I ask because after a lot of strong talk about security, I read Google backtracks on Android 5.0 default encryption by Kevin C. Tofel, to suggest that Google is backing off its promise of encryption by default. Kevin has the details but the changing requirement is due to performance issues, or so they say.
But don’t you think Google engineers, the same type of engineers who now routinely beat Atari games with an AI, knew there would be a performance hit from default encryption? Isn’t it little late in the game to claim that “performance” issues took you by surprise?
The other odd bit of news on Google was Google performs U-turn on Blogger smut rule by Lee Munson.
From the post:
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However, many of the people who use the service to publish explicit content complained that Blogger was a means of expressing themselves. Now, it seems like Google has listened to them.The company will instead focus its attention on preventing the distribution of commercial porn, illegal content and videos and images that have been published without the consent of any persons featured within them.
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You have to wonder if Google is getting bad results from machine learning algorithms for business strategies or if they are ignoring the machine learning algorithms?
After hosting porn (a/ka/a personal “expression”) for more than a decade, what host would not expect massive pushback from changes to the rules? Should be easy enough to discover how many “expression” accounts exist on blogger.
Focusing on illegal content or publications without consent makes sense because there is corporate liability that follows notice of its presence. But that’s nothing new.
With the election cycle about to begin, the term flip-flop comes to mind.
Thoughts on who at Google has that much clout?