alt Hacker NewsFWIW, 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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>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?
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.
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.