[skybrian]

This subject has gotten extremely political and I simply don’t trust most of what’s posted on Hacker News. Everything looks like motivated reasoning to me. Only a small minority really understand the issues and they use motivated reasoning too.

It’s much like deciding which nutritional studies to trust when most people aren’t scientists and are just reposting memes.

And although I don’t know what’s going on anymore, I have residual trust in the Chrome team since I used to work for Google.

[marshmallow_12]

I think what you are saying is privacy concerns are a straw man. But just to accuse HN doesn't really help me. Can you share with us a bit about what is going on in Chrome. I would be genuinely interested to hear more about how it was made/runs etc.

[skybrian]

Oh, I don't know anything. I didn't work closely with the Chrome team, and even if I did, I left Google years ago.

But I don't think my co-workers were evil, and though I didn't work personally with them much, I think the folks on the privacy and security teams know their business.

Public blog posts can be extremely difficult to understand though, I'm guessing because it's gotten so political. You can get a bit more from "intent to ship" emails on the public mailing lists.

[CarelessExpert]

> But I don't think my co-workers were evil,

You don't have to be evil to do things that result in terrible outcomes.

I genuinely don't think anyone at Facebook wanted to create a propaganda tool, but that was the aggregate outcome.

I don't think anyone at Google set out to build an invasive surveillance platform. But in aggregate that's what's happened.

There's real danger in assuming you will only get bad outcomes because of bad people. Unintended consequences are a thing and I personally think most of the negatives of big tech come from precisely that.

If we can't acknowledge that because we insist on labelling everything and everyone good or evil, we'll never actually solve these issues.

[skybrian]

Yes, unintentional outcomes do happen, despite everyone’s best efforts. Sometimes we call them bugs, security holes, or design flaws. They aren’t unique to Chrome, either. There are bug bounties and hacking contests to encourage outside investigation.

Links about things like that do get posted here and that keeps me coming back. But it seems like for certain topics, good-faith critiques are often intermingled with large amounts of contempt. Often the contempt gets upvoted too, just because a lot of people agree with the sentiment.

I wonder if it would be possible to discuss such things without the contempt? Even the Chrome team’s attempts to improve security and privacy get discussed with contempt.