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> it never occurred to us [Google] that people could be seriously harmed by others' knowing details of their lives.

This explains so much.

EDIT: A year ago I wrote this, and it seems I was right:

> Google is self-selecting to employ those people who are fine with the idea of Google recording everything they do. This does not bode well for the rest of us.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8591417)

It actually was far worse in the past than it is now, both because Google management does learn from their mistakes and because Google is much bigger now and so they employ more people from marginalized backgrounds.

I'd say that peak "all your data are belong to us" was back in 2010, before the launch of Google Buzz and various location/wifi privacy flaps in Europe.

I would be more worried now about the same dynamic existing in every other startup that takes off. When a startup is on a break-out trajectory, it has its pick of applicants from a wide number of elite institutions. Most of them will never have experienced powerlessness or marginalization, because that's what it takes to get into a hot startup. And so they generally won't be able to empathize with what it's like to have arbitrary fact X in your background taken and used against you in devastating ways, even if they do genuinely sympathize.

Well, you forgot Google+, particularly nymwars. I do dislike real name policies, but I do take the problems with using real names seriously though I know that not all can be easily fixed. A recent example is this fiasco: http://ryanspahn.com/my-google-NDA-experience.html https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=LargeCompanies (the first comments are not hard to find)

IMO, this is a huge part of why so many startups fail so badly.

Google glass might have caught on as a 50$ toy, but at 1,500$ it's firmly into the realm of things people working at Google would buy, and that's about it. What's really interesting IMO is they could have made a 50$ version of the basic concept, but it was simply not on anyone's radar.

In theory, these blinders are why startups can show up and eat incumbents lunches. But, when starts are drawing from the same talent pool there making the same kind of mistakes.

Net result, way to many food delivery services.

Google Glass was ridiculously priced in an attempt to segment the market to only people who wanted to buy it to build a hobby/business with. They knew it was not ready for mass consumption and tried to use price and availability to signal accordingly.

It's been 2 years and nothing, so clearly whatever the intent it failed.

In a few years a cheap version of the idea may start making the rounds like the mini Segway's. But, again when it was obviously going to fail at that price point why continue?

Entertainment value for whoever is holding the purse strings.

It didn't actually completely fail - Google Glass saw some genuine excitement among certain professions (eg. surgeons, pilots, or firefighters) that need up-to-the-minute information in a heads-up display, and it's been re-launched quietly to focus on those niches. Ironically, the fix will likely be to increase the price: it's not a mass market product, it's an enterprise product that increases the effectiveness and safety of certain highly-trained specialists.

> I would be more worried now about the same dynamic existing in every other startup that takes off. When a startup is on a break-out trajectory, it has its pick of applicants from a wide number of elite institutions. Most of them will never have experienced powerlessness or marginalization, because that's what it takes to get into a hot startup. And so they generally won't be able to empathize with what it's like to have arbitrary fact X in your background taken and used against you in devastating ways, even if they do genuinely sympathize.

That's not "what it takes to get into a hot startup"; it's a self-selecting property that people reinforce, consciously or otherwise. You can and should make a conscious effort to counter that bias, and leaving aside all the other reasons you might want to do so, you'll counter the monoculture that can lead to "let's build things people like us want" (which fails if it becomes "and almost nobody else does").

I don't disagree, but at the same time: who gets hired by hot startups is not something under my control, and they have legitimate reasons (mixed in with illegitimate ones) for preferring people with a solid track record and name-brand affiliations.

I think the broader issue is that too many in the SV tech scene are utopians by heart. They just want to improve lives, but forget or ignore potential downsides to what they are building. Not sure if it is a age thing or a background thing though.

> it never occurred to us that people could be seriously harmed by others' knowing details of their lives.

Recommended viewing: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/

Mandatory viewing.

> Similar cultural mismatches have been responsible for a few other gaffes, eg. Google Buzz was a huge hit internally because pretty much everything inside Google is (was?) public anyway and people are very tolerant of different opinions, and it never occurred to us that people could be seriously harmed by others' knowing details of their lives.

This is really disturbing. Imagine a major Google product launch failing because no one on the dev team had thought of testing it on hardware, OSes, or browsers outside of their than their own laptops. I can't imagine that would ever happen; no one would allow such a comprehensive gathering of idiots to putter along unsupervised on a major product.

So how is it possible that Google existed for over a decade before it even occurred to anyone to consider the users' safety and privacy? It doesn't make sense to me; I don't understand.

This is a general trend, not just Google. People are eager to make something technologically failure-proof. They can come up with all the technological problems that could happen.

People are horrible at coming up with social failure cases because we're often blind to such issues that others face.

> the reaction is "You're fired!"

Is it really that bad? I'm not personally familiar with US office culture, but it seems like an exaggeration. Why would a boss throw away an otherwise functioning employee over something so minor? Why would someone choose to work under such a punitive regime?

It depends where you work, but in some places, it can be. Employees in some industries have zero leverage over their employers; they're complete commodities, so if you do something that the boss doesn't like (whether it be get in late or question his judgment or spend time on Facebook during the workday), you're fired.

I've been lucky enough to never have such a boss, but then, I work in tech, where the supply & demand equation has been on the worker's side since I started my career.

Aren't there any employment laws surrounding this? I find it hard to believe someone can be sacked just like that, unless they do something really bad like assault someone, or a white collar crime or something.

>Aren't there any employment laws surrounding this?

Not in most US states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_will_employment

This is the US, most employment laws are about who cannot work and how to protect the employer. There is very little in the way of worker rights.

Never mind rights or leverage, do they care nothing about the working relationship with their employees? The work environment I'm used to is much more collective. If there is a screw-up, it's the team that screwed up, and we fix it together. If it's the same person who causes the team to screw up again and again, it would be a different matter, but when does firing someone over a mistake solve a problem? And if a colleague was let go because his PC started making pacman noises, most of the team would probably quit the same day. I can't even imagine it happening. More likely the boss would joke about it: "Hey, wobbleblob, it sounds like you're not very busy at he moment. In that case I have a nice chore for you"

I'm certain the "You're fired!" is an exaggeration. You would rarely get fired over something so minor here.

Firing is difficult here and is only done for the most severe offenses. You could be "laid off," but you'll never know exactly why, (as you could then sue for improper termination), but even then, that involves a lot of paperwork and he won't sign up for that instantly after hearing a noise.

I have had my supervisor give me talks about proper workplace conduct for these kinds of things though.

I remember https://twitter.com/nestsupport/status/606246459822997505 a day or so after I reported the 768-bit DHE problem to Google security. (affected server was https://transport01-rts10-iad01.transport.home.nest.com). Also see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1170833