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Glad to be here on social.coop. I’ve long been attracted to the co-op ideal, and looking forward to seeing how it works.
My socialist, anti-nationalist politics were formed growing up in working-class Dublin, sickened by the carnage from both sides in Northern Ireland’s “Troubles”.
I’m fighting the fight for privacy within a big-tech company in San Francisco, leading a team building user-interface changes that give people more transparency and control over their personal data.
@eob nice to meet you on Mastodon. That's a nice fight to be a part of, the fight for privacy. How does your team publish their user-interface work?
@resing We usually don't publish anything; we just release our features. And unfortunately I can only talk about things that have been announced.
The last big thing we did announce was a change in Europe where we improved the cookie consent dialog to allow rejection of all non-essential uses of cookies with a single click of a "Reject All" button on the initial screen.
But our team is working on a lot of other worldwide privacy-enhancing changes.
@eob very interesting. How did you improve the cookie consent dialog? I like the "Reject all" option!
@resing Well, in addition to the "reject all", we made it the dialog super fast, so that it appears instantly overlaying the search results, and disappears instantly as soon as you click either accept or reject.
Though actually there was even more work invisibly on the backend in the cookie-serving infrastructure, and making sure we didn't do anything non-essential with cookies when the user rejects.
@eob this sounds great. Sorry I'm still confused. Your team builds user-interface changes and releases features like this super-fast dialog. Where? How? I'm missing something, but I'm not sure what.
@resing The cookie consent feature is only visible if you're in Europe (or VPNed into Europe) and do a Google search in a brand-new browser session that's not signed in to Google, like for example if you open a new incognito/private browser window and search for something.
These cookie consents are super annoying to Europeans and we're generally trying to make them less annoying.
@resing a more interesting feature that we're working on is "quick delete" of the last 15 minutes of your search history.
@eob so you work as a contractor to Google? Just trying to connect what your saying with what I'm seeing.
@resing Oh sorry, I just realized I was a bit obscure about where I work in the original post in this thread. I'm a full time employee there, a software engineering manager leading a "Trust Experience" team which handles compliance features (like cookie consent) but also adds new features that give users agency in the management of their privacy and safety.
@eob ah. That makes everything more clear. If you’d add that to you bio it might help others (or me in the future after I forget.) I’m curious, does Google have social media guidelines for employees. For example, at Microsoft, ours require making it clear we work at Microsoft when talking about Microsoft or our work there b