Klox

I hear a lot of different far out theories: microphone spying on Android (as a feature, not some 0-day bug), manipulating search results nefariously, handing information over to the government, and dozens more. Google wants user profiles to sell ad segments, but beyond that they do not want your data:

1. Some data is product-scoped. Emails, pictures, YouTube videos, etc. Google can’t just delete these because people want them back heh. Most product-scoped data is not accessible for analytics at all. For example, there’s no scanning gmail to inform ad decisions. Data is encrypted in ways that would make that impossible, e.g. only an SRE or bug investigation might be able to review a specific email. Another example is Maps tracking data. Maps Timeline is now user-device local. Google no longer has the data. Thats pretty impressive, to have a timeline feature and not have the data!

2. All the other tracking and analytics data (that comes from every individual user) have time-locked controls. Data types expire at specific business intervals ranging from hours, weeks, months, and more rare is a about 1.5 years. Some very special types may get retained indefinitely, such as legal holds, or data that is business-produced (as opposed to user-produced). There are both row and column wipeout processes always running for hundreds of reasons.

3. Google has aggressive internal goals to cut costs. They don’t want to host infinite pictures and videos. They improved consolidating user data so that Google Wipeout is pretty much a guarantee that you are gone from their system. Very few people do that though, so they also push the data plans to recoup some of those costs.

4. All the user data they collect is downloadable: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en. Everything there can be deleted.

Yeah, they are excellent at monetizing data, but IMO it’s not for sacrificing user privacy. From my engagement with privacy communities, that is not well understood at all.

I have for sure been avoiding programming since I left. Yes avoiding some tech as a result. I’m de-googling as they say. I’ve spent a lot of time with my family, pursued other hobbies, and volunteered more, which has all been fantastic.

I know I will get back into programming at some point. I really enjoy the selfhosting community and I think I will likely be focusing on the areas of decentralized private networks (similar to Tailscale), decentralized apps (not really web3, but open source apps that can leverage ipfs easily and make it dead simple for others), and tools for public good (promoting good information, skepticism and rational thinking, promoting democracy, fighting against fascism/GOP, etc.).

I hear you on that. It seems like there’s room for it, but it’s just covered in this gross amorphous hyper-capitalist structure.

I am inspired by DeepMind giving away the AlphaFold protein structure database for free. That was awesome!

Or developing and giving away anonymous, decentralized, Bluetooth-based proximity detection for COVID tracking. That’s freaking awesome!

YouTube too is awesome, and it’s profitable, but they slowly make insane, gross decisions to chase 30% YoY growth. 1.5 hour ads, double ads, cutting creator payments, etc. Just make it sustainable!

Repeat ad nauseum across the business units. It’s upsetting.

Good question. I wasn’t. I was not located in California, and the union never really came up in any of my conversations with colleagues. I vaguely thought dues were 5-8% of total compensation (I see now they are 1% which seems reasonable, either I am misremembering or they have since lowered, or maybe I looked at a different union) and they did not have any negotiating rights. Admittedly, if the union isn’t negotiating then I don’t know what it is for. But maybe it just needed to get to critical mass to have that negotiating leverage and I could have helped by joining. My total compensation was very good though, so it didn’t really seem like something a union had to protect. I had excellent work-life balance, good benefits, etc.

Edit: Internally, Googlers are fairly transparent. There were multiple anonymous surveys run by employees for collecting compensation statistics broken down by gender, role, region, office, etc. It had a pretty high number of participants. That was very informative and I always participated.

I took a voluntary layoff from Google last year. It’s probably self-rationalizing, but IMO I had an excellent role at the company for the last 5 years of my time. I helped design a system that locks down and redacts server logs across many of Google’s services. Only on-call engineers with an emergency backed by a post mortem review could get temporary access to original server logs. The system doesn’t delete all data but it can enforce codified contracts, country/state regulations, make certain privacy gurantees, and surface problems for auditing.

Google has made and continues to make poor business decisions, but from my experience they are one of the best big companies managing user privacy. I can’t speak for all of Google’s business units (well I can’t speak for the company at all, heh), but the privacy zeitgeist says the opposite which I’ve found misleading, but could never really speak to while being employed.

User data is taken extremely seriously at Google, and I worked with hundreds of people that would gladly get fired if asked to do anything unethical with user data. They audit and lock down access, build systems for guaranteeing anonymization (systems in place long before I worked there), report compliance, and most importantly they work independently from the employees that use the data. Every business unit had committees to consult and review privacy specifically. I was also an expert consultant for several privacy incidents and the number of people involved and the seriousness taken was personally impressive for even minor incidents.

IMO it’s still one of the best companies to work for, but there’s many legitimate reasons to cut them out. My opinion switched when Google had their first layoff in January 2023. The company had issues (I am sure there are plenty of legit lawsuits that I know nothing about that can be fixed with money and internal/external controls and improvements), but in that moment I realized it’s not the company I thought I knew. Rough ordering of reasons for my exit:

1. Government contracts supporting fascism (Israel, CBP, ICE, face tracking, etc.).
2. The layoffs.
3. Pichai going to inauguration and capitulating. GOP donations.
4. 180 on remote culture.
5. AI slop.

There’s probably more if I reflected longer. Maybe I should have resigned sooner, idk. I’m glad I made the choice that I could.

Google was good to me for the years I was there. I got up to L6 and saved enough for my family to exit on my own terms and find a better environment. I’m still looking heh.

Happy to answer some questions (culture, privacy, SWE/SRE, oncall, etc.) if there are any. The company is massive and I saw only a small slice.

They do! Check out https://play0ad.com/ if you haven’t. A free, open source variant that’s pretty complete.

https://tagpro.gg/

I’ve played 3300 hours over 12-13 years. It’s a free capture the flag web game that is typically 4v4 and around 4-10 minutes per match (6 min with a slaughter rule of 3 caps and an OT for ties).

There are 3 types of power ups: tag pro, juke juice, and rolling bomb. There are a few special tiles: boosts, bombs, spikes, gate switches, gravity well, and speed. There’s a lot of maps that rotate every month by committee vote.

It’s a good ratio of team tactics and individual skill that keeps bringing me back. The community is solid and they just slowly keep improving the experience. The community isn’t huge so there’s more popular regional times to have matches.

Maybe a Lemmy hug will get an infusion of new players :) Come check it out!

Fascist apologists are fascists.

Who knew that violating the Constitution has neglible damages. What a fucking joke of a country.

The people will have justice.

There’s a principle of charity OP is missing.

1. Maybe this person next to you didn’t do the important parts of their job because they were in a public setting with you spying over their shoulder. Doing anything proprietary in that situation is a huge no-no from OpSec.

2. Maybe they are mandated to use AI as part of their job. I recently left a company that was mandating its use.

3. Maybe there’s a language barrier and AI is solving a communication problem reasonably well.

4. Maybe this person was already awful at their job and AI is just lipstick on a pig. People can be bad at their jobs, or pick jobs they don’t care for and do the bare minimum.

Judging the quality of someone’s character while being boring on a flight is likely more reflective of OP.

tl;dr Snopes said nothing of significance and didn’t rate the claim.

They do spend a lot of time regurgitating nonsense. We saw the god damn video!

Was he put into the casket alive with a poison triggered by a random event? If so, love that conviction.

I’ve never used any steam points. Is there something I’m missing?

Colloquially it is also meant to include conviction by the Senate. Impeach + convict. But yes, Republicans have been assholes for many decades. It still needs to happen though, so it is what continues to get demanded.

Do better California.

Fullmetal Alchemist was awesome. It gets really intense and pretty graphic. I haven’t seen it in over a decade but might be time for a rewatch!

Thanks!

Please quote what you’re referring to. I read https://archive.ph/Cq2Mo before making my comment, and then again after reading yours, and still am not seeing anything related. They say:

Potential settlement terms were not discussed in court.

And the word “framework” is not in the article.

The order was temporary until it went to the supreme court. The SC ruled in favor of Illinois, making the injunction permanent. I don’t understand negotiating after losing the case. AFAIK you settle “before” getting a ruling, not after losing.

I don’t understand, what is there to settle? They lost. Fuck off. I guess we’ll find out January 28th what bullshit they are peddling.