HN Books @HNBooksMonth

Yep: https://www.amazon.com/Google-Leaks-Whistleblowers-Expos%C3%...

I'll save you the read. A Google employee downloaded 100k documents from the company-wide available internal wiki, identified all the ones that seemed anywhere from highly-to-mildly offensive to anyone in the world, and then published it all as a book on Amazon. The book has been out for about a year and continues to sell well (not to mention the hundreds of paid media appearances for the author to speak in front of like-minded audiences).

Here's the fun part: Google considered suing, but recognized that this would trigger the Streisand Effect and let him off the hook. Obviously, this was a calculated risk this dude took and that paid off (at least from the legal perspective).

Did Google act ethically 100% of the time? God no! But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha.

So clearly there's a market out there for juicy internal documents. I would still say the first step is not to do anything wrong, ever. But once you have enough people working for you and you can't be in every meeting at all times, shit is going to happen, and people are going to want to pay to find out about it.

EDIT: replaced "filtered out" with "identified"

⬐ vincentmarle

> Here's the fun part: Google considered suing, but recognized that this would trigger the Streisand Effect and let him off the hook.

Well, their strategy worked because I’ve never heard about this book.

⬐ rsj_hn

> But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha.

I hear this often and find it a bit puzzling. Perhaps it's part of believing that speech is violence - thinking that critical speech or angry feelings are really hurting Google.

So how do you think it hurt them? Did they lose customers, and if so, how many? Did they miss a quarter? Have to lay people off? Cancel product initiatives?

⬐ jessaustin

If any of these calamities eventually happen, we'll have to blame GP post.

⬐ xyzzy21

Honestly this doesn't happen if you have a good corporate culture to begin with (which Google has not had for quite a while).

I always go back to my experience at HP when Bill and Dave were still alive: the leadership decision to trust employees was pretty much reciprocated so openness worked just fine.

So lack of leadership skill (especially an inability to "lead by example") is usually what causes this type of situation.

⬐ amznthrwaway

A good rule of thumb as a leader, is that if you have more than 1,000 employees, at least 1 person is actively working to hurt the company.

Lots of possible drivers from mental illness, to being paid by an unethical competitor, to just twisted ethics in response to some random situation…. But if you’ve got 1,000 employees, somebody is secretly trying to f* you.

⬐ q1w2

This is folly because it only takes ONE person to leak documents, and there are always disgruntled employees somewhere in a company at the scale we are talking about.

You cannot assume good behavior of literally tens of thousands of employees because you have an overall "good" company culture.

That's just impossible.

⬐ jareklupinski

Best Sellers Rank: #48,190 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

#2 in Tribology Mechanical Engineering

#4 in Content Management

#10 in Online Internet Searching

what the hell

⬐ refurb

Is your argument that the world would be a better place if those wiki pages weren’t public?

⬐ geofft

I think this comment is giving an (interesting, IMO) example of the claim "Sometimes transparency encourages bad actors" and not making a value judgment on whether it is worth the tradeoff to limit internal transparency just to have stopped this one bad actor.

⬐ aerosmile

Not at all. Most companies are not in the business of making the world a better place, and therefore they are not going to be optimizing their info access policies against that target, but instead they will be optimizing for shareholder value or what have you.

Don't confuse this statement with an endorsement - I wish it all worked differently, but this is the reality.

⬐ oceanplexian

Most companies put a lot of money and reputation on the line advertising and taking stances on current events in such a way to imply that they are "in the business of making the world a better place". Either they need to step up and practice what they preach, or a regulatory agency like the FTC should step in when they make false claims about corporate governance.

⬐ scohesc

Interesting! I'm going to have to get a hard-copy of this book.

⬐ rhcom2

If it's the same stuff on his website it is incredibly underwhelming https://www.zachvorhies.com/google_leaks/

⬐ matheusmoreira

> But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha.

Good. Google should not be able to hide anything from anyone, especially the public whose privacy they invade. The more leaks, the better off we are. Especially the kind of leaks that hurt them. Those are the ones we want most. If they didn't want us to find out, maybe they shouldn't have been doing it, right?

⬐ q1w2

So they should make all their code open source? Have no intellectual property rights?

You are suggesting they just go bankrupt.

⬐ matheusmoreira

> You are suggesting they just go bankrupt.

I'm suggesting they stop surveilling the world's entire population. Until they stop violating our privacy, I won't feel sorry for them when others violate theirs. Total lack of privacy is exactly what these big tech companies deserve.

⬐ AlbertCory

"Paid media appearances" - how would you know he got paid?

I'm not on his level, but I have a book and I've done "media appearances" (BBC stations in Berkshire & Bristol). You don't get paid for promoting your book.

Maybe on a TV show, the union forces them to pay you the minimum, which I believe is not very much.

⬐ mh-

This book is only ~200 pages long. What am I missing?

⬐ Noumenon72

When the GP says "filtered out" the offensive ones, I think he means he filtered out the inoffensive ones and kept the offensive ones, which makes for a much shorter book.

⬐ aerosmile

Yep, sorry for the logic brain fart. Updated the parent comment accordingly.

⬐ gremIin

It sounds like the book is just a big spanning hundreds of pages crying about how Google is trying to make search smarter, and not end up with something like Microsoft's racist chatbot.

Remember, blindly codifying society's bias into algorithms can be very evil itself. It's no surprise Google didn't both with this guy.

⬐ tablespoon

>>> Sometimes transparency encourages bad actors.

> I'll save you the read. A Google employee downloaded 100k documents from the company-wide available internal wiki, identified all the ones that seemed anywhere from highly-to-mildly offensive to anyone in the world, and then published it all as a book on Amazon. The book has been out for about a year and continues to sell well (not to mention the hundreds of paid media appearances for the author to speak in front of like-minded audiences).

You also have to keep in mind that a "company-wide available internal wiki" is going to be almost entirely full of boring crap that people literally have to be paid to read.

I mean, the internal wiki pages for nearly every system I've worked on in my company don't even describe what that system is supposed to do in terms someone from outside the team would understand.

> So clearly there's a market out there for juicy internal documents. I would still say the first step is not to do anything wrong, ever. But once you have enough people working for you and you can't be in every meeting at all times, shit is going to happen, and people are going to want to pay to find out about it.

It's not a "bad actor" thing to leak things like that. "Shit" that happens at low levels is still shit, even if it's not company policy coming from the top.

⬐ jimbob45

>"Shit" that happens at low levels is still shit, even if it's not company policy coming from the top.

In some cases, it can be worse. If something happens at a low level that is unambiguously bad and no one at the top does anything about it despite knowing about it, then to the public, it's as if upper-management is condoning the behavior.

Case in point: the Redskins practicing human trafficking with no strong public denouncement from the team's front office.

⬐ nostrademons

Google a decade ago wasn't like that. I learned so much about software development from reading internal wiki pages for things like MapReduce, GFS, Colossus, their search serving system, search algorithms in general, their authentication/ID system, GMail storage, Google Reader feed ingestion, Google Moderator voting algorithms, etc. Not to mention snooping on code reviews from folks like Jeff Dean, Rob Pike, and Guido van Rossum.

It's not like that now - things are so much more locked down. The first time I was there I could basically treat it like a Ph.D that I got paid for, in terms of learning new things. This time, it's a job where I do my tasks and receive lots of money in return. I think this is kind of a shame - I liked the environment much more when most people were there to learn and invent rather than collect a paycheck - but perhaps this is the inevitable result of a company growing past 100K employees.

To make a new career in the QAnon industry.

https://www.amazon.com/Google-Leaks-Whistleblowers-Expos%C3%...

⬐ trasz

How would you make career in Qanon by leaking true information?

A matter of negative time.

https://www.amazon.com/Google-Leaks-Whistleblowers-Expos%C3%...

⬐ jasonvorhe

Uh, yeah, one of those project veritas stunts:

> Using Google's own internal search engine, Zach discovered their six-part plan for complete information dominance and released 950 pages of these documents to the world in June 2019 with an appearance with James O'Keefe on Project Veritas, which quickly became one of their most popular stories.

Of course he's into QAnon and thinks that Covid-19 was planned: https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7qqyn/an-ex-google-employee...

What a great source.