> a "virtual on-site interview" (an oxymoron I know)

... But seriously, what? What is a virtual on-site meant to be?

It's an interview that would have been an onsite in non-pandemic times. In other words it means you're past the screens and you're now doing a full panel of interviews, possibly including members of your prospective team.

In hiring committees I've sat on, people for some reason had a lower bar for code that was written during a "phone screen" than during an "on-site", even when both were done with the same tech "stack" (phone call / Skype + coderpad or similar).

Maybe the name "virtual on-site" is supposed to convey to both interviewer and interviewee that "this is for serious".

Typically you only get one or two phone screen interviews at Google, so the bar should be much lower. The purpose of the phone screen is to see whether it's worth the time for onsite (now virtual onsite) interviews.

This may vary by hiring committee, but on mine we don't look at feedback from the phone screen interviews at all.

As a candidate, I will put in as much effort into phone screens (with real code pads) as the real interview.

As an interviewer, I will give a slight benefit to the doubt for “screens” because I understand some candidates don’t take it as seriously as the main interview.

Do they get consent from the interviewee saying they could do this? For privacy reasons.. you know

It sounds like they're just recording the text you're typing and not the entire interview (video recording, conversation) but I could be wrong. If that is the case though, I doubt they'd need additional consent since it's implied that they're evaluating you based on the code you share with them anyways.