Month: January 2019

UPDATE (February 4, 2019): Google Users Panic Over Google+ Deletion Emails: Here’s What’s Actually Happening

UPDATE (February 2, 2019): Google’s Google+ Shutdown Emails Are Causing Mass Confusion

UPDATE (February 1, 2019): If Google Cared: The Tool That Could Save Google+ Relationships

– – –

For weeks now, I’ve been pounding on Google to get more explicit about their impending shutdown of consumer Google+. What they’ve finally written today on a G+ help page (https://support.google.com/plus/answer/9195133) demonstrates clearly how little that they care about G+ users who have spent years of their lives building up the service, appears to put a lie to key claimed excuses for ending consumer G+, and calls into question the degree to which any consumer or business users of Google should trust the firm’s dedication to any specific services going forward.

The originally announced shutdown date was for August. Then suddenly it was advanced to April (we now know from their new help page post that the official death date is 2 April 2019, though the process of completely deleting everyone from existence may take some months).

The key reasons for the shutdown originally stated by Google were API “security problems” that were obviously blown out of proportion — Google isn’t even mentioning those in their new announcements. Surprise, surprise:

“Given the challenges in creating and maintaining a successful Google+ that meets our consumer users’ expectations, we decided to sunset the consumer version of Google+. We’re committed to focusing on our enterprise efforts, and will be launching new features purpose-built for businesses.”

Translation: Hey, you’re not paying us anything, bug off!

And as I had anticipated, Google is doing NOTHING to help G+ users stay in touch with each other after the shutdown. In other words, it’s up to you to figure out some way to do it, boys and girls! Now go play on the freeway! Get lost! We just don’t care about you!

Since there’s nothing in Google’s new announcement that contradicts my analysis of this situation in my earlier related posts, I will herewith simply include for reference some of my recent posts related to this topic, for your possible perusal as you see fit.

I’ll note first my post announcing my own private forum that I’ve been forced to create — to try provide a safe home for many of my G+ friends who are being unceremoniously crushed by Google’s betrayal of their trust. Given my very limited resources, creating a new forum at this time was not in my plans, but Google’s shabby treatment of G+ users forced my hand. No matter what else happens in my life, I promise never to treat users of my forum with disrespect and contempt as Google has:

A New Invite-Only Forum for Victims of Google’s Google+ Purge
https://lauren.vortex.com/2019/01/05/a-new-invite-only-forum-for-victims-of-googles-google-purge

And here are some of my related posts regarding the Google+ shutdown fiasco, its impacts on users, and related topics:

Google’s G+ User Trust Betrayal Gets Worse and Worse
https://lauren.vortex.com/2019/01/29/googles-g-user-trust-betrayal-gets-worse-and-worse

An Important Message from “Google” about Google+
https://lauren.vortex.com/2019/01/22/an-important-message-from-google-about-google

Boot to the Head: When You Know that Google Just Doesn’t Care Anymore
https://lauren.vortex.com/2019/01/14/boot-to-the-head-when-you-know-that-google-just-doesnt-care-anymore

Why Google Is Terrified of Its Users
https://lauren.vortex.com/2019/01/06/why-google-is-terrified-of-its-users

Why I No Longer Recommend Google for Many Serious Business Applications
https://lauren.vortex.com/2018/12/20/why-i-no-longer-recommend-google-for-many-serious-business-applications

Can We Trust Google?
https://lauren.vortex.com/2018/12/10/can-we-trust-google

The Death of Google
https://lauren.vortex.com/2018/10/08/the-death-of-google

As Google’s continuing decimation of user trust accelerates, you can count on me having more to say about these situations as we move forward. Take care everyone. Stay strong.

Be seeing you.

–Lauren–

When I recently posted a parody “Message from Google” regarding the upcoming shutdown of consumer Google+, I did not anticipate the wellspring of reactions from Google users, including those who were not specifically Google+ users.

An Important Message from “Google” about Google+ !
https://lauren.vortex.com/2019/01/22/an-important-message-from-google-about-google

(Google Docs Version: https://lauren.vortex.com/google-plus)

I had anticipated many folks saying that the posting was funny but in key respects depressingly true — which they did — but I did not expect my inbox to be flooded with consumer and business users telling me that they were abandoning Google services or not moving operations to Google, due to Google’s shabby treatment of so many users, and I did not realize that I was going to become the focal point for desperate, loyal G+ users asking me questions that Google has been refusing to answer.

In retrospect I shouldn’t have been surprised. To this day, Google has as far as I know not emailed ordinary G+ users about what’s going on, has no informational banners up about the impending shutdown, and (believe it or not!) is still soliciting for new users to join G+ and spend their time following other users and getting to know a service that Google is about to mercilessly destroy!

It’s remarkable. Unfathomable. Disgraceful.

And the questions. G+ users are sending me their questions:

What happens to all of the external web pages and posts that link to public G+ posts? Google taking down those G+ posts will break vast numbers of non-Google pages around the web.

What happens to sites that have deeply embedded G+ APIs for displaying “Plus” counts, follower boxes, G+ site login integrations, and more? What happens to Google Contacts data integrated from G+?

What is the ultimate fate of the actual G+ posts and related data? Do they all suddenly vanish from public view, from the control of their authors? Will they continue to be used internally by Google for ad system, machine learning, or for other purposes?

The list goes on and on.

Meanwhile, Google is hardly saying anything at all. It’s obvious that they’re treating consumer G+ — and all of its loyal users — as inconvenient pariahs, tossing us all into their dumpster as quickly and unceremoniously as possible.

My inbox is full of users both angry and sad, who loved Google but are now feeling like they’ve been pushed out of a car and directly into the path of steamrollers.

I’ve always tried to help with Google-related problems when I could. But I really don’t know what to say to these jilted users abandoned so callously by Google, because frankly I feel the same way about how Google is mistreating us, and Google has not been forthcoming with explanations, answers, or even believable excuses.

It’s obvious that Google just doesn’t care. And perhaps that’s the saddest part of all.

–Lauren–

UPDATE (March 16, 2019): The ads discussed below as appearing on the Roku YouTube app (even when subscribed to YouTube Premium) have now vanished for me — at least for the moment. I have no word as to whether this is a temporary or more long-term change, whether this was a test that has now terminated, or any other additional information. But I’m definitely glad to see those annoying boxes gone, especially the one that was overlaid on the playing videos themselves.

– – –

I pay for YouTube Premium because — among other things — I don’t want to see ads on videos.

But at least through the popular YouTube Roku app, YouTube is now continuously displaying BUY SEASON ads for some video program clips (complete with purchase price) in a blue box on the video control YouTube Roku app “watch pages” — and even worse, for a period of time (around 10 seconds) as a corner ad box overlay on the running videos themselves. The blue box ad is also present whenever you return to the watch page (e.g., by pausing the video), and the overlay ad appears for the same interval every time you begin running the video again. The overlay ad in particular is extremely annoying.

These ads are also present as a box on the regular web-based YouTube watch pages for these clips — where they are less obtrusive but still are ads on an ostensibly ad-free service.

YouTube Premium is promoted as a paid, ad-free service. The presence of these ads on Premium accounts (especially when overlaid on top of running videos — whether limited to Roku devices or ultimately deployed through other display devices as well) is not acceptable.

–Lauren–

(Google Doc version: https://lauren.vortex.com/google-plus)

Google – “You can count on us!”

An important announcement about Google+

Dear Google+ users,

We have some bad news for you. We hope you’re sitting down. If you’re driving, please pull over safely before reading the remainder of this message.

We know that many of you have built major parts of your lives around Google+, beginning back in 2011. Over the years since, we have encouraged you to share your experiences and photos, to build Communities and Collections. We know that large numbers of you have spent hours every day on G+, and have built up networks of friends with whom you communicate every day on G+.

And we know that in our rush to maximize G+ participation and engagement, we made some pretty poor decisions, like that period where we integrated YouTube comments and G+ posts, requiring YouTube commenters to create G+ accounts — managing to upset both communities in the process. But you know the motto — move fast and break things!

Now we just want to get out from under Google+. And you’re going to be the collateral damage. Please understand that it’s nothing personal. It’s just business.

So we’re shutting down G+. We’ll be shutting it down this coming August, uh April, uh as soon as we can locate the Google+ SRE in charge. We’ve been trying to page them for months but they’re not answering. We’re pretty sure that there’s a G+ control dashboard in our systems somewhere — when we find it we’ll pull the switch and you’ll all be history.

We could yank your chains and claim that killing G+ is all about poor engagement and API problems and whatnot, but we know you’d see through that, and frankly we just don’t want you around anymore. You’re more trouble than you’re worth to a firm that is pivoting ever more toward serving businesses who actually pay us with actual money. Of course, many businesses now claim that they’ve lost faith in us due to our behavior killing services and mistreating users on the consumer side, but we’ll throw them some usage credits and they’ll come around. You can always buy user trust!

The ad business just isn’t what it used to be. We need new users in new places! Governments are breathing down our necks, ad blockers are reducing ad impressions and conversions, and a bunch of would be do-gooders are making a fuss about our plans to set up a censored search engine in China. You know how many Chinese are in China? More than you can count on your fingers and toes, believe us!

And speaking of business, we’ll be continuing G+ over on our enterprise/business products, at least until it becomes inconvenient for us to keep doing so. And before you ask, no, you can’t pay for continued access to consumer G+ or bundle it with Google One, and you can’t have a pony or anything like that. Get this through your heads. You’re not our target users or target demographics. We just don’t care about you.

Now, after we’ve said all that, we hope that you won’t get too upset if we ask for your help in killing off G+ with a minimum of public attention from bloggers and the media.

Since we routinely provide the means for you to download your data from Google, you can download your G+ posts before we drive a stake through the heart of the G+ data center clusters. We don’t know what the hell you’re going to do with that data, since you’re going to lose contact with all your followers and friends you’ve built up over the years on G+, but did you really expect us to bother providing a tool to help you stay in contact with them after G+ is tossed into the dumpster? We recommend that you just forget about those people, like we’re forgetting about you. It’s easy with practice.

Oh, here’s another thing. You might expect that with the shutdown of G+ so close, we wouldn’t still be soliciting for new G+ users, and you might think that we’d have “butter bar” banners up warning users of the shutdown and providing continuing updates. You might expect us to email G+ users about what’s going on.

But, c’mon, you know us better than that. Remember, we just don’t care, so there are no banners, no continuing informational updates, and — get this! — we’re still soliciting for new G+ users to sign up, without so much as giving them a clue that they’re signing up for a service that is “dead man walking” already! The poor ignorant slobs! Pretty funny, huh? And the only users we’ve emailed about the G+ shutdown are at sites using our G+ APIs, which we’re going to start dismantling in late January. It’s going to be quite a show, because that’s going to break vast numbers of websites that made the mistake of deeply embedding G+ APIs into their systems. Hey, to quote “Otter” from “Animal House” — “You f*cked up! You trusted us!”

So it’s up to you all to spread the word about what’s going on, because we’ve got better things to do than dealing with G+ losers. You’re so yesterday!

OK, ’nuff said! We’ve already spent more time on this note than we should have, and talking to you guys isn’t advancing any of our careers. Be glad that we’re posting this in a nice dark font that you can actually read — we could have used “Material Design” and then sat here chuckling, knowing that so many of you would be squinting and getting migraine headaches from trying to read this.

But we’re not cruel. We just don’t care about you. There’s a big difference! Please keep that in mind.

Thanks for being the guinea pigs in our social media experiment that was Google+. Now back to your cages!

Best,

Google, Inc.

 – – –

Lauren Weinstein / lauren.vortex.com / 22 January 2019 / https://plus.google.com/+LaurenWeinstein / https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein

Google Contacts — which I use heavily — has now moved over to Google’s horrific “let’s kick people with less than perfect vision in the teeth!” user interface (UI) design. I assume it’s rolling out gradually so you may not have it yet.

But even when you do get it, you STILL may not be able to really see it, because like most of Google’s “material design” UI “refreshes” it’s terrible for anyone who has problems with low contrast fonts. Even at 175% magnification, the fonts are painful to read — and for many users are likely to be impossible to view in a practical manner. And as usual, older users will suffer most at the hands of Google’s UI design changes.

There are a few minor improvements in the new Contacts design relating to form field layouts, and your “notes” for an entry no longer need to be in a restricted-sized box. But those positive changes are rendered meaningless when the fonts overall have been made so much more difficult for so many people to read.

If you talk to Google’s internal accessibility folks about this sort of problem (and I’ve done so, numerous times) you’ll be told that the new design is fine for “most users” and meets formal accessibility standards.

Yet the single most common complaint I get about Google is from users who simply can’t comfortably read or use Google interfaces, and Google is pushing material design into more and more of their products. Google Docs (I use this one heavily also), plus Sheets, Slides, and Sites are also apparently doomed to undergo this change, according to Google.

For the moment, you can still switch back to the familiar version of Contacts (there’s a link for this buried at the bottom of the left sidebar), but we know that Google at some point always ultimately removes the ability to use the older versions of their products.

This situation is rapidly becoming worse and worse for the negatively affected users.

Of course, Google could solve this problem by providing higher contrast UI options, but such options are severely discouraged at Google.

After all, you don’t want to make things easy for those users that you don’t really care about at all, right?

For shame Google. For shame.

–Lauren–

UPDATE (February 10, 2019): Another Positive Move by YouTube: No More General “Conspiracy Theory” Suggestions

When I feel that Google is making policy mistakes, I don’t hesitate to call them out as appropriate. I don’t enjoy doing this, but my goal is to help Google be better, not to see a great company becoming less so.

On the other hand, I much enjoy congratulating Google when they make important policy improvements — and yeah, it’s nice when this involves an area where I’ve long been urging such changes.

So I’m very pleased by Google’s newly announced changes to YouTube acceptable content rules, to significantly crack down on dangerous prank and dare/challenge videos on YouTube.

I’ve written about my concerns in this area many times, for example in “YouTube’s Dangerous and Sickening Cesspool of ‘Prank’ and ‘Dare’ Videos” (https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/05/04/youtubes-dangerous-and-sickening-cesspool-of-prank-and-dare-videos), approaching two years ago.

I am not unsympathetic to Google’s philosophical and practical preferences for a “very light touch” when it comes to excluding specific types of content from their YouTube platform. In a perfect world, if all video creators behaved responsibly in the first place, we likely wouldn’t be facing these kinds of challenges at all. But of course, the reality is that irresponsible creators of all sorts permeate vast swaths of the Internet ecosystem.

The new YouTube “Policies on harmful or dangerous Content” (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801964), should in theory go a long way toward appropriately addressing the kinds of concerns that I and others have expressed about dangerously inappropriate videos on YouTube.

Whether the new rules will actually have the desired positive effects will of course depend on how rigorously Google enforces these rules, and in particular whether that enforcement is evenhanded — meaning that large YouTube channels generating significant revenue are subject to the same serious enforcement actions as much smaller channels. 

Time will tell in this regard. But today, as someone who very much loves YouTube and who considers YouTube to be an irreplaceable aspect of my daily life, I want to thank Google for these positive steps toward making YouTube even better for us all. Kudos to the teams!

–Lauren–

If you’ve ever needed more evidence that Google just doesn’t care about users who have become “inconvenient” to their new business models, one need only look at the saga of their ongoing handling of their announced Google+ shutdown.

I’ve previously discussed what I believe to be the actual motivations for this action, that’s suddenly pulling the rug out from beneath many of their most loyal users (“Can We Trust Google?” – https://lauren.vortex.com/2018/12/10/can-we-trust-google). But let’s leave the genesis of this betrayal of users aside, and just look at how Google is handling the actual process of eliminating G+.

What’s the technical term for this that I’m searching for? Oh yes: disgraceful.

We already know about Google’s incredible user trust failure in announcing dates for this process. First it was August. Then suddenly it was April. The G+ APIs (which vast numbers of web sites — including mine — made the mistake of deeply embedding into their sites, we’re told will start “intermittently failing” (whatever that actually means) later this month.

It gets much worse though. While Google has tools for users to download their own G+ postings for preservation, they have as far as I know provided nothing to help loyal G+ users maintain their social contacts — the array of other G+ followers and users with whom many of us have built up friendships on G+ over the years.

As far as Google is concerned, when G+ dies, all of your linkages to your G+ friends are gone forever. You can in theory try to reach out to each one and try to get their email addresses, but private messages on G+ have always been hit or miss, and I’ve had to resort to setting up my own invite-only forum for this purpose (“A New Invite-Only Forum for Victims of Google’s Google+ Purge” – https://lauren.vortex.com/2019/01/05/a-new-invite-only-forum-for-victims-of-googles-google-purge).

If I’d been running G+ and had been ordered from “on high” to shut it down, I would have insisted on providing tools to help users migrate their social connections on G+ to other platforms, or at least to email! Google just doesn’t seem to care about the relationships that users have built over the years on G+.

You know what else I’d be doing if I ran G+ at this point? I’d be showing respect for my users. I’d be damned well warning everyone about the upcoming shutdown on a continuing basis — not just with an occasional post on G+ itself visible only to users following that official G+ user, and not relying on third-party media stories to inform the user community.

I’d have “butter bar” banners up keeping all G+ users informed. I’d be sending out emails to users updating them on what’s happening (so far as I know, only G+ API users have been contacted by email about the shutdown).

And with only a few months left until Google pulls the plug on G+, I sure as hell wouldn’t still be soliciting for new  G+ users!

Yep — believe it or not — Google at this time is STILL soliciting for unsuspecting users to sign up for new G+ accounts, without any apparent warnings that you’re signing up for a service that is already officially the walking dead!

Perhaps this shows most vividly how Google today seems to just not give a damn about users who aren’t in their target demographics of the moment. Or maybe it’s just laziness. We can assume that consumer G+ is being operated on an ever thinner skeleton crew these days. Sure, encourage users to waste their time setting up profiles and subscribing to communities that will be ghosts in a handful of weeks. What do we care?

The upshot here though isn’t to suggest that Google is required to operate G+ forever, but rather that the way in which they’ve handled the announcements and ongoing process of sunsetting a service much beloved by many Google users has been nothing short of atrocious, and has not shown respect for Google’s users overall.

And that’s nothing short of very dismal, and very sad indeed.

–Lauren–

The casual outside observer can be readily excused for not noticing the multiplying red flags.

At first glance, so much seems golden for Google.

Google is still expanding its physical infrastructure by leaps and bounds. New buildings, new data centers, new offices — just last week we learned that Google will be taking over virtually the entire old Westside Pavilion for offices here in L.A. I used to hang out there many years ago, back when it was a relatively new shopping mall.

The pipeline of graduating students into Google’s HR machine remains packed to overflowing, and as usual there are vastly more applicants than positions available.

But to those of us with deeper connections to the firm and its employees, there are alarm bells sounding loudly.

Google is in the midst of a user trust and ethics crisis, and an increasing number of their best long-term employees are leaving.

Their reasons vary — after all, nobody is expected to stay with one firm forever, and there are career paths to be considered. 

However, it is undeniable to anyone who really knows Google that there is an increasing internal glumness, a sense of melancholy and in some cases anger, toward some key decisions that management has been making of late, and regarding the predicted trajectory for Google that logically could result.

As at most firms, there has always been some degree of friction at Google between management and the “rank and file” employees — traditionally staying largely internal to the firm and out of public view.

This has changed recently, with a series of controversial internal issues spilling out dramatically into the external world, in the form of employee protests and other employee actions really never seen before in modern Big Tech workplaces. 

Consternation over Google’s links to military projects, a potential censored search project for China, and a massive payout to a high-ranking employee accused of sexual harassment — the world at large has taken note of these issues and more.

Just in the last few days, a major shareholder lawsuit has been filed against Google relating to the sexual harassment case. And coincidentally a couple of days ago, the Arms Control Association named the 4000 Googlers who opposed Google’s contract with the Pentagon’s “Project Maven” as the “Arms Control Person(s) of the Year.”

There have indeed been some positive internal changes at Google resulting from this unprecedented level of employee activism — for example, Google has formalized an important and positive set of AI Principles.

For many Googlers, this has been too little, too late. Particularly among female and LGTBQ employees — but by no means restricted to those groups — the atmosphere at Google is no longer seen as welcoming and ethical. And increasing numbers of Googlers — alarmingly including those who have been at Google for many years, who have been the representatives of Google’s culture at its best, and who have constituted the ethical heart of the company — have left or are about to leave.

And this appears to be only the beginning. I’ve lost count of the Googlers I know who have asked me to keep an ear open for outside positions that fall into their areas of expertise — a bit ironic since I’m always looking for work myself. 

These kinds of situations can be devastating to a firm in the long run, in and of themselves.

They also hand Google’s political and other enemies — the haters and more — political ammunition that can be used against Google not only to the detriment of the firm at a time when Big Tech is increasingly being inappropriately framed as “enemies of the people” by Luddite forces on the left and the right — but to the ultimate detriment of Google’s users and everyone else as well.

Yet compared to Google’s competition — for example firms like Amazon and Microsoft who happily accept military combat contracts, or Apple with its highly problematic actions to help China block open Internet access by removing VPN and other apps — Google’s ethics have traditionally been a cut above the others.

As Google’s brain and ethics drains continue, as more of their best and most principled employees leave, Google’s moral advantage over those other firms is rapidly deteriorating, and the exodus of such employees is always a “canary in the coal mine” warning that something fundamental has gone awry. 

So long as Google management chooses not to directly and effectively address these issues, to not dedicate significant resources toward reclaiming the ethical, user trust, and employee trust high grounds, there is little reason to anticipate a course correction from the increasingly dark path on which Google now appears to be traveling. 

–Lauren–

I’ve been highly critical — to say the least — of the European Union’s insane global censorship regime — “The Right To Be Forgotten” (RTBF) — since well before it became actual, enacted law.

But there’s finally some good news about RTBF — in the form of a formal opinion from EU Advocate General Maciej Szpunar, chief adviser at Europe’s highest court.

I’m not sure offhand when I first began writing about the monstrosity that is RTBF, but a small subset of related posts includes:

The “Right to Be Forgotten”: A Threat We Dare Not Forget (2/2012):
https://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000938.html

Why the “Right To Be Forgotten” is the Worst Kind of Censorship (8/2015):
https://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001119.html

RTBF was always bad, but it became a full-fledged dumpster fire when (as many of us had predicted from the beginning) efforts were made to enforce its censorship demands globally. This gave the EU effectively worldwide censorship powers via RTBF’s “hide the library index cards” approach, creating a lowest common denominator “race to the bottom” of expanding mass, government-directed censorship of search results related to usually completely accurate and still published news and other information items.

In a nutshell, Maciej Szpunar’s opinion — which is not binding but is likely to be a strong indicator of how related final decisions will turn out — is that global application of EU RTBF decisions is usually unreasonable. While he doesn’t rule out the possibility of global “enforcement” in “certain situations” (an aspect that will need to be clarified), it’s obvious that he views routine global enforcement of EU RTBF demands to be untenable. 

This is of course only a first step toward reining in the RTBF monster, but it’s potentially an enormously important one, and we’ll be watching further developments in this arena with great interest indeed.

–Lauren–

Have you ever seen the “10 Things” philosophy page at Google? It’s uplifting. It’s sweet. And in significant respects, it’s as dead as the dodo:

https://www.google.com/about/philosophy.html

Even if it didn’t say so, you’d know that this page has been around at Google for a long, long time, because it still speaks of “doing one thing really, really well” and calls Gmail and Maps “new” products.

By no means is everything on that page now inoperative, but it’s difficult for some sections not to remind one of the classic film “Citizen Kane” where Charles Foster Kane himself rips his own, now “antique” Declaration of Principles to shreds.

Point number one on that nostalgic Google page is of special note: “Focus on the user and all else will follow.”

I would argue that when those words were first written many years ago, Google’s users — and the entire Internet world — were very different from today. By and large, the percentage of non-techies in Google’s user community was much smaller. You didn’t have so many busy non-technical persons, older people, and others for whom technology was not a 24/7 “lifestyle” but who were still very dependent on your services.

And of course, Google’s range of services was much narrower then, and Google services were not such a massive part of so many people’s lives around the world as those services are today.

Google has traditionally been — and still to a significant extent is — something of a “black box” to most users.  Unless you’ve been on the inside, many of its actions seem mysterious and inscrutable. Even being on the inside doesn’t necessarily free one completely of those observations.

While there have been some improvements in some respects, especially in regard to Google’s paid services, overall Google still seems to have something of an “us vs. them” attitude — keep the users at arm’s length — when it comes to the majority of their users, a tendency to wall users off in significant respects. 

Granted, when you have as many users as Google, you can’t provide “white-glove” personalized service to all of them.

But even within the practical range of what could be done to better serve users overall, one senses that Google decreasingly cares about you unless you’re a genuine paying customer, and even then only to the minimal extent required. 

Part of this is likely driven by quite realistic fears of potentially draconian actions by pandering politicians in governments around the planet, and the declining value of traditional online advertising models.

But Google’s at best lackadaisical attitude toward so many of its users is still impossible to justify. Just to note two recent examples that I’ve discussed, why would Google not choose to proactively help Chromecast users whose devices might be hijacked, even if the underlying fault wasn’t actually Google’s? And how can Google justify the sudden and total abandonment of loyal Google+ users who have spent many years building close communities, without even bothering to provide any tools to help those users stay in touch with each other after Google pulls the plug? 

It’s a matter of priorities. And at Google, only a limited number of particular users tend to be a priority.

It goes further of course. Google’s institutional fear of the “Streisand Effect” — reluctance to even mention a problem to avoid risking drawing any attention to it — rises essentially to the level of neurosis.

Google’s continual refusal to give users a truly representative “place at the deliberation table”  through user advocates, or the means to escalate serious dilemmas through ombudspersons or similar roles, are ever more glaring as related issues continue to erupt into public notice, often with significantly negative PR impacts, making Google ever more vulnerable to the whims of opportunistic regulators and politicians.

Some years ago when I was consulting to Google, I was in the office of a significantly high ranking executive at their Mountain View headquarters (one clue to knowing if someone is a significant executive at Google — they have their own office). I was pitching my concepts for roles like ombudspersons, and he was pushing back. Finally, he asked me, “Are you volunteering?”

I thought about it for a few seconds and answered no. A role like that without the actual support of the company would be useless, and it seemed obvious from my meetings that the necessary support for such roles within the company did not exist.

In retrospect, even though I’ve always assumed that his question was really only meant rhetorically, I still wonder if I should have “called his bluff” so to speak and answered in the affirmative. It probably wouldn’t have mattered, but it was an interesting moment.

One way or another, the political “powers that be” today have the long knives out for Google and other Internet-based firms. And I for one don’t want to see Google go the way of DEC and Bell Labs and the long list of other firms that once seemed invincible but now either no longer exist or are mere shadows of their former once-great selves.

Given current trends, I’m unsure if Google — even given the will to do so — can turn this around fast enough to avoid the destructive, toxic, political freight trains headed toward it. Many of my readers frequently suggest to me that even that sentiment is overly optimistic.

We shall see.

–Lauren–

Several weeks ago, in the wake of Google’s shameless and hypocritical abandonment of loyal Google users and communities with the announced rapidly approaching shutdown of consumer Google+ (originally scheduled for August, then — with yet another kick in the teeth to their users — advanced to April based on obviously exaggerated security claims) I created a new private forum to help stay in touch with my own G+ followers.

This was not something that I had anticipated needing to do.

If Google had shown even an ounce of concern for their users’ feelings, and provided the means for the “families” of users created on G+ since its inception to have some way to stay in touch after Google pulls the plug on consumer G+ (to concentrate on expanding their enterprise/business version of G+), I wouldn’t even have had to think about creating a new forum at this stage.

But relying upon Google in these respects — please see: “Can We Trust Google?” (https://lauren.vortex.com/2018/12/10/can-we-trust-google) — is a fool’s errand. Google has made it clear that even their most loyal users can be booted out the door at any time that upper management finds them to be an “inconvenience” in the Google ecosystem, to be swatted like flies. Given Google’s continuing user support and user trust failures in other areas, we all should have seen this coming long ago. In fact, many of us did, but had hoped that we were wrong. 

There have been continuing efforts to find some way in conjunction with Google to keep some of these consumer G+ relationships alive — for example, via the enterprise version of G+. To date, these prospects continue to appear bleak. Google seems to have no respect at all for their consumer G+ users, beyond the absolute minimum of providing a way for users to download their own G+ posting archives.

Since Google clearly cares not about destroying the relationships built up on Google+, and since I have many friends on G+ with whom I don’t want to lose touch (many of which, ironically, are Googlers — great Google employees), I created my own small, new private forum as a way to hopefully avoid total decapitation of these relationships at the hands of Google’s G+ guillotine.

A significant number of my G+ followers have already joined. But I’ve been frequently asked if I would consider opening it up further for other G+ users who feel burned by Google’s upcoming demolition of G+, especially since many G+ users are not finding the currently publicly available alternatives to be appealing, for a range of very good reasons. Facebook is nonstarter for many, and various of the other public alternatives are already infested with alt-right and other forms of trolls who were justifiably kicked off of the mainstream platforms.

So while I am indeed willing to accept invitation requests more broadly from G+ users and other folks who are feeling increasingly without a welcoming social media home, please carefully consider the following before applying.

It’s my private forum. My rules apply. It operates as a (hopefully) benign dictatorship. I reserve the right to reject any invite applications or submitted postings. Any bad behavior (by my definitions) will result in ejection, typically on a one-strike basis. All submitted posts will be moderated (by myself and/or by trusted users whom I designate) before potentially being accepted and becoming visible on the forum. Private messaging between users is not supported at this time. I make no guarantees regarding how long the forum will operate or how it might evolve, but my intention is for it to be a low-key and comfortable place for friends to post and discuss issues of interest.

If you don’t like that kind of environment, then please don’t even bother applying for an invitation. Go use Facebook. Or go somewhere else. Good luck. You’re going to need it.

If you do want to apply for an invitation, please send an email message explaining briefly who you are and why you want to join, to:

g-forum-request@vortex.com

I look forward to hearing from you.

Take care. Be seeing you.

–Lauren–

You may have heard by now that significant numbers of Google’s excellent Chromecast devices — dongles that attach to televisions to display video streams — are being “hijacked” by hackers, forcing attached televisions to display content of the hackers’ choosing. The same exploit permits other tampering with some users’ Chromecasts, including apparently forced reboots, factory resets, and configuration changes. Google Home devices don’t seem to be similarly targeted currently, but they likely are similarly vulnerable.

The underlying technical vulnerability itself has been known for years, and Google has been uninterested in changing it. These devices use several ports for control, and they depend on local network isolation rather than strong authentication for access control.

In theory, if everyone had properly configured Internet routers with bug free firmware, this authentication and control design would likely be adequate. But of course, everyone doesn’t fall into this category.

If those control ports end up accessible to the outside world via unintended port forwarding settings (the UPnP capability in most routers is especially problematic in this regard), the associated devices become vulnerable to remote tampering, and may be discoverable by search engines that specialize in finding and exposing devices in this condition.

Google has their own reasons for not wanting to change the authentication model for these devices, and I’m not going to argue the technical ramifications of their stance right now.

But the manner in which Google has been reacting to this new round of attacks on Chromecast users is all too typical of their continuing user trust failures, others of which I’ve outlined in the recent posts “Can We Trust Google?” (https://lauren.vortex.com/2018/12/10/can-we-trust-google) and “The Death of Google” (https://lauren.vortex.com/2018/10/08/the-death-of-google).

Granted, Chromecast hijacking doesn’t rank at the top of exploits sorted by severity, but Google’s responses to this situation are entirely characteristic of their attitude when faced with such controversies.

To date — as far as I know — Google has simply taken the “pass the buck” approach. In response to media queries about this issue, Google insists that the problem isn’t their fault. They assert that other devices made by other firms can have the same vulnerabilities. They lay the blame on users who have configured their routers incorrectly. And so on.

While we can argue the details of the authentication design that Google is using for these devices, there’s something that I consider to be inarguable: When you blame your users for a problem, you are virtually always on the losing side of the argument.

It’s as if Google just can’t bring itself to admit that anything could be wrong with the Chromecast ecosystem — or other aspects of their vast operating environments.

Forget about who’s to blame for the situation. Instead, how about thinking of ways to assist those users who are being affected or could be affected, without relying on third-party media to provide that kind of help!

Here’s what I’d do if I was making these decisions at Google.

I’d make an official blog post on the appropriate Google blogs alerting Chromecast users to these attacks and explaining how users can check to make sure that their routers are configured to block such exploits. I’d place something similar prominently within the official Chromecast help pages, where many users already affected by the problem would be most likely to initially turn for official “straight from Google” help.

This kind of proactive outreach shouldn’t be a difficult decision for a firm like Google that has so many superlative aspects. But again and again, it seems that Google has some sort of internal compulsion to try minimize such matters and to avoid reaching out to users in such situations, and seems to frequently only really engage publicly in these kinds of  circumstances when problems have escalated to the point where Google feels that its back is against the wall and that they have no other choice.

This isn’t rocket science. Hell, it’s not even computer science. We’re talking about demonstrating genuine respect for your users, even if the total number of users affected is relatively small at Google Scale, even if the problems aren’t extreme, even if the problems arguably aren’t even your fault.

It’s baffling. It’s disturbing. And it undermines overall user trust in Google relating to far more critical issues, to the detriment of both Google itself and Google’s users.

And perhaps most importantly, Google could easily improve this situation, if they chose to do so. No new data centers need be built for this purpose, no new code is required. 

What’s needed is merely the recognition by Google that despite their great technical prowess, they have failed to really internalize the fact that all users matter — even the ones with limited technical expertise — and that Google’s attitude toward those users who depend on their services matters at least as much as the quality of those services themselves. 

–Lauren–

When small, closed minds tackle big issues, the results are rarely good, and frequently are awful. This tends to be especially true when governments attempt to restrict the development and evolution of technology. Not only do those attempts routinely fail at their stated and ostensible purposes, but they often do massive self-inflicted damage along the way, and end up further empowering our adversaries.

Much as Trump’s expensive fantasy wall (“Mexico will pay for it!”) would have little ultimate impact on genuine immigration problems — other than to further exacerbate them — his Commerce department’s new plans for restricting the export of technologies such as AI, speech recognition, natural language understanding, and computer vision would be yet another unforced error that could decimate the USA’s leading role in these areas.

We’ve been down this kind of road before. Years ago, the USA federal government placed draconian restrictions on the export of encryption technologies,  classifying them as a form of munitions. The result was that the rest of the world zoomed ahead in crypto tech. This also triggered famously bizarre situations like t-shirts with encryption source code printed on them being restricted, and the co-inventor of the UNIX operating system — Ken Thompson — battling to take his “Belle” chess-playing computer outside the country, because the U.S. government felt that various of the chips inside fell into this restricted category. (At the time, Ken was reportedly quoted as saying that the only way you could hurt someone with Belle was by dropping it out of a plane — you might kill someone if it hit them!)

As is the case with AI and the other technologies that Commerce is talking about restricting today, encryption R&D information is widely shared among researchers, and likewise, any attempts to stop these new technologies from being widely available, even attempts at restricting access to them by specific countries on our designated blacklist of the moment, will inevitably fail.

Even worse, the reaction of the global community to such ill-advised actions by the U.S. will inevitably tend to put us at a disadvantage yet again, as other countries with more intelligent and insightful leadership race ahead leaving us behind in the dust of politically motivated export control regimes.

To restrict the export of AI and affiliated technologies is shortsighted, dangerous, and will only accomplish damaging our own interests, by restricting our ability to participate fully and openly in these crucial areas. It’s the kind of self-destructive thinking that we’ve come to expect from the anti-science, “build walls” Trump administration, but it must be firmly and completely rejected nonetheless.

–Lauren–