[crote]

They are institutionally incapable of fixing it. Companies like Google are too big for that.

Individual workers and even entire teams don't matter. They are just another cog in a massive machine. Customer service representatives are forced to follow a script, and they are technically unable to deviate from it. After all, if there's an override button, it just takes one of your tens of thousands of minimum-wage workers to go rogue to end up with a massive compromise.

To fix it you need your manager's manager's manager to file a change request, which will be put on an endless backlog to be potentially looked at by two dozen teams a few years from now. And if it's not a frequently-occurring issue, it's not worth the effort. Google isn't going to fix it because as an organization they aren't even aware you exist. You are collateral damage, and they are totally fine with that.

The only way around this is to shortcut the entire process. Post on HN and hope some manager high enough in the policy/tech chain can be bothered to personally agenda the issue.

[Telemakhos]

I wonder if there's any sort of quiet constraint outside of organizational inertia at work here. Telephone numbers were (are?) one of PRISM/XKeyScore's favorite "strong selectors," and Google, like all major players in communications, does things to make its services play well with the current iteration of surveillance tools. I wonder if the current, seemingly boneheaded approach to applying phone company data to account data via phone numbers, including overwriting names, is some new requirement of the surveillance system.