Thread

Google breaks promise to provide 10 years of updates to Chromebooks

355 points · 156 comments · speckx

jezzamon · 1790860299 · focus · HN ↗
Discussed a lot here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49893653">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49893653
Seems to be more reasonable than this title suggests?
Some comments: "So they have introduced a major change and said any older Chromebooks bought going forward will only get 8. So its not a retrospective reduction for existing customers." (Edit: actually I think this comment is wrong, if you bought a Chromebook 1 year ago, you'd only get 9 years of ChromeOS updates)
"From my understanding of the article, it sounds like ChromeOS support is getting pared back for those devices, but the devices themselves should still be supported, albeit via a (planned but not yet in existence) migration path to GooglebookOS."
1. hedora · 1790860980 · focus · HN ↗
  These devices are usually bought on contract, with lots of lock in.
  In particular, there are lots of schools getting screwed over financially. Maybe they’ll switch vendors, or use the money for education. Chromebook spending has a strong negative correlation with educational performance.
  As a parent, I am supposed to have control over my kids’ personal information, but the schools firehose all the most sensitive kids’ info they have to an unlawful marketing firm that I do not trust. How do I opt out?
  1. eitally · 1790862046 · focus · HN ↗
    Education contracts do not allow Google to use customer data for advertising.
    Scubabear68 · 1790866498 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you really think the engineering teams pour over those contracts when implementing new features?
    Every single time? I sincerely doubt it.
    Whatever logical business firewalls Google has between orgs for this kind of purpose seems pretty frail and thin from what I have seen reported.
    sulam · 1790868355 · focus · HN ↗
    This absolutely happens, there's a set of teams whose job it is to make sure it happens every time a system is going to be handling customer data. It's not left to the engineers to remember to do so.
    altmanaltman · 1790868587 · focus · HN ↗
    They don't even need to know how to read the contract. But its not like engineers can ship whatever they want at a company the size of google.
    So my question is, what have you seen reported and what makes you doubt it?
    hn_go_brrrrr · 1790868632 · focus · HN ↗
    Tell me you've never worked at Google without telling me you've never worked at Google.
    There are a lot of complaints you can legitimately levy, but "Google doesn't have enough of a compliance org to ensure eng behaves." is not one of them.
    redwall_hp · 1790871623 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, absolutely. Every microservice where I work is architecturally scrutinized by multiple groups over things like PCI, GDPR and SOX, with major features requiring review. And then third party auditors get to review stuff occasionally. PII is radioactive and PCI data is hard siloed.
    If you work at a company that deals with education or HIPAA stuff, there's going to be even more of that.
    Presumably Google aren't morons or criminals.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.