, professing to be Googlers and stating "this hasn't been my experience".

Asked genuinely: as someone inside the company-with much better access to sentiment, opinion and company culture than I could ever hope to have, is Google truly that open and transparent to employees that you actually had an expectation to see this sentiment "expressed" elsewhere?

(I would pose a similar to question to other FAANG employees who do the "as an employee of faang[]:")

I've heard all this and more. But one opinion I have never heard is that increased visibility into our operations would make people trust us less or dislike us more. I cannot see how anyone could believe that who is familiar with both the internal workings of the company and the external views of it.

"I'm worried that if the rest of America knew what we were actually doing here they would literally come here and kill us..."

This is a VERY specific and very interesting response to the goings on of your employer. My company frequently has feedback surveys prompted by HR for employee satisfaction, I still hear through back-channel mediums a lot of gripes and kvetches that were uttered over libations with the understanding that the discussion doesn't leave the bar.

I'm inquiring how insulated individuals at Google are from even that level of 'resentment' born dialogue between colleagues and coworkers.

I think your question was answered, but you don't really believe it, because it's difficult to believe.

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It destroys intellectual curiosity, which the site exists for."

Perhaps it would help to read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20013092 in addition to the site guidelines.

I don't like the general tone, but agree with the sentiment, and it seems tough to share without addressing the user personally, but was that it?

I'm not trying to convince you and HN users to trust Google (which seems to be impossible anyway), but at least for more than 5 years there has been a strong incentive structure for not doing something that might make "the rest of America would literally come to Google and kill them". I think this investigation would enhance this structure even further, which might be a good thing since there's still room to improve especially for keeping high level executives in check.

From the outside, it's doubtful that this team exists at all. Or if they do, they must watch YouTube all day instead of doing their jobs, because Google is getting better and better at compromising privacy, thanks to fancy designs/dark patterns: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/undersokelse/2018/every-step-y...

It looks to me like you have no clue what your own company's doing but hurry nevertheless to defend them.

You're suggesting that the situation is getting worse, which I don't really see much clues from the linked report, though I don't want to spend my weekend on scrutinizing 44 pages report. I don't work for Maps, but AFAIK it used to track you silently and didn't give you control on user history. But now at least it tries to get a consent (even though it's admittedly just a nominal action) and give you some amount of control on your data, which is better than typical web practice on average. Can you explain why this should be considered as going toward "dark patterns"? All those works were strongly pushed by Privacy team. I don't expect you to praise their works, but you still don't have to use that level of derogatory words as well.

I don't necessarily deny that Google's previous (and probably current) business practice has been done in a quite privacy-invasive way. That needs to be corrected. But there's much more things to be considered as well, which slows down the pace for a good reason. So the best thing Google can do is improving the situation carefully rather than breaking everything by changing the fundamental at once.

Let me give you a super simplified example of ads; which privacy invasive practice has gone too far. But it's also true that this has powered the web ecosystem for a decade. Any kind of significant updates would lead to direct revenue impacts on not only Google but publishers and advertisers. This is real existential threats to them; surprisingly many publishers and creators solely depends on ads revenue. There are also indirect impacts on users via garbage ads and more pay-walled contents. Of course, I know what would typical HN user's answer be; "I would rather choose garbage ads than tracking and I will pay money!" But the history shows that most of attempts to prove this kind of people are significant has miserably failed (except very few examples, such as NYT) including Google's own.

BTW, one irrelevant stuff; is there anyone who have a concrete, feasible business proposal to materialize this no-ads-willing-to-pay demands into the reality? Then try a business and be the next Google/Facebook/Amazon. I'm serious. I always have been thinking about a way to do this so the web can run without ads, but because of Dunning-Kruger effect, I'm getting less and less confident about this idea :)

Just do a search for "dark pattern" + Google on HN.

Your business model is at odds with privacy, you have that much figured out. But for unknown reasons you seem to think that Google can win against market forces and implement privacy-maintaining SW solutions.

That is disproven by Google's entire history. It's gotten particularly clear lately with AMP & Chrome.

One more thing: the world doesn't owe Google a business model. The world can survive just fine without internet ads, Google, Facebook and Amazon.

I am sure they do review things quite carefully to avoid something too obviously illegal. But anything more than that? Color me skeptical.

Do the ends justify the means? Maybe. Is this causing an unfortunate precedent to be set? Maybe, too.

I mean I would guess it's pretty much yeah we have everything you have ever typed into Android, almost every site you have visited, a detailed dossier of your porn habits, all your Google Home conversations... All your e-mails. List of your friends. Your driving habits. And we've been pretty much trying to kill all our competition pretending like there are bugs in our software when often it's been intentional... oh and we've been sharing everything with the government so it's been looking the other way.

It's just getting scary at this point.

But the thing we should be concerned with is how the government goes about solving this anti-competitive issue. A breakup is not in the cards since Google is not a monopoly. So the fact that the justice dept has jurisdiction here does not bode well for us. It likely means any remedies will be within the parameters of the current regulatory regime. But what we as consumers really need is a new regulatory regime. What do I mean by that? Well, like the Microsoft case, they may "solve" this whole issue of anti-competitive practices by simply obliging google to allow everyone access to their 'OS', so to speak.

But in this case the 'OS' would effectively be their data.

Which is our data.

Which would be very bad news for us.

All of a sudden, hundreds of companies, all with guaranteed access to our data. Basically, imagine the privacy equivalent of a 9mm round being turned into a shotgun blast for everyone not fortunate enough to be born an EU citizen. (GDPR)

What we really need is a GDPR, not really sanctions against Google. But DOJ can only give us sanctions. I'm starting to believe that somewhere deep in the bowels of the government, there is an extreme aversion to any potential action that might lead to making commerce based privacy infractions illegal.