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Google provides colorful bicycles for its Mountain View area employees to ride. But hundreds of these bicycles go missing every week, and some have been found tossed in a local creek:
"The disappearances often aren't the work of ordinary thieves, however. Many residents of Mountain View, a city of 80,000 that has effectively become Google's company town, see the employee perk as a community service," the Wall Street Journal reported.
And for the company, here's one Google bike use case that's got to burn a little: 68-year-old Sharon Veach told the newspaper that she sometimes uses one of the bicycles as part of her commute: to the offices of Google's arch foe, Oracle. Google doesn't really want non-Googlers using the bikes, "but it's OK if you do," Veach explained.
Google has hired 30 contractors using five vans to recover lost and stolen bikes, about a third of which are equipped with GPS trackers. The teams carry waders and grappling hooks for pulling bikes out of creeks.
The company can't even confront people who appear to have stolen their bikes:
Ensuring that only company workers are riding the "Gbikes" is not particularly straightforward: some Googlers don't exactly fit the stereotype of the Silicon Valley techie. Company transportation executive Jeral Poskey told the paper he once took action when he saw what appeared to be a homeless woman on a commandeered Google bike. "If I could describe her, you would agree with me," Poskey said. "She looked all panicked, and then she showed me her Google badge."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Monday January 08 2018, @11:07AM (15 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday January 08 2018, @11:56AM (4 children)
I guess that's the crux of it.
It's still a failure to honour ownership rights, and it imposes a real cost on the owner, but it doesn't permanently deprive the owner of the possession the way ordinary theft does.
Piracy (or, as cutlass-wielding SN pedants will insist upon, copyright infringement of a work for immediate personal gain), and using a train without a ticket, are other such 'halfway sorta thefts'.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @12:26PM (1 child)
"Piracy (or, as cutlass-wielding SN pedants will insist upon, copyright infringement of a work for immediate personal gain), and using a train without a ticket, are other such 'halfway sorta thefts'."
Your analagy is flawed still. A person riding a train for free is taking up space a paying customer could have taken. There's a real limit on how many sacks of water you can fit on there. A downloaded mp3 doesn't stop every other willing customer from buying their own mp3 from the limitless supply of ones and zeros.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Wootery on Monday January 08 2018, @03:24PM
As if on cue...
In your best David Attenborough whisper, if you please:
Note how the pedant is careful to imply that there is no analogy whatsoever to be drawn between copyright infringement, and conventional theft. To concede any such, would be the end of the pedant. That analogies are by definition inexact, is apparently of no consequence. One could just as easily nitpick the train-riding analogy, of course, but predictably, that analogy goes unchallenged.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday January 08 2018, @02:39PM (1 child)
I disagree. IF there's any failure at all here, it's a failure of google to assert said rights. But it sounds like that was done deliberately, and is not a 'failure' either.
Google introduced these things all smiles and sunshine, 'our contribution' and I'm pretty sure at some point they've explicitly said it's fine for everyone in the area to use them, if not they've certainly failed to communicate otherwise. So at this point anyone *using* (but not abusing) the bikes can certainly claim a good faith belief it was allowed, and harm is de minimis.
The folks dumping them in the creek are a different matter though.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday January 08 2018, @03:27PM
If they really did tell the community that the bikes may be used by anyone, then I agree that Google don't get complain when people take them up on it making legitimate use of the bikes. I'm not convinced Google ever said any such thing, though.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @03:16PM (5 children)
"Theft of service" vs. "conventional theft"? Really!? How were you raised? Stealing is stealing. If it's not yours or you're not supposed to have access to it/use it, it's stealing. Plain and simple.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday January 08 2018, @03:25PM (3 children)
It's not stealing if you don't keep it.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @04:50PM (2 children)
Ok, when someone empties out your bank account and spends every cent - they didn't keep it. What's that?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday January 08 2018, @06:39PM
That's a stupid analogy because the money is now in the hands of other people, and hard to retrieve.
A better analogy is someone coming into your unlocked garage, getting in your car that you left the keys in, and driving away, and then parking it three blocks away and leaving it there. Technically, they've "stolen" the car, but they didn't do much with it, but they've caused you a big inconvenience because now you need to go find it and retrieve it. But it's not nearly as bad as if they had taken it to a chop-shop. It is still theft though.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday January 08 2018, @08:02PM
Plus the whole thing where apparently even Google itself doesn't consider borrowing them without permission to be theft.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Touché) by Wootery on Monday January 08 2018, @03:30PM
See where he used the word 'theft' inside 'theft of service'?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Monday January 08 2018, @03:57PM (3 children)
I used to work at SGI, who was the first (in that area) to have bikes like that.
SGI had all those buildings at shoreline and we often had meetings at diff sites, so we'd hop onto a bike, ride to the meeting and ride back when done.
SGI was a cool company with an honest product. I was proud to work for them.
google - not so much. never worked for them, but their whole purpose is ADVERTISING and I just can't get behind that. the other 'benefits' from google don't make up for the evil that google has become.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday January 08 2018, @06:47PM (1 child)
SGI was a cool company with an honest product. I was proud to work for them.
google - not so much. never worked for them, but their whole purpose is ADVERTISING
Let this be a lesson to you. Cool companies with honest products don't last.
I think a relevant bit of wisdom is the sage words, "Evil will always prevail because good is dumb."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @07:28PM
You need competent and honest leadership too! [theregister.co.uk]
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday January 09 2018, @05:51AM
Google's whole purpose, as I see it, is to do crazy stuff. Advertising is just a means to fund that. Things like AlphaGo, Guetzli (35% better JPEG compressor), Maps, Earth, Tensorflow, Go, Loon, Wing, Translate, Search, Waymo are all funded by the ads money printing machine. What, you thought cutting edge research was free? Project Zero, which uncovered the recent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, among many many other security issues? Also funded by Google's ads.
You're welcome to have an opinion about whether all of those things are worth Google selling ads targeted with your data, of course.
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