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Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company

nytimes.com

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Re: Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company

#101

Post by PurpleBoxDragon »

hobs wrote: post #91
chiefalchemist wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm not a fan, this is the crux of the Charles Koch book "Good Profit." In short, government oversight / over-reach quickly becomes a game of favoritism and distorted markets. Like it or not, it's hard to argue with that theory.

Not really: "When companies become too large it quickly becomes a game of anti-competitive actions and distorted markets" Companies dont have our interests in mind any more than the government, but we can vote the government out.

>Companies dont have our interests in mind any more than the government, but we can vote the government out.

Companies are easier to not do business with. Governments only get voted out if enough people agreed to vote with you. Also, only one of these groups generally has the ability to use violence against you, and if the other group has that ability, it is only because the first allowed it to be delegated.

Re: Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company

#102

Post by Aunche »

ben_jones wrote: post #46
Aunche wrote: post #40

Yet another white American who thinks that thinks that their personal moral grievances are more important than a billion Chinese people gaining access to Google. This is even worse than men telling women that abortion is evil because at least men can claim to speak for the fetus. I've yet to hear a convincing argument that Dragonfly make the lives of Chinese dissidents any worse, let alone regular residents.

Go clear your cookies, history, change your IP, and open Youtube. Take a look at what videos Google is promoting for you, then decide if the the family of Google products is that essential to human life.

If your standards of what is OK to keep away from people is "not essential to human life," you should join the CPC. Religion, freedom of the press, and privacy aren't essential to life either.

Re: Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company

#103

Post by oconnor663 »

andrepd wrote: post #71
tensor wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company complying with the laws of the country it does business in seems fairly uncontroversial to me, even if you may not agree with those laws. Do you want your companies to be extensions of US foreign policy?

Ah right, "following the laws", because discussions of morality can be reduced to whether it "follows the law" or not? No, that's absurd. Google is objectively abetting an authoritarian regime and providing it with extremely useful tools to maintain and strengthen totalitarian control over 1.4 billion people, and this is wrong.

Look, my biases are much more in favor of the US govt than of China's, for all the obvious reasons. But we have to be able to see that this is opening a huge can of worms. For example, I think it's pretty troubling that the French government banned a bunch of Muslim religious garments. Does that mean I should advocate that various US companies need to stop doing business with France? Clearly there's _some_ level of abuse that would be too much. But I think setting objectively standards about these things is extremely difficult.

Re: Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company

#104

Post by colanderman »

oconnor663 wrote: post #103
andrepd wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah right, "following the laws", because discussions of morality can be reduced to whether it "follows the law" or not? No, that's absurd. Google is objectively abetting an authoritarian regime and providing it with extremely useful tools to maintain and strengthen totalitarian control over 1.4 billion people, and this is wrong.

Look, my biases are much more in favor of the US govt than of China's, for all the obvious reasons. But we have to be able to see that this is opening a huge can of worms. For example, I think it's pretty troubling that the French government banned a bunch of Muslim religious garments. Does that mean I should advocate that various US companies need to stop doing business with France? Clearly there's _some_ level of a…

If those companies were making special tools to identify and remove said garments, then yes.

Re: Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company

#105

Post by kodablah »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #72
notriddle wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More specifically, the political pundits latched onto a thing that has been around for over a decade. Tor has been around since 2006, and mixmaster is even older than that. The anti-adtech privacy movement is not new, but the interest coming from mainstream political talking heads is.

The difference is that after the Russian interference thing, politicians realized all of this Internet stuff they didn't understand can cost them re-election.

> realized

Or, in a continued fit of misunderstanding, they came to that assumption and are shaping their narrative/attacks around it.

Re: Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company

#106

Post by marricks »

gunnihinn wrote: post #28
bilbo0s wrote: post #7

I actually applaud Poulson for leaving Google in protest of Google's Chinese business practices. Having mentioned that, I think I have to part ways with him when he implies that the correct way to "fix" this is to have the government come in and make these sorts of business decisions for the company. I don't believe in the government obliging businesses to do things. Especially when it looks like this whole thing is…

> Once government gets involved and starts playing favorites, everything gets messed up. OK. Is it more or less messed up than that a private corporation can and is willing to perform surveillance on foreign citizens on behalf of those citizens' government that would be unacceptable anywhere else?

I agree so much.

Business use this sort of hand wavy excuse all the time “government shouldn’t be involved.” Truth is they don’t want the American people to have any say in the operation.

Sure, you could say we vote with out dollars but they keep as much info secret as humanly possible.

They need regulation for basic things like “users own their information” and “don’t corporate with foreign governments to censor or monitor citizens”.

How the US public bought this corporate lie so hard is beyond me, people are actively rooting for companies to get more and more power.

Re: Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company

#107

Post by icebraining »

yeahforsureman wrote: post #79
icebraining wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why the GDPR has a reduced level of obligations for companies under 250 employees (see article 30).

Not really. You're talking about an exception to only one obligation (record-keeping). And even that is relevant only where the processing is "not occasional".

A small company is also less likely to need a DPO.

Re: Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company

#108

Post by vkou »

kodablah wrote: post #59
vkou wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are fifty million reasons for why 'Just build a better competing product' may be a less successful solution to this problem.

And hundreds of millions of reasons why government-led heavy-handed internet oversight is worse. I also included other options such as education. But I'll take any option, including the status quo, over what I consider the nuclear option that often has unintended consequences regardless of original intent.

Government-led heavy-handed oversight is so terrible that it also gave us rivers free of coal sludge, products that work as advertised, drugs that have to be tested before they are sold, airplanes that usually don't crash, and cars that are safer, more fuel efficient, and cleaner then they were before mandated seat belts, air bags, emission limits, and mileage gains.

At this point, the nuclear option, like the GDPR, is the only way to align the interests of large data firms with the public.

If you think otherwise, consider how the market punished Equifax for their data breaches. Or Kaiser. Or Target. Or Facebook.

When given the choice between doing the right thing, and the expedient thing, this industry has a long, and shitty track record of always choosing the expedient thing.

Re: Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company

#109

Post by joshuamorton »

794CD01 wrote: post #92
stale2002 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You still need to grow by more than the dividend or you will erode share price over time No you don't. Imagine a company that has a share price of 100$. And this company makes 10$ in profit, per share, and returns that 10$ in profits to shareholders every year in perpetuity. Thats a 10% rate of return that investors would be happy to accept in perpetuity. People accept this deal all the time. Usually they are calle…

People accept that deal when they have a very strong guarantee that their $100 will still be worth $100 at the end of the term. Combining the low yields of bonds (let's be honest, your numbers are chosen for their roundness, not their realism) with the low safety of stocks is the worst of both worlds.

He's talking about investing in value stocks.

There's quite literally a word for low growth but reliable stocks that pay out decent dividends. "Value stocks", as opposed to "Growth stocks" where investors expect to see the returns directly in the stock price.

Re: Ex-Google Employee Urges Lawmakers to Take on Company

#110

Post by kenmicklas »

rajuvegesna wrote: post #5

Fundamental issue is the expectation that all public companies must keep growing and show profits quarter after quarter, year after year. This is obviously unsustainable. It is like a treadmill that keeps increasing speed. If you slow down, you are thrown out. If consecutive quarterly results are not good, CEO is typically thrown out. This pressure forces management to make unnatural decisions that might help short-t…

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit... for a detailed analysis of this effect
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