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By Root 2078 0

I forecast that user privacy, our near monopoly in search, and censorship demands by foreign governments would be the three trials to bedevil us in the coming year. We needed to prepare—to get out in front and lead the parade rather than be trampled by it. Marissa complimented my analysis but had reservations about my recommendations. Just as I had thought "Don't be evil" overpromised, she feared taking public stands about our ethical positions would result in overly heightened expectations and negative reactions if we failed to live up to them. I understood that perspective (and shared it) but believed we didn't need to claim to be ethically superior. We just needed our actions to demonstrate that we were. Users could draw their own conclusions.

Sergey's feedback was less encouraging. "I find documents like this frightening," he stated. "It's vague and open-ended, which makes specific feedback impossible." Lest I take his lack of comments for assent, he asked me to detail the next steps I intended to take. I had already done that, but evidently he hadn't read past the first page. I wondered if my communication with Sergey would improve if I took him for a walking chat, as I had with Marissa—perhaps along a high cliff overlooking the ocean.

Meanwhile, the privacy discussion bubbled and boiled until at last a meeting could be arranged to hash out once and for all policies on employee access to user data, data retention, and user education about privacy issues.

The meeting raised many other questions, and answered none of them. Eric Schmidt half-jokingly suggested that our privacy policy should start off with the full text of the Patriot Act. Larry argued we should keep all our data until—well, until the time we should get rid of it. If we thought the government was overreaching, we could just encrypt everything and make it unreadable. Besides, Ashcroft would most likely go after the ISPs first, since they had much better data than we did about what users did online.* The meeting ended, but the debate continued for months.

My idea for blazing a path on educating users about privacy never gained the endorsement of Larry and Sergey, and so did not come to fruition. Perhaps they were right that it would have opened a Pandora's box. The issue of privacy would never go away, and trying to explain our rationale might only make things more confusing. Why not let the issue come to us instead of rushing out to meet it? We weren't willing to talk about the wonderful benefits of users sharing their data with us, because we weren't willing to share any information about how we used that data. If we couldn't say something nice, why say anything at all?

That didn't stop me from assuming the most aggressive possible stance when it came to communicating with users about privacy each time a new product launched. I repeated the Yada Yada story to every Googler who would listen, though I found few converts to my vision of users making fully informed decisions about the data they shared with us. Most engineers felt the tradeoff was too high. If users came to Google looking for information about online privacy, they figured, we would help them the way we always did—by sending them somewhere else for answers.

Let the Good Times Scroll

Larry refused to talk directly to users about cookies and log files, and he tried to keep the public from getting curious by minimizing their exposure to the data we collected. He wasn't always successful.

For example, a display of "real time" Google search queries crawled across a video monitor suspended over the receptionist's desk in our lobby. I sometimes sat on the red couch and watched to find out what the world was looking for. The terms scrolled by silently in a steady stream:

new employment in Montana

scheduled zip backup

greeting cards free

nervous system

lynyrd skynyrd tabliature Tuesday

datura metal

tamron lense 500mm

mode chip for playstation

the bone collector

singles chat

Journalists who came to Google stood in the lobby mesmerized by this peek into the global gestalt and