I recently left Google after spending a few years there.
Internally Google puts a huge premium on user safety and privacy. So much so that shipping anything requires getting changes through a regulatory process to safeguard users.
Google doesn’t do a good job of marketing its process. In some domains Google does explicitly use user behavior to drive revenue, so from the outside it becomes easy to spin changes like this as encroaching on user privacy, but I don’t see that here. I see something like a PM who is trying to surface some more functionality to users directly, and some engineers who spent far too long with lawyers to get sign off on this change.
It may be fashionable to sensationalize product changes like this, but the truth is often more mundane.
Internally Google puts a huge premium on user safety and privacy. So much so that shipping anything requires getting changes through a regulatory process to safeguard users.
Google doesn’t do a good job of marketing its process. In some domains Google does explicitly use user behavior to drive revenue, so from the outside it becomes easy to spin changes like this as encroaching on user privacy, but I don’t see that here. I see something like a PM who is trying to surface some more functionality to users directly, and some engineers who spent far too long with lawyers to get sign off on this change.
It may be fashionable to sensationalize product changes like this, but the truth is often more mundane.
Edit: found a comment from the PM themselves in a previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30174304