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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, I think Google is overly-hated, but it's hard to frame them as a bleeding-heart altruist. Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.

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I worked at google some years back, in the VR team for a while. I can't speak to all of google, but at least in that org, the amount of nonsense we had to go through to make sure there wasn't some way some genius could figure something out related to personal information by correlating various pieces of data that we were storing in good faith to improve the product was absurd.

They were trying really really hard to do the right thing. Lots of people really cared about it, many to the point of it being detrimental to just making the product better.

From my time there, a favorite quip of mine, towards some new startup we bought was: welcome to Google, here is a list of every settlement and consent decree you are now subject to.

>Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.

I don't get it. In the first sentence you're claiming that there's "basically no obligation to individual consumers", but when they do a pro-consumer thing, you dismiss it as being "made to cover their own ass". Which one is it? Is this just a lot of words to say that Google isn't as pro-consumer as you'd like it to be?

I don't think Google genuinely does a lot of these things to truly be pro-consumer. One could see these kind of actions as them not wanting to have to deal with the bad publicity of handling all this data that they overall haven't been able to really monetize well anyways.

The truth is probably somewhere in between if you were to actually sit down and talk with all the people involved with such a decision.

Regardless of the reasons though I do think we should give praise to companies and organizations doing things that ultimately benefit us though. We should give feedback as to the changes we like to let decision-makers know people actually do care.

Companies like Google are too large to have single, clear motives.

I think it is appropriate to judge their actions, but I am not sure any simplistic “good motives/bad motives“ discussion can be fruitful.

“Covering their ass” from government pressure. If they can’t provide it they can’t be dinged for not doing so.

Exactly. A lot of people acted like the attacks on Waymos during the ICE protests were random but they were anything but. All the local organizers are well aware of Google's contracts with ICE as well as the tributes Google paid to Trump.

How is this relevant? Just because you disagree with some vague connection between two entities doesn't give you the right to destroy property. That's the definition of a childish tantrum. Inflicting blind pain on random, unrelated people because you don't get your way.

There's a rhetorical dodge in this argument where it transitioned from talking about property destruction to talking about harming people.

One can cause the other, but the burden of proof is on the claimant that wrecking a mass-produced special purpose autonomous vehicle did more tangible harm to a human being than make some engineer sad before they rolled up their sleeves and built a replacement.

The Waymo emphatically did not care it was destroyed.

It's relevant because Waymo is Google

How can you justify anarchist vigilante violence?

Should I be legally allowed to assault you or vandalize your property because I think your political orientation or that of your company is not "on the right side of history" ?

Come on. Not that I support destroying anything, private or public, for rhetorical effect. But assaulting someone or destroying their property has an incomparably larger impact on that individual than destroying a vehicle that won't even show up in Google's balance sheet.

>an incomparably larger impact on that individual than destroying a vehicle that won't even show up in Google's balance sheet.

Same re*arded argument people use to justify shoplifting. Now tell me genius, what happens to the shops in areas with high crime?

I didn't justify anything. Just pointed out the false equivalence. We could also argue about the effect of systemic shoplifting, but that is also neither here nor there.

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