The interesting ramifications from this are going to be at Apple. Their corporate secrecy is well known in the industry - employees aren't even supposed to tell outsiders what department they work in, never mind small potatoes like Google employees agreed to that they're getting $20 for.
Mostly just trying to avoid an awkward gotcha moment where someone digs through my comment history, finds a reference to my employer, and accuses me of some sort of shilling.
I've seen it happen to other people and IMO it's better to go with the lame disclaimer.
> Full disclosure, am googler, opinions are my own, etc etc
> From the article it sounds like it's actually $42-$79 that most of us didn't have to fight particularly hard for
Lots of litigation most of us aren't even aware of. Early this year, I came across a Google class-action relating to "the inclusion of Google search queries in referrer headers":
"In the end, Google will pay out only $27 million, a drop in the bucket for such a titanic company."
The article compares that payout against the $20,000 million Alphabet profited just last quarter, a significant difference considering that the lawsuit took ~28 quarters to generate this outcome.
Does anyone think the confidentiality clauses were pivotal in generating that scale of profit? Would Google or Alphabet be significantly poorer if their employees had been suddenly unburdened of the confidentiality clauses back in 2016?
Put another way, is it possible these actions led to a >$27m increase in profits? That's a 0.1% increase for that quarter, so maybe not so far fetched. If so then it was financially advantageous to break the law.
