I would certainly be fearful of providing an honest review of a paper championed by such a powerful figure at Google who could get me fired and unemployable with a tweet. Revealing the reviewers and throwing them under the bus would have been the end of any honest reviewing at Google. Dean made the right move here.

He took one for the team, kept them safe.

> A manager in ethics shouldn’t ask Google to break the law by not providing confidientality that was requested.

It is not implied anywhere that the reviewers requested confidentiality. It is certainly not implied that Google would be violating the law to rescind that confidentiality (and, to be clear: they almost certainly would not be).

I think it’s fairly strongly implied, particularly due to the fact that nobody would let her have possession of the written feedback. It sounds to me like there was concern that if she was provided with the written feedback she would be able to de-blind the reviewers via close analysis of the writing itself. Why else would management refuse to share the written feedback, considering that (a) they were willing to share the content, just not the specific writing itself and (b) the feedback doesn’t seem to have been in and of itself particularly noteworthy?

My take is that the reviewers wanted to be able to express some mundane criticisms about the quality of the work without having to expose their identity to a person with a public reputation of unusual hostility.

The fact that she was able to hear the feedback but specifically not allowed to walk off with a written copy of it is what makes me think there was concern that she would try to discover the identities of the reviewers. That and the fact that she noted specifically in her writeup that she was told the feedback had come via HR.

You are right, it's not in the article. It was published by Timnit:

https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withering-email-that-got-a...

But you are not right about privileged and confidential : it limits what Google can do legally.

,,Privileged and confidential communication is the interaction between two parties having a legally protected, private relationship.''

Timnit was presented with a privileged and confidential document. That binds her from sharing the information in the document with others. It has nothing to do with the authors of the document or the confidentiality of their identities.

And importantly, in the context of a company like Google, an executive (like jeff Dean) likely has the authority to "unprivilge" said contents, whatever they are.

,,Have you ever heard of someone getting “feedback” on a paper through a privileged and confidential document to HR? ''

To me it sounds like the person who submitted the feedback to HR was using privileged and confidential communication.

And yes, Jeff Dean has the authority, but the HR who got the feedback doesn't.

Given that Timnit ostensibly does not know who the people who gave the feedback, nor how they did so, and elsewhere notes that she was able to see the feedback, but was told she couldn't share it because it was privileged, can you explain how you reach this conclusion instead of that "to" was a typo in a tweet and instead should have been "via" or similar.