[HN Gopher] Googlespeak - How Google Limits Thought About Antitrust
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Googlespeak - How Google Limits Thought About Antitrust
Author : cyrusshepard
Score : 247 points
Date : 2021-08-24 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zyppy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (zyppy.com)
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| The author could use another search engine, or put their business
| efforts(SEO) into a field _not_ dependent on another
| company(Google) making zero changes to their services. They aren
| 't the power company(or another utility), they are a for-profit
| corporation, behaving in a manner the shareholders of a for-
| profit corporation expect them to.
|
| Or is that...unreasonable?
| mcrad wrote:
| Okay so do shareholders of public companies encourage the
| management to commit fraud and deception?
| coldacid wrote:
| What good would "[putting] their business efforts" towards
| other companies accomplish, other than cutting off their own
| air supply? With how much of search is dominated by Google, you
| have to deal with them if your job is SEO, simply because all
| of their search competitors _combined_ don 't add up to the Big
| G.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > Or is that...unreasonable
|
| Yes. And I suppose that is what your downvoters mean too.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| If Google would like to return the public investments in the
| creation of The Web perhaps then and only then should we allow
| them to destroy it.
| benatkin wrote:
| It can get pretty nasty. Last year @jaffathecake who works at
| Google called @getify's "language" Trump-like for trying to raise
| the alarm about Chrome looking at hiding the path from the URL
| bar until the URL bar is focused, like Safari does. The original
| tweet is deleted, so you can't check whether it was "sowing
| division", but it wasn't IMO.
|
| https://twitter.com/jaffathecake/status/1275030931577896962
| ryankupyn wrote:
| I think that a lot of this makes sense from Google's legal
| perspective, where antitrust litigation is a constant
| consideration and any internal document mentioning market share
| or competitors could be used against them.
|
| I'm sure that there is a great deal of discussion about potential
| anticompetitive issues within Google and with their outside
| counsel, but in a context where legal privilege protects against
| disclosure.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| One could argue that they position themselves as an
| accomplished monopoly already, because their internal
| correspondence pretends competition doesn't even exist, or is
| of no consequence whatsoever.
| ec109685 wrote:
| >It's difficult to imagine any new flight search, no matter how
| innovative, winning today with Google acting as the web's
| gatekeeper.
|
| Google results are dominated by the Expedia Group (a conglomerate
| of tons of different brands:
| https://www.expediagroup.com/home/default.aspx). While Google's
| practices have definitely hurt, it's a _huge_ business, and
| probably a larger reason why a new flight search competitor can
| 't get off the ground.
|
| As a customer, it's annoying there isn't more diversity anymore.
| Generic travel searches are dominated by these brands, plus
| articles full of affiliate links that are hard to trust.
| ummonk wrote:
| It's not just legal risk but PR risk as well it's hat they're
| trying to avoid. Notice how the press often gets its hands on and
| makes a big deal out of shocking comments made by a few random
| employees in a company employing tens of thousands.
| dleslie wrote:
| While looking at the tables of good versus bad phrasing I
| couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading something not so
| dissimilar to how leaders of organized crime historically avoided
| prosecution. By not naming the crime, by speaking about it
| indirectly and with softer language, they hoped to invigorate
| doubt in a hypothetical jury.
|
| It's a method of avoiding responsibility oft credited to Henry
| II, who stated off-hand "Will no one rid me of this turbulent
| priest?"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
| JadeNB wrote:
| Or the earlier example "Edwardum occidere nolite timere bonum
| est" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_linguistic_example_
| sen...).
| eunoia wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder how much of the push against remote work from
| certain large companies comes down to the increased
| discoverability (in the legal sense) of employee communications
| over Slack/Teams/etc vs in person...
| tytso wrote:
| When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a
| monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware
| space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle,
| SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.)
| employees still had to complete annual legal training that was
| very similar to what was described in the post.
|
| Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going
| to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our
| competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of
| their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on
| making life better for their customers. It's a much healthier way
| for product managers to focus, and what you might do if the goal
| is "crush/dominate the competition" is *not* the same than if the
| goal is delight the customer. So it's not just a messaging
| strategy to prevent embarassing e-mails from coming out at trial;
| it's a business strategy, too.
| yakubin wrote:
| _> Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is
| going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to
| crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the
| lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their
| employees to focus on making life better for their customers._
|
| The lawn mower would like to have a word with you:
| <https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2040>
| delusional wrote:
| I agree that others do the same, but the observation that
| vocabulary somewhat affects thought is still interesting. As an
| example, the sentence about "defensive rationale" didn't just
| reformulate the sentence, it completely changed the meaning.
|
| If people aren't allowed to talk about "crushing competition"
| they also can't think about it. If they can't think about it
| they also can't recognize it when it happens.
| ajb wrote:
| Yes and no.
|
| Via market share, competition amplifies the rewards of being
| better. if you make your product 1% better than the
| competition, you might go from 30% to 70% market share. But to
| do so, you have to actually gain the market share. You can't
| just "build it and they will come"; in many industries, someone
| has to go out and win the market after the product is built.
| And so a lot of people in companies are really, really, really,
| motivated to gain market share. That's what increases their
| share option value, and gets their bonuses. And that's what
| tempts companies towards lock-in and all the rest.
| greatgib wrote:
| I was a direct witness of such a brain washing case a few years
| ago.
|
| Google was about to release a new version of Android or of Nexus
| phones. (I don't remember the exact details)
|
| And there was an insider leak, so the details of the innovation
| were published on internet a few days before the official
| announcement.
|
| Leaks are now very common and often organized by companies, but a
| few years ago it was not yet the case.
|
| I had a lunch with a few people including some Google engineers a
| few days after the leak. A discussion started about this topic,
| and the googlers said things like: "what a scandal the leak, we
| hate so much the person that did that, that we would have like to
| have him dead. If anyone in the company find who he his, we would
| seriously punch his face".
|
| I was surprised, because, this was just a leak of the features,
| same content has what would have been disclosed in the PR
| announcement. Personally I would be happy that people have so
| much interest in my product that they spontaneously reshare early
| details about it. I did not see where the offense was for some
| random engineers of the company.
|
| So, I asked them, and they told me that they felt that the
| insider "stole their announcement of their product".
|
| I told them that it is ridiculous, because as an engineer you
| should like that your product is known, and that people hear and
| talk about it. But it should personally make no difference if the
| feature list/preview is published a few days earlier by a leak
| instead of by a random PR guy or by a big head of the company.
|
| The only offended one might be the big head and the PR/marketing
| guys that had their plan ruined, but not common Google software
| engineer salarymen.
|
| But the Googlers were not able to understand this idea, and then,
| they became hostile to me for the rest of the lunch for even
| having suggested that their feeling might not be justified.
|
| So then I realized that they were brain washed by the company
| internal communication to feel that anything annoying for Google
| was bad for them personally!
|
| In the exact same way that there are dictator led countries were
| most of the inhabitants are blindly following whatever the
| dictator says is the truth!
| wccrawford wrote:
| I've never even worked at Google, but if my team is working
| towards something and our announcement is pre-empted, yeah, I'm
| going to be upset. I would never wish anyone dead over it, but
| I would definitely be pissed at them.
|
| There's a lot of work that goes into those announcements. It's
| not just advertising the product that is the goal, it's
| presenting it their way.
|
| Similarly, when someone is telling a joke and someone else
| tells the punchline, they get upset about it. According to your
| logic, they shouldn't. The joke was told, and the audience
| heard it. But I've yet to meet anyone who wouldn't be upset
| about someone else telling the punchline to their joke.
|
| They were not brainwashed. You were incredibly insensitive to
| their feelings.
| bigcorp-slave wrote:
| Every large company has these trainings. I personally have worked
| at multiple companies with very similar trainings.
|
| With thousands of employees, a company can't take the risk that
| some random college hire mouths off over Slack on something they
| don't know anything about and it shows up in discovery for
| something in the future and is used as evidence of planned
| malfeasance on the part of the company. I know we don't like
| Google but this is not a Google thing, it's a "opposing lawyers
| will take speculation from random low level engineers wildly out
| of context and judges and juries are too dumb to put it in
| context" thing.
| hospadar wrote:
| On a literary note: another great sci-fi reference point is
| Samuel Delaney's "Babel 17" - the hook is that a government
| creates a language that enables extreme thought capabilities, but
| prevents you from conceptualizing the opposing government as
| anything but an enemy.
| johan_felisaz wrote:
| Totally out of topic, but I highly recommend it ... (Not
| technically a spoiler) I really liked the parallel betweens the
| bad guys' language, which was manipulative to the extreme, and
| the good guys' language, which was of course less extreme but
| still contained deceiving vocabulary (i.e. Babel 17 is
| critiqued because the good guys are called "who are invading",
| yet the bad guys are themselves called "invaders" in English
| ...)
| mavhc wrote:
| People who go to live in other countries are called expats,
| people coming to live in your country are called immigrants
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's a shame about the downvotes, because that's a perfect
| example of loaded language which imposes a conceptual frame
| for both speaker and listener.
|
| It's not an abstract point. It has very real consequences
| because it's supposed to - and does - trigger expected
| emotions and behaviours.
|
| PR consultants, politicians, lawyers, ad copy writers, and
| others who use rhetoric professionally use this kind of
| loading very deliberately.
| snarf21 wrote:
| It is far more widespread than an interaction with a Google
| employee. The phenomenon is everywhere. It was distilled
| perfectly by Upton Sinclair quite a while ago: "It is difficult
| to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends
| upon his not understanding it!"
| prox wrote:
| Same with asking people here to stop using Chrome to get rid of
| the way it dominates the web.
|
| When you are tied to the hip to something, you will never
| change. The network effect keeps you on the same Ferris wheel.
| SCUSKU wrote:
| While I wholeheartedly agree with this article, I can't help but
| think, why would Google or Googlers encourage discussion about
| anti-trust in the first place? I understand that Google certainly
| does dominate the market, but can you really blame them for
| wanting to keep it that way?
| Lammy wrote:
| Google wants to be anthropomorphized. It is a non-physical but
| conscious/living entity, and yeah I do empathize with its
| desire to continue to exist:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore
| Barrin92 wrote:
| probably because for a company that prides itself on
| innovation, it's a long term bad idea to prioritize eliminating
| wrong-think and hiring people who are okay with that over
| people who actually believe in competition and open thought
| poof131 wrote:
| It amazes me that the consumer welfare standard has become so
| ingrained in legal antitrust. How is a company town, feudalism,
| or even slavery not the purest endgame of this logic? Own nothing
| and forever be indebted. "Wow, everything is free for most
| consumers, I guess we created a great world!" Can we move on to
| the total welfare standard, please. [1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...
| amelius wrote:
| That font ...
| echelon wrote:
| There was a point in time when monopolies weren't understood as
| economic constructs.
|
| We're in a new era where the Famgopolies are something entirely
| new with an even greater reach. They're all-encapsulating bubbles
| that ensnare people across all the interactions they perform on a
| daily basis, then tax every single point of ingress or egress.
|
| If they keep growing, the classic _Demolition Man_ scene where
| everything is Taco Bell will come true. Everything we see, buy,
| eat, date, or think will come from the Famgopolies.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| You really need to define 'famgolopy' every time you use it.
| It's not in urbandictionary and the only search results on the
| topic link back to these threads.
|
| It's too much of a neologism to trust that people understand
| what you mean from context.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Forget about "competition" and "who provides the service" for
| just a moment. (I'll return to them below.) I'm saying all of
| this as someone who _doesn 't use Google search_. I would like to
| see more competition in search engines. But anyone seeking to
| work in that space needs to think about how users actually use
| search engines, and stop thinking in the conceptual model of
| "finding sites for the given search terms".
|
| "65% of searches don't result in a click" is a feature. You asked
| a question, you got the answer to that question. A search engine
| isn't a tool to find sites, it's a tool to find information; once
| upon a time that meant finding a site for that information, but
| ideally, it means _finding the information_. Sometimes you might
| be looking for "a site that has X", but often you're just
| looking for X. For that matter, 100% of searches via Google
| Assistant don't result in a "click", because the information has
| to be digested and presented via a voice interface.
|
| It's _accurate_ to say that Google is in competition with every
| site that provides information to users. Anyone in the business
| of providing information to users needs to treat Google as their
| competitor.
|
| So, yes, a regulator or competitor who speaks in terms of how
| Google isn't driving users to other sites or prioritizing its own
| sites, and doesn't acknowledge that doing so is _answering the
| user 's question_, is indeed speaking a foreign language.
|
| If we were in some post-scarcity world, someone trying to help
| user's find information should be taking a very similar approach
| to Google (or finding something even better), and finding more
| ways to make information more digestible and presentable this
| way, and encouraging sites to provide information in a way that
| can answer questions like this.
|
| In today's non-post-scarcity world, there is _absolutely_ an
| anti-competitive issue here. But the problem is that the most
| efficient and often most useful way to answer a user 's question
| may well be _incompatible_ with the "just present links to sites
| given search terms" model.
|
| In seeking to solve that problem, we can't start out by
| preventing people from presenting information in whatever way
| users find most useful and efficient. We shouldn't seek to
| shoehorn a search engine back into a simple "here are the results
| for your search terms" model. Any approach that unthinkingly
| tries to foster competition by _breaking_ the ability to present
| information in the most useful way possible is rightfully treated
| as some outside hostile force that 's destroying something
| useful.
|
| And _because_ so much of the effort to regulate this as an anti-
| competitive issue has been unthinkingly treating a search engine
| as nothing more than mapping search terms to outbound site links,
| that has generated a backlash even _outside_ of Google (for
| instance, here on HN), from people who see how much value would
| be destroyed by such an approach.
|
| Not all efforts to foster competition have been this unthinking.
| I've seen proposals that try to introduce the use of APIs to
| present such information from a variety of sources (e.g. "here's
| the service I prefer to use for flights/hotels/etc"). I don't
| know if that's the _right_ approach, or if it 's _fair_ , or if
| it's _necessary_ , but it's at least closer to the right
| direction, and it isn't _destroying_ useful things like
| "answering user's questions" or "building a useful voice
| assistant".
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I read a certain amount of entitlement in TFA too. Like "I
| deserve to have my site on the front page of Google, rather
| than its paid advertisers or its own pages".
|
| Why? This isn't a government-provided public service. It's a
| commercial product. Why should they direct traffic to your site
| for free? They, like everyone else, walk the line between
| providing an excellent product for customers and creating
| revenue for shareholders.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of Google since they stopped not
| being evil. But I'm not sure that having a competing set of
| search engines would solve the author's problem - they would be
| writing passionate blog posts about "why can't we have a single
| set of SEO rules so I can get my site to the front page of all
| of them with no hassle?"
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The entitlement may be sourced to the fact that the author is
| an SEO company.
|
| As a sidebar... SEO companies would love to see Google
| knocked out of its current market position. Google has gotten
| very good at relying on signal that SEO companies can't
| control. They would much prefer a more gamable engine take
| Google's position from it.
| terafo wrote:
| _It 's accurate to say that Google is in competition with every
| site that provides information to users. Anyone in the business
| of providing information to users needs to treat Google as
| their competitor._
|
| I think the problem that author tries to address is that Google
| uses their competitor's data in order to serve that
| information, which isn't that great since IIRC they do no
| profit sharing which undermines long term viability of
| collecting, systemising and maintaining that data.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| > Google uses their competitor's data
|
| Their competitor's _publicly available and explicitly
| indexable_ data. Their competitors are free to ban Google
| from crawling their site.
| skybrian wrote:
| This is about being careful what you put in writing, because the
| discovery process for lawsuits will find your carelessly written
| email and opposing lawyers will take it out of context, and do
| you want to end up in court years later explaining what you
| meant?
|
| Google has so many employees that they need training to limit the
| damage from random chatter and speculation.
|
| It's more cumbersome to have to talk about some things via video
| chat, but it's not about limiting thought.
| ohazi wrote:
| No, that's just a convenient excuse.
|
| The other side of "Be careful what you put in writing because
| lawyers, lol" that is always ignored is:
|
| "If you think we need to dress up the way we talk about this
| one particular thing we're doing, then maybe we should
| reevaluate whether we should be doing this thing. If you think
| we need to dress up the way we talk about _literally everything
| that this company does_ , then maybe it's time to step back and
| reevaluate the ethics of what this company stands for."
|
| A company is a machine that is going to do whatever it can to
| print money, including brainwashing its employees. You and your
| colleagues are the only entities capable of ethical reasoning.
| The company and its executive functionaries are not going to do
| this for you. In fact, they're more likely going to try and
| stop you.
|
| It's your responsibility to do it anyway.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Who is "we" and "you" in this context?
|
| At Google, the team responsible for deciding whether a given
| project is legal is the legal team. Googlers are encouraged
| to get a member of legal on board as soon as a project gels
| far enough to have a concrete description that could have
| legal consequences. At that point, a set of attorney client
| privileged communications could begin where any of the words
| listed here can be on the table (because that communication
| is not in discoverable media).
|
| But in general, Google doesn't encourage its software
| engineers to think they're experts in law any more that it
| encourages its lawyers to think their experts in BigTable
| performance tuning.
| ohazi wrote:
| I'm not talking about what is legal, I'm talking about what
| is ethical. They are not the same.
|
| I'll grant you that not every corporate policy will agree
| with me, but I would argue that every human with a brain
| has a responsibility to think about whether what their boss
| asks them to do is ethical, and a responsibility to raise
| hell if they think it isn't.
|
| I don't believe it's ethical to abdicate this _human_
| responsibility to a corporate legal team.
|
| Part of what these corporate policies are deliberately
| designed to do is condition employees into believing that
| "deferring to the legal team" is where their responsibility
| ends. They want to convince you that this checks the box
| for both "legal" and "ethical" so that you feel like you've
| done your duty, and now you don't need to think about the
| ethics of your work anymore. This is what I meant by
| corporations "brainwashing" their employees. But you're
| always on the hook for the ethics of your work.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I agree with you. But one can raise hell by advocating to
| get the legal team on board as quickly as possible and
| making it clear that there's a significant issue that
| needs to be considered without using the words that will
| get the company half a million dollars of billed in-court
| attorney time _whether or not there was actually any
| ethical issue._
|
| That's the key difference and the purpose for
| constraining what ends up in discoverable media.
|
| There is, perhaps, a meta-ethical question of whether
| companies should, in general, be factoring into their
| calculus ways to minimize the government's capacity to
| hinder their activities. It's a good question. I don't
| have an answer that's universally true. I suspect if we
| sit down and consider it, we find lots of circumstances
| where it's not in the best interests of anyone to just
| hand the government a company's throat to be slashed.
| After all, especially if we're talking about the United
| States, it's not like the government itself has proven a
| bastion of ethical reasoning either.
| sa1 wrote:
| It might not be intended to limit thought, just to avoid
| liability, but does it limit thought anyway?
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Well, I'd say it does. My understanding is that if you're not
| limited in what you're thinking, but severely limited in
| _how_ you are allowed to think about it, your freedom of
| thought is limited nonetheless.
|
| And it's limited, by necessity, even outside working hours,
| lest your tongue/fingers slip and you utter a bad word in
| your Googler capacity so that a liable deed gets a liable
| name and there won't be any lawyering around this.
|
| Heck, it's almost, though not entirely, like a brainwashing
| cult!
|
| I guess in China they also force their Uighur camp operators
| to not even think about what they do as "torture", but
| "reeducation". It makes them happier in their workplace.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| How people think about things and what people put in
| legally discoverable media like email are worlds apart. As
| a basic aspect of corporate survival, it's important to
| keep that in mind.
|
| The overarching concept is "don't make it hard for the
| company to do business." The point of those trainings is
| that the words to avoid have legally-defined meanings that
| may or may not be what the Googler intended, but are likely
| to be interpreted in an antitrust sense in a court of law.
| The underlying concept is "don't talk like a lawyer if
| you're not one of our lawyers."
|
| Watching what you put in email (as described in this
| article) is in the same training where Googlers are given
| the overarching advice "always communicate via email as if
| those emails are going to show up on the front page of the
| New York Times tomorrow."
| refenestrator wrote:
| Working there in the first place limits thought. Nobody wants
| to think of themselves as part of the problem.
|
| The language, at best, just makes the cognitive dissonance a
| little easier.
| kyrra wrote:
| Googler, opinion is my own.
|
| When I started at Google in 2015, in my first week here
| chatting with some peers, some of them were complaining
| about some of our policies around Android and that they
| much preferred Apple (the person didn't work anywhere near
| Android, but was complaining about it more as a user).
|
| There are many people at Google that have issues with
| various parts of Google's businesses. Some are more vocal
| about it than others. One great example was Brad
| Fitzpatrick complaining about the first-gen Nest smoke
| alarms (2015):
| https://twitter.com/bradfitz/status/566072337020112896
| [deleted]
| skybrian wrote:
| It might have some effect, but Googlers can read all the same
| stuff on the Internet as everyone else.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Have you ever been a devout practitioner of a religion
| whose views on the world differ in key parts from the
| established scientific consensus?
|
| Have you ever been affiliated with a political party that
| was highly popular (or a _monoparty_ even) in your country
| but was held in contempt by the rest of the world because
| of how totalitarian /inhumane it was?
|
| In both cases, you could read whatever, even critical
| information about your values. But you would have an
| explanation ready -- enemies envy and slander us, they
| either know they lie or they are repulsed by the God's
| light because of how corrupted they are, they are not aware
| of the _whole truth_... You would have a whole arsenal to
| explain things away, because you are _committed,_ and your
| commitment makes it hurt to realize that the purpose your
| values serve is not very noble, or that you 're a part of
| something atrocious. It's the human nature.
| skybrian wrote:
| I understand what you're getting at and there is
| certainly a lot of closed-mindedness going around. I
| don't think any organization is immune to this.
|
| But there are also a lot of employees who have strongly
| opposed various Google policies and engaged in various
| political activity based on that, so the groupthink
| doesn't seem to be working very well? Also, the company
| leaks like a sieve these days.
|
| Even before that, there were a lot of internal debates.
| (They just didn't leak as much.) It's in part because of
| these debates that you need policies; people sometimes
| say careless things in heated discussions.
|
| (Former Googler, but it's been a while.)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Isn't continuing to work for a company that has policies
| you strongly oppose an example of successful groupthink?
|
| I suppose you could make a case for continuing if the
| policies are/have been/could realistically be changed.
|
| But if that's unlikely?
| Johnie wrote:
| Many large companies have the same policies/training for this
| very reason. You do not want to put something in writing that
| could potentially appear on the front page of the Wall Street
| Journal.
|
| The training/policies just codify that.
| CPLX wrote:
| This is what's known as a Stringer Bell warning[0] and it
| doesn't reflect well on the organization who has to make it
| this aggressively.
|
| Yes, it stands to reason that if you're engaged in a
| potentially unlawful conspiracy you need to be careful what you
| put in writing.
|
| However if this is coming up constantly and prevents you from
| using common sense words for your regular business operations
| then it's a pretty clear red flag that your _actions_ may be
| subjecting you to legal liability.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/pBdGOrcUEg8
| pyrale wrote:
| From don't be evil to don't leave a paper trail...
| titzer wrote:
| They also have a corporate email policy where mails get auto-
| deleted after 18 months, unless you apply labels or are on a
| litigation hold (which would make such policy completely
| illegal). The email policy has _no other purpose_ than to limit
| legal exposure. There is no legitimate business reason for that
| policy. In fact, it actively harms institutional memory and is
| frankly Orwellian, IMHO.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| That's not just Google though. Most companies have an email
| deletion policy that auto-deletes emails after a certain
| about of time, on the premise that they eventually lose all
| value and only pose a potential liability and litigation
| risk.
|
| Even U.S. government officials have used private email
| servers to avoid having to serve them up via requests.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >There is no legitimate business reason for that policy.
|
| You already completely answered the perfectly standard and
| reasonable business reason: "to limit legal exposure. "
|
| In fact, this legitimate business reason is 100% the reason
| for the policy. Increasing legal exposure for no reason is a
| bad idea, for companies and for individuals.
| gumby wrote:
| > They also have a corporate email policy where mails get
| auto-deleted after 18 months
|
| Eric Schmidt's retention policy was 72 _hours_.
| alphabetting wrote:
| Source? Curious what the reasoning would be there. Seems
| insanely impractical
| gowld wrote:
| Before or after the High-Tech Employee Antitrust
| Settlement?
| laurent92 wrote:
| How does he keep track of relationship history with
| someone? Commitments? Goals?
| laurent92 wrote:
| > The email policy has _no other purpose_
|
| Yes, it has: GDPR requires that you delete PII in reasonable
| time. I have a lot of customers contacting me by email for
| example, but also the JIRA notifications which all end up in
| emails with extensive PII. It must be deleted in a controlled
| way according to GDPR.
|
| But you are correct that this excuse goes away with Google,
| since they don't do support ;)
| zepto wrote:
| Why not both?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I was in Google Ads from 2008-2010. At that time, there was a
| limit of 3 top ads and 8 right-hand-side ads. The top ads
| generated the vast bulk of the revenue.
|
| They were also in blue or yellow (I forget which, but one was WAY
| more lucrative than the other!) so it was very easy for the user
| to distinguish an ad from a search result.
|
| I just did the canonical $$$ search "flowers" on my Macbook. The
| entire first page was ads and they are not colored anymore
| (although they do say "Ad"). There is also a Maps snippet which
| shows where I can buy flowers.
|
| What happened? Well, I can guess: they did experiments, and not
| coloring the ads produced more revenue. I know from talking to
| ordinary users that they often say proudly "I never click on
| ads!" Now they do.
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