Working In Tech

On his personal Medium blog, Homebrew partner Hunter Walk shares perspective for tech workers who worry about what it means to grow older in an industry that has a certain “incorrect (and sometimes illegal when it plays a role in hiring) age bias.”

While there was certainly a fair amount of roasting over the newfound visual confusion created by the rebrand, on the whole, the backlash was short-lived and met with more ambivalence than vitriol. My initial analysis shows that in the week following the new Gap logo’s debut, there were 93 tweets containing the words “Gap,” “logo,” and “sucks,” compared to just four such tweets for Gmail over the same time period.

For knock-off or budget devices, the same is rarely true. These open up a bigger risk of exposing your personal data, tracking your movements, or otherwise compromising your privacy. Be especially careful with these devices — especially if you’re giving them to a non-tech-savvy family member who might have trouble understanding how to properly configure their privacy settings.

With some research, an awareness of the importance of security, and open lines of communication, we can all make it through this holiday season with our privacy intact. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get on the waitlist for a Ring Always Home Cam. With a compelling-enough gadget, there’s always room for a privacy compromise.

With devices from large companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google, the biggest risk is usually that a gadget will feed these companies data, which they often use to target ads. Short of occasional breaches, most large companies’ systems are secure, many use solid security technologies like two-factor authentication, and most have well-designed, well-implemented privacy policies.

With some research, an awareness of the importance of security, and open lines of communication, we can all make it through this holiday season with our privacy intact. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get on the waitlist for a Ring Always Home Cam. With a compelling-enough gadget, there’s always room for a privacy compromise.

If possible, offer your loved ones safer alternatives to higher-risk tech gadgets. Mozilla says, for example, that Eufy’s device is a more private alternative for people who absolutely must have a video doorbell. And you can likely write code that transforms a comparatively safe Spero into a robot for remotely interacting with your dog, instead of buying a less private device like the Dogness.

So Google has dodged the online pitchforks and torches. But what, then, to make of this Google Workspace redesign? The name “Workspace” is interesting in that, according to Google’s own Ngram data, the word peaked in use a decade ago, and its rate of appearance in U.S. trademarks has stayed at a generally low level.

But in this era of remote work, which no longer occurs in a geographic place, but in a virtual space, claiming the name “Workspace” is an appropriate banner for Google to march under as it fights an increasingly higher-stakes battle on the work-from-home front against such competitors as Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft 365 and Teams.

If you’re looking to purchase a gadget for someone you care about this holiday season, start by doing some research into its privacy implications. Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included blog is a great place to start. Make sure that the company behind the device has a clear privacy policy, especially if the device comes with a camera, microphone, or location-tracking functions.

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mazon actually did periodic “check-ins,” to ensure that their investments were actually profitable — i.e. they were always a super financially disciplined organization driven by FCF and ROIC, but Bezos liked to “check-in” every so often to make sure that their investments were rational investments with a high ROIC that drove FCF. They did these check-ins regularly, most notably in 2004 and 2009, and showed that they could generate significant FCF margins while still growing rapidly. Yet long after these “check-ins,” retail executives continued to believe Amazon was unprofitable. I vividly remember a well regarded retail CEO explaining in 2012 that e-commerce was unprofitable based on Amazon’s headline profitability numbers. At that point, it should have been obvious to even casual observers that Amazon’s US e-commerce business was consistently running between mid single digit to low double digit EBIT margins and funding their international expansion.

In all seriousness, you’re probably looking to protect your loved ones’ privacy this holiday season, not invade it. As Mozilla’s researchers point out, today’s tech gadgets can make it hard to strike the right balance between giving a loved one a cool new device and inadvertently exposing them to privacy risks they may not understand.

As a company becomes more familiar to consumers, it can simplify its logo, stripping out the more literal design elements in favor of a purer symbol of the brand, like the Cheshire Cat’s body fading away to leave only its smile.

Overall, when giving tech-enabled gifts, it can help tremendously to have a conversation with your loved ones about privacy. You can share resources like Mozilla’s guide so they can make their own decision about whether to use the device you’ve given them, based on their own comfort level. Privacy is highly personal — always make clear that you won’t be offended if they return the device for privacy reasons.

Even when it comes to somewhat ephemeral matters of creativity in design, the company is dedicated to a philosophy of fastidious decision-making based on rigorous testing. Google, after all, famously evaluated 41 shades of blue to see which would best prompt users to click links and revamped its logo by moving the lowercase “g” one pixel to the right and the “l” one pixel right and one pixel down. So it was not surprising to learn that the decision to jettison the Gmail envelope was informed by “regular user testing and feedback” that showed that “the logo’s long-standing envelope element wasn’t as critical to the design as [Google] had anticipated.”