[mrweasel]

Someone at Google are ultimately responsible for the overall direction. Saying that a company is made up by thousands of people and they should be judge, perhaps not individually, but at least not as one gigant whole, is asking the employees to absorb moral responsibility, while the corporate is excused of any wrong doing.

[twodave]

No, I think the company has plenty of responsibility. I just think it is more likely as someone who has been part of many engineering orgs that this is a latent bug affecting some people than some intentional change of policy.