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by vexxed-concave 1663 days ago
This feels way too coincident with her recent book release.

Given her already public figure persona and proceeds from prior works, why EVER take the risk to ship such personal hardware to a 3rd party?!!

Just get a new phone and sync a back-up…unless it just might be beneficial PR to, apparently, do the “risky” thing and carp about it.

So far, I see ZERO corroborating evidence—even something as simple as a suitably redacted screenshot of an email to Google support.

Trust, but verify & extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

2 comments

Really? Your first reaction is that she must be making it up? This is hardly a far fetched scenario. I’m guessing she didn’t bother posting screenshots because most people wouldn’t automatically assume she is lying.
Yes. Given the timing of things (why even make this public?), the low likelihood of the event, and crucially the lack of any evidence, I see the preponderance of the probabilities weighing against her claims.
Why not make it public? That’s often what leads to action being taken. I don’t see any reason to believe there’s a low likelyhood of the event occuring. And she’s not making a legal case, it’s just a tweet. The lack of evidence in her tweets does not mean there’s an actual lack of evidence.
Please review the stated history of events—-it IS extremely unlikely.

She is making a case in the court of public opinion.

Granted she has more clout than the “average joe” (and the very fact that this is even being discussed is evidence for it) but ANY case without corroborating evidence is just hearsay.

She should “put up or shut-up” and the levels of “put” required are so minimal that her PR credibility before the “court” on this matter has a very short half-life.

> Granted she has more clout than the “average joe” (and the very fact that this is even being discussed is evidence for it) but ANY case without corroborating evidence is just hearsay.

An anonymous poster on reddit had a similar issue a few days ago [0]. Their comment got 331 points on HN while this one got 257 points so far. The anonymous one got more points.

Is it possible you're wrong about this aspect?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29443645

Indeed, she did copy this story directly from an anonymous poster on Reddit, other than making up some details that don't even make sense given the rest of her story. And yet people still believe her.
If there's one thing Google has down-pat, it's their mobile device security. I know that might sound silly, but it's true. I don't trust Google as a company overall, but the Pixel devices outshine any other when it comes to device security, hardware keystores, etc.
Interesting to see you get the causality potentially wrong. I take it that because of the book perhaps the author felt emboldened to share their story -- which they otherwise might be pressured to hide. Do you see how that might be a possibility?

What if your thesis was "I expect to only see reports of sexism from people with clout because they're the only ones that can actually tell the truth without getting their lives ruined?"

Can you see that this thesis is a possibility?