Speaking as a user, WTF? I thought I had location tracking turned off.
August 26, 2020 10:33 AM Subscribe
"The current UI feels like it is designed to make things possible, yet difficult enough that people won’t figure it out." Newly unsealed and partially unredacted documents from a consumer fraud suit the state of Arizona filed against Google show that company employees knew and discussed among themselves that the company's location privacy settings were confusing and potentially misleading. (via: arstechnica)
Some fun quotes from Google engineers:
"The current UI feels like it is designed to make things possible, yet difficult enough that people won’t figure it out."
"Some people (including even Googlers) don’t know that there is a global switch and a per-device switch."
"Indeed we aren’t very good at explaining this to users. Add me to the list of Googlers who didn’t understand how this worked and was surprised when I read the article ... we shipped a UI that confuses users."
"I agree with the article. Location off should mean location off, not except for this case or that case."
The “oh shit meeting”
The suit also provides a fascinating insight into how Google reacts when a negative news item about the company goes big. "The day the AP story was published," the suit says, "Google turned into crisis mode and held a self-styled 'Oh Shit' meeting in reaction to the story."
The company's communications team published daily reports (PDF) after the AP's story went live, tracking where and when stories about the AP's bombshell were being published and following what social media accounts with significant influence were saying about the story.
Day-one coverage of the story was "100% negative," the report found, with 93 percent of stories identified covering "the lack of user consent / creepy factor," 51 percent mentioning "misleading controls," and 32 percent of stories providing some kind of how-to information for customers to opt out or manage their data, the report concluded.
"We're seeing a growing narrative driven by third party commentary (policy influencers) that alludes to FTC / congressional action," the report said, citing stories by CNET, Vanity Fair, and Wired. "This will likely become a bigger focus as the week goes on."
Some fun quotes from Google engineers:
"The current UI feels like it is designed to make things possible, yet difficult enough that people won’t figure it out."
"Some people (including even Googlers) don’t know that there is a global switch and a per-device switch."
"Indeed we aren’t very good at explaining this to users. Add me to the list of Googlers who didn’t understand how this worked and was surprised when I read the article ... we shipped a UI that confuses users."
"I agree with the article. Location off should mean location off, not except for this case or that case."
The “oh shit meeting”
The suit also provides a fascinating insight into how Google reacts when a negative news item about the company goes big. "The day the AP story was published," the suit says, "Google turned into crisis mode and held a self-styled 'Oh Shit' meeting in reaction to the story."
The company's communications team published daily reports (PDF) after the AP's story went live, tracking where and when stories about the AP's bombshell were being published and following what social media accounts with significant influence were saying about the story.
Day-one coverage of the story was "100% negative," the report found, with 93 percent of stories identified covering "the lack of user consent / creepy factor," 51 percent mentioning "misleading controls," and 32 percent of stories providing some kind of how-to information for customers to opt out or manage their data, the report concluded.
"We're seeing a growing narrative driven by third party commentary (policy influencers) that alludes to FTC / congressional action," the report said, citing stories by CNET, Vanity Fair, and Wired. "This will likely become a bigger focus as the week goes on."
Related: over a month after the Court of Justice of the European Union definitively invalidated the so-called Privacy Shield framework between the US and the EU with immediate effect, Google somehow continues to claim that the Privacy Shield permits its collection of data on EU users. Facebook has likewise failed to take substantial action. This has led to a round of 101 legal complaints against EU and EEA companies using Google Analytics and Facebook Connect, in pretty plain contravention of EU privacy laws.
I don't think this is going to end until Google, Facebook, etc get hit with either a truly bottom-line-threatening fine (i.e. many billions) or are outright forbidden from these kinds of practices, with enforcement via fines of at least several million dollars per day, breaking up the companies, or jailing their executives. Anything less is just becomes the cost of doing business.
posted by jedicus at 10:50 AM on August 26, 2020 [20 favorites]
I don't think this is going to end until Google, Facebook, etc get hit with either a truly bottom-line-threatening fine (i.e. many billions) or are outright forbidden from these kinds of practices, with enforcement via fines of at least several million dollars per day, breaking up the companies, or jailing their executives. Anything less is just becomes the cost of doing business.
posted by jedicus at 10:50 AM on August 26, 2020 [20 favorites]
When caught grifting, the focus shifts away from fixing the issue — respecting user privacy — to massaging the message. Who better to do that kind of massage than an ad company, I guess.
European regulators have been fighting Google for a little while over this UI issue (among others), as well.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:54 AM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]
European regulators have been fighting Google for a little while over this UI issue (among others), as well.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:54 AM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]
I was one of the original beta testers for Chrome OS so I'm pretty familiar with it by now. Still, normally after an update, something I know existed yesterday appears to have grown legs and disappeared. Then I get to waste time trying to track it down. I usually find it with a changed name, a different feature-set and hiding in a remote dark corner. It's a little game we play...
posted by jim in austin at 11:04 AM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by jim in austin at 11:04 AM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]
OK, so how do i turn it off?
posted by ArgentCorvid at 11:12 AM on August 26, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by ArgentCorvid at 11:12 AM on August 26, 2020 [5 favorites]
It feels very deliberately confusing--not the organic confusion of a busy team cobbling things together
It's a company full of incentives to change things and no incentives to keep things the same. No one gets promoted by doing nothing. There's no magic inside big companies - it's just a bunch of people at the limit of their competence making shit up as they go along. The amazing thing about a dog walking on its hind legs, etc.
posted by GuyZero at 11:16 AM on August 26, 2020 [20 favorites]
It's a company full of incentives to change things and no incentives to keep things the same. No one gets promoted by doing nothing. There's no magic inside big companies - it's just a bunch of people at the limit of their competence making shit up as they go along. The amazing thing about a dog walking on its hind legs, etc.
posted by GuyZero at 11:16 AM on August 26, 2020 [20 favorites]
I recently ran into the opaque Google UI when I tried to see if there was a way to change the name on my Youtube account so I could make comments on videos that weren't under my full, real name. After 45 minutes or so of wading through byzantine settings pages involving the Creative Studio to create some sort of Brand Account, I got to some sort of all-or-nothing button I was asked to click on, warning me of the irreversable change I was about to make, and I eventually chickened out because the warning made it seem like I was about to accidentally overwrite all of my Google accounts, including my Gmail, just to change my Youtube display name.
It was hard to tell how much of that was actual malice on the part of Google developers vs simple obliviousness to the user experience. In any case, I have continued to not comment on Youtube videos.
posted by Dr. Send at 11:19 AM on August 26, 2020 [10 favorites]
It was hard to tell how much of that was actual malice on the part of Google developers vs simple obliviousness to the user experience. In any case, I have continued to not comment on Youtube videos.
posted by Dr. Send at 11:19 AM on August 26, 2020 [10 favorites]
If you ever need help doing something in one of the Google dashboards, don't Google it. You'll end up with pages of results linking to Google's own help. Each of these will take you step-by-step through a process that no longer exists, because they moved the feature somewhere else and didn't update the documentation.
posted by pipeski at 11:26 AM on August 26, 2020 [40 favorites]
posted by pipeski at 11:26 AM on August 26, 2020 [40 favorites]
There's no magic inside big companies - it's just a bunch of people at the limit of their competence making shit up as they go along
Depends on what you mean by "magic".
A company-wide relentless pursuit of a small set of specific goals even at great cost might not officially be "magic" (which is pretty much how we do things at everyone's favorite fruit company), but the end result sure can look like it when compared to like a hundred competing fiefdoms where changing shit is 100% the only way get promoted, which is how things are done over in Google-land.
Also, big ol' LOL to GOOG's culture of everything being super open internally. It makes the plaintiff's legal discovery process not just incredibly easy, but randos from all the company can make sure their semi-informed hot takes can be entered as evidence in a legal preceding.
posted by sideshow at 11:40 AM on August 26, 2020 [7 favorites]
Depends on what you mean by "magic".
A company-wide relentless pursuit of a small set of specific goals even at great cost might not officially be "magic" (which is pretty much how we do things at everyone's favorite fruit company), but the end result sure can look like it when compared to like a hundred competing fiefdoms where changing shit is 100% the only way get promoted, which is how things are done over in Google-land.
Also, big ol' LOL to GOOG's culture of everything being super open internally. It makes the plaintiff's legal discovery process not just incredibly easy, but randos from all the company can make sure their semi-informed hot takes can be entered as evidence in a legal preceding.
posted by sideshow at 11:40 AM on August 26, 2020 [7 favorites]
Google's UI across all of its "dashboards" is maddeningly opaque.
Google Drive is so, just horrendously, awful.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 11:42 AM on August 26, 2020
Google Drive is so, just horrendously, awful.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 11:42 AM on August 26, 2020
Google's UI across all of its "dashboards" is maddeningly opaque. It's never clear where you need to be, where certain controls are (or even if there are any).
It's also never clear if you've gone through all the options, or if there are more dashboards out there in random places that have settings related to what you're trying to do. Not to mention new settings silently rolled out in updates that might negate your current settings.
posted by trig at 11:43 AM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]
It's also never clear if you've gone through all the options, or if there are more dashboards out there in random places that have settings related to what you're trying to do. Not to mention new settings silently rolled out in updates that might negate your current settings.
posted by trig at 11:43 AM on August 26, 2020 [2 favorites]
I've used several Google tools over the last decade or so. My smartest systems administrators and engineers spent countless hours figuring out their garbage UI. Their UI is always a kluge...if you want to do a simple thing, good luck figuring out how to do it.
Migrating from Postini, which had a sophisticated, easy to use UI, to Google Vault was a disaster.
Integrating Google Docs into SSO? Hahahahahaha, you're screwed. Get ready for *some* of the tools to actually work, and for *some* of the tools to be broken with no expected date for them to be back online, if at all. Lost all your data? Oh well...
Nightmare.
posted by Chuffy at 11:48 AM on August 26, 2020
Migrating from Postini, which had a sophisticated, easy to use UI, to Google Vault was a disaster.
Integrating Google Docs into SSO? Hahahahahaha, you're screwed. Get ready for *some* of the tools to actually work, and for *some* of the tools to be broken with no expected date for them to be back online, if at all. Lost all your data? Oh well...
Nightmare.
posted by Chuffy at 11:48 AM on August 26, 2020
Almost none of the comments from the Google engineers actually indicate the UI is behaving other than as designed or expected. Possibly they all indicate success, if your goal was to obfuscate rather then clarify user choices.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 12:07 PM on August 26, 2020
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 12:07 PM on August 26, 2020
One of the main issues that helped me decide to quit working there (and take a huge financial and status hit) is exemplified by this story.
The following is just my perception and what some colleagues told me. There is a possibility I was an outlier and the rest of the company does no evil and is one of the top places in the world to work at.
The first couple of years I was there we would discuss issues like these among the engineers working on a project, then we would try to figure out what would be best for the user, and implement it. All decisions taken at the engineering and UX level. When we had "oh shit" meetings, they would go like "Oh shit, we screwed up, lets fix this issue ASAP and hope we did not do too much harm".
By the time I left, we engineers still had these kinds of discussion, but we did not feel free to to think of the user and implement a fix. We had to think about the OKR for that quarter, the metrics we were being evaluated on, and we would need buy-in from someone on the business side before we could make changes.
I remember one case were we realized that we had made the UX confusing for the users, but that bad design change had the secondary effect of improving one of our "key metrics" (the metric does not care if the user spends more time in the app clicking on thing because they are having fun or because they are lost, both count as "engagement"). Guess what happened next.
posted by Dr. Curare at 12:34 PM on August 26, 2020 [34 favorites]
The following is just my perception and what some colleagues told me. There is a possibility I was an outlier and the rest of the company does no evil and is one of the top places in the world to work at.
The first couple of years I was there we would discuss issues like these among the engineers working on a project, then we would try to figure out what would be best for the user, and implement it. All decisions taken at the engineering and UX level. When we had "oh shit" meetings, they would go like "Oh shit, we screwed up, lets fix this issue ASAP and hope we did not do too much harm".
By the time I left, we engineers still had these kinds of discussion, but we did not feel free to to think of the user and implement a fix. We had to think about the OKR for that quarter, the metrics we were being evaluated on, and we would need buy-in from someone on the business side before we could make changes.
I remember one case were we realized that we had made the UX confusing for the users, but that bad design change had the secondary effect of improving one of our "key metrics" (the metric does not care if the user spends more time in the app clicking on thing because they are having fun or because they are lost, both count as "engagement"). Guess what happened next.
posted by Dr. Curare at 12:34 PM on August 26, 2020 [34 favorites]
Fuckin' metrics. How do they work?
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:59 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:59 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]
Also, big ol' LOL to GOOG's culture of everything being super open internally. It makes the plaintiff's legal discovery process not just incredibly easy, but randos from all the company can make sure their semi-informed hot takes can be entered as evidence in a legal preceding.
Yes, whereas Apple's super secret stance has really emboldened them to help the customer. By removing things from the app store then prohibiting any alternative means of distribution. Clearly Apple employees know to go straight to the internet to post hot takes, where no officer of the court will find them.
Arguably, a culture of people writing things down and asking awkward questions leads to fewer dumb decisions like this. Or at least, in the future, knowing that discovery is a thing and dumb and user antagonizing decisions can't be hidden.
posted by pwnguin at 1:05 PM on August 26, 2020 [4 favorites]
Yes, whereas Apple's super secret stance has really emboldened them to help the customer. By removing things from the app store then prohibiting any alternative means of distribution. Clearly Apple employees know to go straight to the internet to post hot takes, where no officer of the court will find them.
Arguably, a culture of people writing things down and asking awkward questions leads to fewer dumb decisions like this. Or at least, in the future, knowing that discovery is a thing and dumb and user antagonizing decisions can't be hidden.
posted by pwnguin at 1:05 PM on August 26, 2020 [4 favorites]
Google Maps traffic is so amazing, but it is only amazing because they are sucking up location data from most every Android phone and many iPhones, too. If it was easy to turn it off, the maps would be worse.
posted by bitslayer at 1:11 PM on August 26, 2020
posted by bitslayer at 1:11 PM on August 26, 2020
Feature. Not a bug.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:13 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by Thorzdad at 1:13 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]
Google Play still thinks I live in the UK. I left in 2012. I haven't been able to find a solution that doesn't require creating a whole new account.
posted by srboisvert at 1:22 PM on August 26, 2020 [4 favorites]
posted by srboisvert at 1:22 PM on August 26, 2020 [4 favorites]
Arguably, a culture of people writing things down and asking awkward questions leads to fewer dumb decisions like this. Or at least, in the future, knowing that discovery is a thing and dumb and user antagonizing decisions can't be hidden.
Arguably, the pleasant ochre shade of the undigested corn husks in this turd make for a more pleasant olfactory experience as compared to the sickly yellows we see in the turd over here. Furthermore,
posted by invitapriore at 1:33 PM on August 26, 2020 [5 favorites]
Arguably, the pleasant ochre shade of the undigested corn husks in this turd make for a more pleasant olfactory experience as compared to the sickly yellows we see in the turd over here. Furthermore,
posted by invitapriore at 1:33 PM on August 26, 2020 [5 favorites]
Almost none of the comments from the Google engineers actually indicate the UI is behaving other than as designed or expected. Possibly they all indicate success, if your goal was to obfuscate rather then clarify user choices.
If you've ever screwed around in the guts of the Android permission system it will come as no surprise to you to learn that the creator of Android believes that one person can own another. Waze has a feature to help you avoid DUI checkpoints and speed traps, and I'd bet as much money as you'd care to wager that there's not a single person on that team who's ever had a loved one killed by a drunk driver.
Software is just an idea that we've turned into machine. It's built out of our values, politics and priorities, and any substantial piece of code is as much the story of the people who built it as it as it is a product. None of this is an accident. It's just the people who work at on these products showing us who they are, and who they're being rewarded for being.
posted by mhoye at 1:56 PM on August 26, 2020 [13 favorites]
If you've ever screwed around in the guts of the Android permission system it will come as no surprise to you to learn that the creator of Android believes that one person can own another. Waze has a feature to help you avoid DUI checkpoints and speed traps, and I'd bet as much money as you'd care to wager that there's not a single person on that team who's ever had a loved one killed by a drunk driver.
Software is just an idea that we've turned into machine. It's built out of our values, politics and priorities, and any substantial piece of code is as much the story of the people who built it as it as it is a product. None of this is an accident. It's just the people who work at on these products showing us who they are, and who they're being rewarded for being.
posted by mhoye at 1:56 PM on August 26, 2020 [13 favorites]
Clearly Apple employees know to go straight to the internet to post hot takes, where no officer of the court will find them.
My personal opinions on the shortfalls of Google's promotion system might already be part of any number of ongoing legal actions. No one needs to go to Metafilter to find those.
posted by sideshow at 2:29 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]
My personal opinions on the shortfalls of Google's promotion system might already be part of any number of ongoing legal actions. No one needs to go to Metafilter to find those.
posted by sideshow at 2:29 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]
Clearly Apple employees know to go straight to the internet to post hot takes, where no officer of the court will find them.
Google employees are routinely told not to talk out of their asses about legal issues or products they don't work on for exactly this reason, emails showing up in court.
Sadly, that stops very few people.
posted by GuyZero at 2:50 PM on August 26, 2020 [3 favorites]
Google employees are routinely told not to talk out of their asses about legal issues or products they don't work on for exactly this reason, emails showing up in court.
Sadly, that stops very few people.
posted by GuyZero at 2:50 PM on August 26, 2020 [3 favorites]
Without enforcement, I do wonder how much of this matters. We could complain, I suppose, but the mix of parochial regulatory vacuums and ineffectual global governance means that a company like this gets away with this, every single time. Nothing changes.
People keep using the product, even as they are being exploited. People who create these exploitative products still cash their paychecks. Gov't regulators hand out fines that are a fraction of a fraction of the day's interest that this company makes in its offshore bank accounts (holding 60% of its wealth, by FT's measure). As mentioned, it's just the cost of doing business.
What breaks this, I wonder? What ended Bell in the 1980s? Standard Oil in the 1910s? We don't seem to have legal systems or governance capable of dealing with this on a global level, and, worse, it seems to start with everyone along the chain being mostly compliant.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:02 PM on August 26, 2020 [6 favorites]
People keep using the product, even as they are being exploited. People who create these exploitative products still cash their paychecks. Gov't regulators hand out fines that are a fraction of a fraction of the day's interest that this company makes in its offshore bank accounts (holding 60% of its wealth, by FT's measure). As mentioned, it's just the cost of doing business.
What breaks this, I wonder? What ended Bell in the 1980s? Standard Oil in the 1910s? We don't seem to have legal systems or governance capable of dealing with this on a global level, and, worse, it seems to start with everyone along the chain being mostly compliant.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 4:02 PM on August 26, 2020 [6 favorites]
If you're in the industry, it's pretty clear that setting out to create an opaque UI I'd p is not something that happen often. However, when dozens of people can add "just one" feature, and there's no team assigned to unify it, it happens all the time.
The UI created when a product is introduced usually has some thought behind it. Two years later, that's not necessarily so.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:43 PM on August 26, 2020 [5 favorites]
The UI created when a product is introduced usually has some thought behind it. Two years later, that's not necessarily so.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:43 PM on August 26, 2020 [5 favorites]
Yeah, one of the more common criticisms I hear of Google's software is that the UIs generally feel like they were designed by programmers, rather than, well, designers.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:46 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:46 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]
I wish the UIs were designed by competent programmers, they would be ugly but actually work, and unit tests would tell you if the UI still did what it was supposed to 2 years out. I think the UIs are molded into their current shape by ad salespeople who pretend to listen to the UI people and the software engineers.
posted by benzenedream at 6:03 PM on August 26, 2020
posted by benzenedream at 6:03 PM on August 26, 2020
I wish the UIs were designed by competent programmers, they would be ugly but actually work
I thought about GPG and laughed for real.
posted by mhoye at 6:34 PM on August 26, 2020 [10 favorites]
I thought about GPG and laughed for real.
posted by mhoye at 6:34 PM on August 26, 2020 [10 favorites]
After 45 minutes or so of wading through byzantine settings pages involving the Creative Studio to create some sort of Brand Account, I got to some sort of all-or-nothing button I was asked to click on, warning me of the irreversable change I was about to make, and I eventually chickened out because the warning made it seem like I was about to accidentally overwrite all of my Google accounts, including my Gmail, just to change my Youtube display name.
Witness! I had the exact same experience, but went ahead and pushed the big button. Now my gmail icon is the same as my Youtube "brand" icon, and I have my real name on my YT channel instead of my previous "brand" name. Sucks, but after my YT account being fallow for many years I was just happy to be able to have full access and control again. Whatever...
posted by Meatbomb at 10:20 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]
Witness! I had the exact same experience, but went ahead and pushed the big button. Now my gmail icon is the same as my Youtube "brand" icon, and I have my real name on my YT channel instead of my previous "brand" name. Sucks, but after my YT account being fallow for many years I was just happy to be able to have full access and control again. Whatever...
posted by Meatbomb at 10:20 PM on August 26, 2020 [1 favorite]
Wow Meatbomb, I admire your courage. I was worried that my new youtube brand would become my Gmail persona, but it sounds like you had the reverse happen, or something. Maybe someday I'll work up the nerve to jump through that wormhole.
posted by Dr. Send at 10:22 PM on August 27, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by Dr. Send at 10:22 PM on August 27, 2020 [1 favorite]
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All of which is to say none of this is surprising. Sigh.
posted by maxwelton at 10:45 AM on August 26, 2020 [16 favorites]