David

Drummond from Google is Documented@Davos Transcript Documented@ Davos 2012 NICK BILTON: I'm here at Documented@Davos with David Drummond, who is the chief legal officer for Google and a senior vice president. And what does that even mean, David? DAVID DRUMMOND: Yes. A little complicated and unclear. Chief legal officer means what it means. I'm the chief legal guy, lawyer guy at the company. But I also oversee government relations and public policy teams around the world, our communications PR teams, M&A-- that's our acquisitions team. And also started up a couple years ago Google Ventures, which is our venture capital arm, which I also oversee. So working on a few things. NICK BILTON: So how long have you been at Google? DAVID DRUMMOND: 10 years I've been at the company. I go back to the very beginnings. I was a partner in a law firm in Silicon Valley-- Wilson Sonsini, which some of your folks seeing this probably know. And I got a call from another client in the firm who said, hey, there are these two guys at Stanford who had built a search engine and they're going around and thinking about starting a company and need a lawyer to help them set it up. NICK BILTON: Did you have to go live in the dorm room with them. DAVID DRUMMOND: No, I did not, thankfully. But we did a fair amount of driving around Stanford to get all this going. This was in 1998, so I actually helped them set up the company. NICK BILTON: So what are you doing at Davos, that's from a Google standpoint? DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, Google, we're global. We have an impact. We are part of the internet, which is, of course, changing the world. And it's a good place for us to be to understand what's going on, to connect with other folks in industry, and clearly folks in government. It saves me a fair amount of travel, actually to come here, because I can meet with lots of government officials who are really interested in what Google's up to and what the internet is doing. And I can meet with them here. NICK BILTON: So one of the things that happened this week was there's the EU data privacy directive that's been floated [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE] actually. And although it's exclusive to companies in Europe, it would affect you guys drastically, right?

DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, it would affect us, clearly, because we're here in Europe. And it's obviously one of the places-- one of our biggest and most important markets. And we have lots of people here. So clearly affects us. And so let me say, we're happy about what they're doing to streamline and simplify this whole privacy sort of regulatory infrastructure. NICK BILTON: Because right now there's 27 different rules that each apply-- DAVID DRUMMOND: Right, each member state has in its own-- not just the different implementations of the EUI privacy directives, but also sort of the whole different processes and different people you have to talk to. So the idea that you can designate one data protection authority that you work with, where you're sort of based, which in our case is Ireland, we think is really good. NICK BILTON: But one of the things that they're presenting is the ability that people would have to be able to-- companies would have to allow people to be able to remove their data from a company to be able to be forgotten online. How would you even implement that? DAVID DRUMMOND: Yeah, that's one of things that I think is going to require a lot more discussion, is try to figure out what this really means, because it's one thing-- NICK BILTON: And so, are you guys pushing back on it? DAVID DRUMMOND: I think that the notion of right to be forgotten that is so broad that it threatens public discourse and the public record, and the historical record. It's a problem, right? We've always had an internal policy at Google that goes back to the early days of web searches, if you're a webmaster, you can decide to tell us not to crawl your site if you've posted content. We operated the old-- with Google Groups-- was the old bulletin board. And if you had a post up there and you decided to pull it down, you can pull it down. So it's sort of, you control that. But if someone else, say, commented on your post, and it became part of a discourse, a conversation-- if someone's quoting you and now in today's parlance is following that and is adding to the discussion, I think that's really problematic. So we have to figure out whether we really need to talk about right to be forgotten or are we talking about data portability, which is a related concept, but not necessarily the same. In other words, you can move your information around. So I think there's some distinctions that we need to make. And to do this in a narrow way that respects this tradition in Europe, but also doesn't squelch discourse on the web. NICK BILTON: Well, but at the same time, I understand what you're saying about being able to say to a webmaster, don't crawl our site. But a lot of times people don't

have control over the things that are on these sites. If Gawker, for example, writes something negative about you, you don't have control over that. And it shows up in Google. So how would you propose that you guys find a solution to that beyond being able to remove the data completely? DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, again, I think even as it is written, I think the concept is not that you can pull down things that are written about you, necessarily. Because that's just kind of censorship where you're being able to censor other people. But I think if you're out there contributing with your own content, the notion is you can decide. I wanted to be open to the world with all of my thoughts before. I've changed my mind. I want to pull that back. And so the questions is just if, once it becomes intertwined with the expression of lots of other people, what do you do? And that's a challenge for this legislation. There's no question. And a lot of us are concerned. NICK BILTON: So at Davos, have you seen a lot of themes around privacy and have you had questions around this, around the EU directive? DAVID DRUMMOND: Well, I think it's one of the topics for discussion, clearly. It's sort of the timing was interesting. While not engineered at all, that we sort of revamped our privacy policies. And I think the thing that's underlying both strands-- and if you talk to Commissioner Reding and I know she's got a couple panels. She'll be talking about this later in the week-- is this notion of well, OK, privacy's important and has to be protected online, but we're now realizing more the power of this data. Like what it can do for the social good, right? In terms of building better products that do things for people, that they care about, and that are interesting. And so in terms of an economic value, in terms of just a public utility and user happiness, there's lots of things you can do to create value if you have the data and you can combine it in interesting ways. Not just what Google does, but with what other people do. And then you set rules. The point is that if you're going to regulate-- and we need to have regulation to make sure there are rules of the road-- you don't want to do it by having edicts that ban certain practices, and say thou shalt not do x. Because that's the kind of thing that's going to squelch innovation. NICK BILTON: But there has to be a balance in the middle, without a doubt. Because we've seen several instances where things have gone wrong. And even with Google, with Buzz and so on. So leading to that, you've had a lot of blowback from the Google+ integration into Google Search recently. And Twitter and Facebook are unhappy, to say the least. Were you expecting this? Did you have any idea this was going to happen? DAVID DRUMMOND: It's not an enormous surprise that those two companies, in particular, are upset. But the point here is, as we said when we launched it, this is about making search better. This is about improving the user experience. Google is not just about, back in the old days of search, it's 10 blue links, right? And it just goes

out and searches the web and finds the best information. We don't have to be limited to that. A search engine should know a lot more. It should be delivering you results that are about you and that matter to you. And that's going to mean things that your friends, places, people that are important to you. And it should be able to know that and to integrate it in. And to do it in a way that's interactive. So if I get this link that shows me a social graph, or groups of people that are interesting, I should be able to instantly interact with them and all that kind of thing. So it requires the social signals and the graphics created, in the case of Google+, or whether it's Twitter or Facebook, wherever the data comes from. There does require a level of integration that's not trivial to do that. And so, as we've said, we once had Twitter data and Facebook in our search. NICK BILTON: But you still do. DAVID DRUMMOND: And obviously, we still crawl whatever is exposed. But those companies have not been interested in allowing us to have access to the data that would allow us to do the kinds of things we do in Search Plus Your World. And we're happy to talk to them about doing it. But we're not going to sort of not do something that we actually think is really important for us to do to improve the user experience. NICK BILTON: One of the things-- an example that Twitter gave, was if you search for WWF, for example, the wrestling organization, and right now the Google+ page shows up on top even though it has a tenth of the followers that they Twitter-- DAVID DRUMMOND: Oh, this is going to evolve. And so you can take little snapshots about celebrities and well known-- NICK BILTON: I mean, I've done it with the New York Times. DAVID DRUMMOND: Sure. Again, but my guess is that if you actually starting doing it about people you know who maybe aren't famous, it's a lot different because you're now able to interact with those people immediately and so forth. So in the following cases, we understand how people are saying, well, why don't you just have the Twitter thing up there? Well, again, we don't have the level of data that allows us to do the kinds of things we're actually trying to do with them. And so, again, we're not going to not do it because of that. And so I think this is going to evolve. This is the first steps of what this is all going to look like. And the idea that somehow when you can immediately toggle, go back to the old way anyway, that this is some kind of evil thing to keep--

NICK BILTON: No, I'm not saying it's an evil thing. I question, I mean, it's putting Twitter and everything aside. You said that the whole goal of this is to make search a better experience. If I search for the New York Times, the Google+ New York Times shows up above the New York Times website in the search results. DAVID DRUMMOND: The New York Times website is certainly there. You're going to get it. NICK BILTON: But it's not the top thing. And if you're looking for a better search experience, I would say that that-- DAVID DRUMMOND: I'm sure that-- I don't have the search in front of me, but we're not going to do things that are going to-- we've always been about search quality. We believe this is going to increase search quality overall. And I think it's easy to take snapshots in individual cases right now and to make arguments about it. NICK BILTON: So you see it all changing? DAVID DRUMMOND: But I think this is an evolution. There are lots of other services that we want the signals from, too, that we're going to integrate. And I think that over time, people will understand better that this is making search overall better in trying to get the signals that are going to make it relevant to-- A lot of people, I think, have the mindset of search is kind of the same for everybody. It's just the broad web. NICK BILTON: Oh no, I don't think that's the case. DAVID DRUMMOND: But there's a vision of that of what Google has always been that I think makes it hard for people to understand where we're headed. NICK BILTON: I think social search is different for different people. Some people use Twitter more, Facebook, Google+, things like that. DAVID DRUMMOND: That's right. And over time we should be able to understand that. We can't do it when people won't give us the data. NICK BILTON: So how much of this do you think is a response to the pressure of Facebook right now, and the social things that they're doing? DAVID DRUMMOND: I think all this is about us making search better. We've known for a long time that we've needed to incorporate those kind of signals about people that you care about, your friends, your relatives, all those kinds of things. And that's what we're doing. Google+ is better understood as making Google social, understanding those relationships, as opposed to some kind of competitive separate service.

NICK BILTON: So as the legal counsel that's been there for 10 years, do you look back at some of the things that have happened with Buzz and things like that, do you see those as mistakes? Are there things that you regret as far as data privacy and things that you've done? DAVID DRUMMOND: Oh, we've made our mistakes. We've made our share of mistakes like everybody. They're well documented and we talk about them. And we learn from them. And if you look at what we're doing with this privacy launch, which really isn't about changing really anything that we're doing. And certainly isn't about disclosing more of your information to the public, but just telling you what we're going forward, and making it more simple. If you look at how we're notifying people, I think it's kind of unprecedented for a company to go out and say, in the ways that we are doing it-- homepage. Everyone telling you this is about our privacy. It's not the usual yada yada. This is important. And I think that we've learned over time that those are the kinds of things that you need to do. And we're putting those things into practice. So we've made mistakes in various areas, but we actually feel like we learn from them. NICK BILTON: Can you tell me a little bit about the new privacy policy that Google's pushing forth? DAVID DRUMMOND: Yeah, the idea is just that we've had-- the way sort of Google developed, lots of different products and they all have their own privacy policy or privacy notice. And it got to the point where, from a user perspective, you can't even figure it out, what really is going on. And also, it created the implication that-- it made it hard to share across the different services. Which really are the features of Google, as opposed to standalone products. And again, in the same vein as Search Plus Your World, what we're trying to do is to make the product much better. And using the signals we have from your use of different products can improve all the products. And so we wanted to be clear with people that that's the direction we're going in to improve Google. And we wanted to be transparent about it, and notify people, make it clear. And give them control over what those settings are going to be. Give them the ability to take the data out if they want to. So that's really what this is all about. It's about sort of the Google of the future. And we wanted to be very clear with users about where we're headed. NICK BILTON: So does the Google of the future allow me to have more control over my data? To be able to go in and know what you're doing with it or be able to remove things and so on? DAVID DRUMMOND: Yeah, I think so. We already currently have through our dashboard and the ads preference manager, we tell people far more about the data we have and what we're doing, and the ability to turn things off and so forth, than pretty much any other company out there. And so we're going to continue that and

give the user that kind of control. Also data portability and being able to it to take your data out. Those are our core principles that we'll continue to have. NICK BILTON: When Google first started, there was this mantra of don't be evil. Do you think that Google might be a little bit too big not to be evil sometimes? DAVID DRUMMOND: I don't know about that. We still aspire to that. And I think we live it. That doesn't mean you don't make mistakes. To some extent, by having that saying, it's a high bar. But we also open ourselves up to any time we make a mistake or someone thinks we've made a mistake, then they can apply the evil sort of label to it. I think it's important for us to have that viewpoint, because it does continue to cause us to look at things and to do things. It reflects the focus on the user. That's really what we're all about. That's why we're doing this. And there could be things that would lead to more short term financial gain, or might be easier, and in the absence of a clear mindset that you might be tempted to do. But I think that that really keeps us, [? concerts ?] our focus. And even if we do make mistakes from time to time, which we do, I think we think it's really important for us to continue with that mindset and that aspiration. And even as a big company, we think it's doable. We think it's possible. NICK BILTON: Cool. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. And I hope you enjoy Davos. DAVID DRUMMOND: Yeah. You too. NICK BILTON: Thanks. DAVID DRUMMOND: Thank you.