How Google spent 15 years creating a culture of concealment

No, please stop with this false equivalence. People get rights and benefit of the doubt. Corporations do not.

It's not false equivalence, we were talking about communications between people. Corporations don't write emails, people do. A corporation, big or small, is just a legal way of definining the property of people, and the people who work for it (who may or may not also own some of it) are people. Communications between them are communications between people.

What they're saying is that people deserve privacy, unless what they're doing has some relationship to making money, in which case they do not.

The flaw that is limiting your thinking and understanding is companies don’t do things, only people can do things. Until you start seeing companies as a group of people, you can’t understand and predict how a “company” will act and behave. When a sales person is selling a product, it is a person who is acting, they may follow some policies, but another person made those policies. You need to expand your thinking into the individual people.

I mean yes and no...

But it's a vague nebula. Stuff like whistleblower protections, retention laws, 'piercing the corporate veil'....

> People get rights and benefit of the doubt. Corporations do not.

Corporations are just groups of people. Unless you're accusing a company of being ran by AGI.

Except it actually is a false equivalence.

Suppose a group of people agree amongst themselves to work together to produce and sell a good or service.

Are these people entitled to the rights you're talking about? They're people, so I think you must say that they are.

OTOH, to all intents and purposes these people are behaving like a corporation. How can it be that corporations are denied those rights, but groups of people that behave exactly like corporations -- that are corporations, in all but name -- are entitled to them?

There are lots of vague things, the idea that if something you said could be used against you in court you must have done something wrong (the only thing to which I was responding) is not one. Prosecutors are just as overzealous in civil cases as legal. Innocent things said at work can be used against someone just as well as ones said at home and in all the same ways and for all the same reasons.

What’s the famous Cardinal Richeleu quote?

I responded only because “corporations bad” is a mind virus deeply inculcated in a lot of people here, but those same people mostly would never think that just because something you said could be used against you in court that you did something either morally wrong or illegal. I wanted people to see the effect the mind virus had on their thinking.

Did anyone? No idea, probably not.

But it’s not a false equivalence at all, all the same reasoning applies whether your communication was at the office or your house, and whether it was about your dog or your code.

There are very many non-nefarious, completely legal reasons one might not want a work communication to be visible down the line, just as with personal. If someone can’t see that their thinking is cloudy and I bet they experience cognitive dissonance.

I use this all the time. People say “the government wants…” or “Republicans did…” (you can pretty much play this like mad libs) and I say “wait, the government is an organization comprised of people, who specifically wants that?” And then they say {insert other nebulous group here} and I point out the same thing.

And then either they give up out of frustration and think I’m dissembling or they start to think about the problem differently.

Because corporations are bad that’s why!

Of course we're talking about communications between people, but the record of these communications is used to find fault with the company, usually, not with the individual people. I think that's a really important distinction.

So I agree with the person who said this was a false equivalence.

Corporations exist at the pleasure of the people; we can and should impose any and all requirements and restrictions on them necessary to ensure they do not amass too much power and act to the detriment of regular citizens. We've failed in that, and we see the negative consequences of that daily.

> Innocent things said at work can be used against someone

No, they can be used against the corporation. And that's totally fine and proper.

> There are very many non-nefarious, completely legal reasons one might not want a work communication to be visible down the line, just as with personal. If someone can’t see that their thinking is cloudy and I bet they experience cognitive dissonance.

No cognitive dissonance here. I just don't consider private/personal speech to be the same thing as work-related speech. I think the former should be protected from prying eyes (including the government) with as much zeal as we can muster. But the latter? No, there is no reason or need to hold that stuff sacred, and many reasons related to accountability to ensure it's recorded and available for legal challenges.

Yes, corporations are groups of people, but they are also legal entities that have been given certain rights, responsibilities, and restrictions.

On top of that, we usually consider the corporate entity legally liable for thinga the people do in the name of the corporation. That doesn't come from "just a group of people". That comes from a specific legal structure we've decided on as a society.