g00g3lethrow

It's true. The google group in question is still active and visible to any Google employee.

However, you should put this in perspective. Google is still one of the most transparent companies of its size. People intentionally collected and shared high sensitive company information. At most companies, security would show up at the desk of everyone involved in this with a box to pack their stuff. At Google, they got an email which asked them to delete the document.

Also, keep in mind that we are talking about a project that is not launched, probably never will be and, if you give Google's leadership the benefit of the doubt, was never going to be.

A couple of months ago there was a post on the frontpage about some Google service being redesign. All the top comments about it found some non-obvious negative spin on it. That was the time when it became obvious to me how strong the anti-Google sentiment had become at HN.

Look no further than this page. The top comment compares the Chinese Government's surveillance with being forced to sign into Chrome. There would have been a lot more interesting intellectual discussions to be had about this topic: China, corporate responsibility, are the Chinese better off with just Baidu...

I don't think Sundar is going to have the same response as to Project Maven. It would be hypocritical because he was involved in this project from the beginning. Project Maven, on the other hand, he probably only learned about because of the controversy.

My prediction is that he is going to sick with his version that this was an experiment, the headcount was necessary to fully explore the idea, it became obvious that it wasn't possible to do ethically, Google isn't going to do it.

The real question to me is what this is going to do to Google's internal transparency.