from Hacker News

Ask HN: How much more is there to Google the company than meets the eye?

by mtowle on 6/7/13, 2:58 AM with 3 comments

How do you think they compare to defense contractors, et al. in terms of secret initiatives, black box projects, whatever?

Asking due to Assange-Schmidt transcript and the Assange NYT op-ed, but might prefer answers which avoid Assange and focus on Google (or MS or whoever).

  • by mcintyre1994 on 6/7/13, 11:49 AM

    They'll give the government whatever they like, just like all the other mentioned companies. Collecting more data is pretty much their business goal, so they're pretty well aligned already. I doubt they do anything special exclusively to help the NSA though, if the data's useful they'd be collecting it for themselves anyway.

  • by nostrademons on 6/7/13, 11:50 PM

    You should probably assume that with any large corporation you are privy to about 0.01% of what goes on there.

    (Of course, that doesn't mean that the remaining 99.99% is evil. Actually, your assumptions about what's going on with stuff that you don't know about says a lot about yourself as a person.)