Monthly Archives: February 2022

Popular Google software engineer Anthony D. Mays leaves the search giant to pursue diversity and inclusion full-time.

Anthony D. Mays

The year after Anthony D. Mays joined Google as a software engineer in 2013, the company publicly released its diversity numbers for the first time. He knew the numbers were likely low, but he didn't realize just how low.

When he found out only 1% of technology roles included Black people, Mays made it his personal mission to help grow that number while working at Google. Now, after several years of seeing slow-moving progress within Google and the tech industry at large, Mays is branching out on his own, starting a consulting firm that aims to help both companies and employees reach more representation.

When Mays joined Google in 2013, he received a personal welcome call from the company's human resources chief at the time, Lazlo Bock. "That was pretty special," Mays told CNBC in an interview.

The following year, the company became the first of many to release their diversity numbers, which showed a dismal 2% of full-time Google employees were Black and only 1% of technical roles were filled by Black employees. Shocked by the statistics, Mays felt a personal obligation to help those numbers grow.

To do that, began sharing his story of coming from an abusive home in Compton, California.

"Having come from the world of Compton to the world of Google and Silicon Valley for several years, it allows me the unique opportunity to build bridges in the way that others may not be able to."

He first shared his story in a company email that ended up going viral. Then, in 2018, he shared his experiences in a Buzzfeed video called "My Unlikely Path To Becoming The 1% At Google," which has racked up 5.3 million views. He also wrote an article, with Google's public relations team, he said, for Huffington Post called "Google Would Never Hire a Person Like Me," explaining how his environment and self-doubt almost kept him from applying for a job at Google.

"I was getting emails from people in and outside of the company that I'd never met," Mays said, adding that he was humbled by the response.

Mays, a full-time engineer at Google, was a key voice for company diversity in tech. Now, he wants to use what he's learned to increase representation.

Anthony Mays

Many told Mays he inspired them and made them feel seen and heard, he said. Google recruiters told him his coaching work helped get diverse applicants in the door and succeed during interviews, he said.

But becoming a key voice for DEI also came with setbacks: He had to juggle DEI work with being a full-time software engineer and says he sacrificed promotions due to the time spent on those initiatives.

Mays said he also experienced imposter syndrome.

"People were telling me I'm doing well, but I'm also keenly aware that in some people's minds, I'm the diversity hire," he said of is feelings early on. "So, early on, there was this sneaking suspicion that I have that I'm being treated differently because I'm a Black man working in tech. "

Part of the motivation for continuing his work, he explained, was "survivors' guilt," Mays said.

"I had a number of friends who were shot and killed when they were 18 and 19 years old," he said. "When you see that kind of tragedy and be so close to it, you start asking what made me so different that I deserved to escape and they didn't?"

But most of the motivation, he said, came from his faith and hope for equity among underrepresented workers. He said he feels a responsibility and passion for giving people a chance at more opportunities.

Mays, whose authentic communication and candor draw people, says he tries to be honest when asked what it's like to be a Black man at Google.

"I talk about how I had a good experience, but there are no guarantees, and I want us to be honest about that," he said. "There are people who've had horrible experiences, and I want to remind people that as much as I've enjoyed being at Google, things might go differently for you."

He also acknowledges the challenges he sees companies face when trying to implement new programs dedicated to diversity and inclusion. At Google, he said, he saw impactful diversity and inclusion programs that were either put on hold or changed in different direction.

"I don't know many companies who are working harder than Google to effect change; however, one of the problems I've seen is the sustained commitment in any given direction," Mays said. "What tends to happen is you have a program that works well for a year or two and then inexplicably goes into another direction or there's a shuffle or a reorg and it can be hard to see things through for the sustained long term."

As the years went on, Mays found his personal brand deviating from Google's, he said.

"Google's an advertising company that organizes information of the world, and my focus during my time there was helping with that as a software engineer that's what I was hired to do," he said. "But, I began to find my interest more in organizing information for the underrepresented in tech who struggled to find resources and information on how to navigate tech as an industry."

In late 2021, Mays says he saw a window of opportunity to do DEI work full-time after watching the labor market tighten, record resignations and tech job-seekers looking for better financial security and work-life flexibility amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

"Seeing the need and the response to my own story over these past few years, it became well 'ok, now I want to do this more than just on my off-time," Mays said. "I came to the realization that now really is the time and as the pandemic begins to loosen its hold."

Mays' last day was in mid-February, and in less than a week, he used his savings to launch Morgan Latimer Consulting, which is named after African American inventors Garrett A. Morgan and Lewis H. Latimer.

Mays has two main goals: to help underrepresented people get jobs in tech if they want them and to help companies understand how to get and keep those workers.

An influential software engineer within Google, Anthony Mays left the company after eight years to pursue his own diversity and inclusion consulting firm.

Anthony Mays

Working with companies, Mays has had to explain the business importance of DEI, which studies have for years shown improves business outcomes and product development.

"There are people who see this as just a PR problem that these aren't real issues," Mays says.

Silicon Valley has been slow to progress in keeping employees of color, placing most of the focus on recruiting.

"They can attract people all day long, but they're still not supporting them enough to stay, as you can see in the numbers and in people's experiences," Mays said.

Mays says part of his conversations involves getting real with companies about how minority talent views them. In particular, there's a sizable lack of trust.

"Most companies either don't know or don't understand why there is a lack of trust, they usually just see the side effects like lack of participation," he said. "We have this expectation that if we throw money at this, we'll have progress, but it's more complicated than that."

He says firms sometimes overlook existing mechanisms that could help the problem, such as organization, support systems, and mentorship.

"It's important for me to help these companies understand why those things are happening and to provide some guidance on how to resolve them," he says. "The FAANG companies in particular oftentimes often feel like they want to reinvent the wheel but oftentimes, they shouldn't."

Mays gave an example of Inroads,a nonprofit organization that creates pathways to careers for underrepresented students. It helped him secure his job in tech, but still doesn't get support or recognition.

He also plans to help companies think about how their performance reviews are inclusive, he said. Expectations and action items need to be clear for workers, he added.

"It's not enough for a company leader to have an initiative with DEI focus," said Jason King, senior associate director of corporate relations at the University of California, Irvine. "It takes solid structure and game plan because once you take foot off gas, it's up to you to implement it and that's just one thing Mays is great at."

For those just getting in the door, Mays says he's dedicating part of Morgan Latimer Consulting to entryways like interviews, which candidates have found difficult.

Before being hired by Google, Mays failed his first Google interview in 2011 despite getting pointers from a company recruiter, he said. Historically black college students training on Google's own campus program told CNBC about challenges and failures during their own processes. Failing interviews left them feeling discouraged and unlikely to try again.

Portia Kibble-Smith, a diversity and inclusion lead at technical interviewing platform start-up Karat, said Mays' services fit in well because of his ability to relate to students and share tips a break from tech companies' often standard practice of refusing to share interview feedback.

An influential software engineer within Google, Anthony Mays left the company after eight years to pursue his own diversity and inclusion consulting firm.

Antony Mays

"One of our biggest challenges we found is that most engineers have less information about the hiring process and interviews, specifically, and that's exacerbated if they're coming from outside the industry" Kibble-Smith said. "It's even harder to get information from peers if you don't have a network."

Mays offers three different packages. The "basic" package, listed at $199, helps candidates "Find out whether you're ready with a realistic coding interview," while the "Pro" package, listed at $549, tracks progress and growth while helping with algorithms and data structures. Last, a $899 package offers all of those benefits plus "advanced topics and behavioral interviews."

The two higher-priced ones can be broken up in monthly payments, and most come with one-on-one time with Mays.

Mays says he hopes to give "high-quality" learning courses to people at an affordable price and regularly shares free tips and advice across his social networks including Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.

"There are so many predatory services just repackaging information freely available and charging a fee," Mays said. "I get that this is a capitalistic society, but I have a heart to put together information in the hands of folks who often don't have the access or the funds to pay for those."

An influential software engineer within Google, Anthony Mays left the company after eight years to pursue his own diversity and inclusion consulting firm.

Anthony Mays

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Anthony Mays is using his experience as a Black tech employee to help others through the door - CNBC

I owe you an update on the number of people whose lives we have changed for the better through a radical upscaling of our Right to be Forgotten initiative that was funded by Google.

Thousands.

Thats thousands of people who no longer feel the humiliation of having the worst mistakes they ever made leaping to the top of the page when people search for their names on Google and other search engines. Thats thousands of people who will no longer see the worst photo ever taken of them their mug shots flash on their computer screens.

Getting here took a lot of work by a lot of people, but as we come in for a landing on the project that Google gave us $200,000 to undertake, were calling it an unqualified success.

For background, you need to know that because our website is so large and popular, our stories often rise to the top of the list when people do internet searches. That means our stories about minor crimes or other mistakes people have made over the years show up high when people search for them, interfering with their efforts to find jobs or partners.

We heard from many people about the pain this caused for them, especially those who had turned their lives around and were striving to be better people. In 2018, we started our Right to be Forgotten project, accepting applications from people to remove their names from dated stories about them. We received 10 to 15 a month on average, and a committee of editors considered them.

We rejected requests involving violence, felony sex crimes, child abuse and corruption. But I estimate we granted 80 percent of the requests.

We knew, though, that for the most part, the only people who knew we offered this service of were members of our audience. That meant large swaths of the population were unaware. We suspected that lack of knowledge created racial disparities in the people taking advantage of our initiative.

We wondered whether we could proactively go through our archives to clear outdated stories about minor crimes, ensuring we provided equal access to Right to be Forgotten. We came up with some ideas involving computer programming, and we entered the competitive process to get funding from the Google News Initiative, which supports digital innovation in newsrooms.

We were awarded $200,000, with us matching a healthy percentage.

The bulk of that money went to creating tools to sift through all of the stories and photos weve published, to identify pieces that we would want to edit or unpublish under Right to be Forgotten. This was a massive programming challenge. We have 1.4 million pieces of content on cleveland.com. Finding stories about minor crimes requires the ability to conduct searches in myriad ways that had not been available with existing tools. Our in-house technical wizards and a brilliant consultant get all the credit.

As with any new technical tool, once the beta model arrives, many hours of testing and tweaking follow. We enlisted four retired cleveland.com/Plain Dealer editors help us, and they came back repeatedly with ideas for making the tool more efficient and effective

And then they set about using it, searching the content and marking stories that we should alter or unpublish while the programmers continued their work to making editing and unpublishing those stories easier.

Separately, the programmers built a photo tool to help us identify mug shots. Theres no key word in our system to say a photo is a mug shot. A variety of parameters had to be designed to bubble up photos that could be mug shots, and then our freelance team of retired editors could plow through them to designate which photos are mug shots. We are working with more than 5,000 photos at this point, and the effort continues. Before we are finished, I suspect we will have removed thousands of mug shots from our site.

The work financed by Google ends in March, but we will use this powerful tool to continue sifting through our content long after. And we already are talking to our sister websites about using it with their content. Ultimately, a lot of people in Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Alabama, Oregon and elsewhere could benefit from this work.

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Weve helped thousands of people get past their mistakes, with Googles support: Letter from the Editor - cleveland.com

Google has announced it will soon remove a feature of Chrome for Android that for years helped people cut down on their mobile data usage. Per 9to5Google, Chromes Lite mode will go away with the release of Chrome version M100 in late March. Lite mode was originally known as Data Saver when Google first introduced it on Android back in 2014.

In those days, many smartphone owners were on tiered data plans and risked extra charges if they went over their monthly allotment. And in some regions, mobile speeds were limited so Lite mode helped pages load faster by compressing them. In 2015, Google added the option to block images entirely to use even less data.

But Google no longer sees much reason to keep the option around. Unlimited data plans are once again the norm, and the company claims that Chrome has continued to cut back on data usage with default settings.

In recent years weve seen a decrease in cost for mobile data in many countries, and weve shipped many improvements to Chrome to further minimize data usage and improve web page loading, the company wrote on a help page this week. Although Lite mode is going away, we remain committed to ensuring Chrome can deliver a fast webpage loading experience on mobile.

Chrome for Android version M100 will be released to the stable channel on March 29th, so Lite mode will remain available until then.

Read more here:

Google is ditching Chromes data saver mode on Android - The Verge

Google addresses whether the changing your website hosting provider to one in a new location can impact SEO and search rankings.

This topic is addressed in the latest installment of the Ask Googlebot video series on YouTube.

The following question is submitted to Googles Search Advocate John Mueller:

Does migrating a website hosting location affect SEO? E.g. an Australian website (and target audience) migrating its hosting location from Australia to US.

In response, Mueller says there will initially be some changes to how Google treats a site following a hosting change.

Does that involve anything that affects search rankings? See his full response in the next section.

Mueller says the biggest change youre likely to notice after changing website hosts is a slow down in crawling.

Thats done to make sure Google wont cause any problems by crawling the site too frequently.

Regulating crawling will resume once Google learns there wont be any issues with doing so

Mueller adds this will happen regardless of the hosting change you make. Whether youre moving to a hosting provider in the same location, or a new location, Google will be cautious with how much it crawls the site.

When it comes to moving hosting, you might see our systems initially slowing down crawling a bit. Any time we recognize a hosting change, we want to be sure that we dont cause any problems. And so we tend to automatically slow down crawling as a precaution.

Over time, once our systems can tell that going faster doesnt cause any issues, well speed up again. This is independent of the kind of hosting change you make. It doesnt matter if youre moving to a different provider down the road, or moving to another country.

Moving website hosting to a new location may impact how fast the site loads for users.

If a majority of visitors live further away from where the website is hosted, that could lead to a noticeably slower user experience.

In turn, that could affect the speed and page experience ranking factors.

Mueller continues:

One practical effect you might notice is that larger geographic moves can affect how quickly a website loads for users. Due to physics and computer networking, out can take longer to reach a server thats far away. Depending on how strongly this is visible, that can play a role in speed and the page experience ranking factor for a website.

To avoid the possibility of your website loading time being adversely impacted, you could consider hosting your website on servers in multiple locations.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) often do this, and depending on the hosting platform youre using your site may be on multiple servers already.

Mueller explains:

To be as close as possible to users, some websites even use servers in many different locations. A content delivery network often does this. If youre using a hosting platform they may already be doing this for you too. This configuration is fine for Google.

The location of your website host is not used for geotargeting.

So your search results in a particular geographic area will not be impacted as a result of changing website hosts.

Mueller concludes his response:

With regards to SEO, the servers location is not used for geotargeting. If you want your website to target users in a specific location, you would need to use either the country-code top level domain, or the appropriate setting in Google Search Console.

In summary, changing the location of your website host will have a temporary impact on crawling, and has the potential to adversely impact loading time.

This type of change will not impact SEO when it comes to geotargeting.

Source:

Featured Image: Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral

See the article here:

Google On The SEO Impact Of Changing Website Hosting Location - Search Engine Journal

A staff member works during preparations for the reopening of a Fnac store in Paris as part of an easing of the country's lockdown restrictions amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in France, May 18, 2021. REUTERS/Sarah Meyssonnier

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Feb 23 (Reuters) - French retailer Fnac Darty said on Wednesday it entered into a new partnership with tech giant Google (GOOGL.O), as it seeks to improve its online services.

Under the new partnership, Fnac Darty's websites will use Google's Cloud Retail Search, a solution designed to help customers find products more easily.

"Fnac Darty is the first retailer in France to implement this new Google Cloud solution, a move which aims to set new standards in terms of online and mobile shopping experiences," the group said in a joint statement.

The retailer will also rely on Google's data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions to help it manage operations, the group said.

Register

Reporting by Dagmarah Mackos;Editing by Alison Williams

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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France's Fnac Darty teams up with Google to improve online retail services - Reuters

If youre a Google Workspace user, the classic Hangouts messaging service will start to disappear next month as part of the transition to Google Chat. Google has announced that itll make Google Chat its default chat application beginning March 22nd, meaning users will be redirected to Chat when they try to visit Hangouts in Gmail on the web, or try to use the old Hangouts mobile apps.

The shift from Google Hangouts to Google Chat is the latest step in Googles constantly evolving messaging strategy, which generally gets more confusing the more you read about it. This particular migration kicked into gear in June 2020, and focusses on the messaging service integrated with Gmail. Google Chat should not be confused with GChat, the unofficial name for Google Talk, which was officially killed off in 2017 and replaced with you guessed it Hangouts.

Existing Hangouts conversation histories will carry over into Chat except in a few special cases, Google says. Although its not possible to opt out of this transition, Google adds that the hangouts.google.com domain will continue to work.

For now, this change is only affecting Workspace users, as well as legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers. In other words, its impacting people who use Googles services as part of a business or organization. But 9to5Google notes that Google has previously indicated free Google Account users will go through the same transition after Workspace.

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Google Chat to fully replace classic Hangouts for Workspace users from March - The Verge

Big Tech disruptors have their eyes on healthcare but have reported positive financial results driven by their core business models in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Google

An increase in digital advertising on Google's searches, video and internet platforms helped push sales 27 percent higher year over year, and its cloud sales increased 45 percent to $5.54 billion in the period. The company logged sales of $72.23 billion and profit of $19.91 billion from October to December 2021.

Apple

In its fourth quarter, Apple saw a revenue record of $83.4 billion, up 29 percent year over year. Apple CFO Luca Maestri said in the news release that "sales performance, unmatched customer loyalty, and strength of our ecosystem" helped push the company to record numbers. While sales were up, the company underperformed according to Wall Street's expectations because of supply chain constraints.

Amazon

Amazon saw a 9 percent increase in sales to $137.4 billion in the fourth quarter, compared with $125.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2020. This sales increase was the first single-digit growth figure since 2001. Amazon Web Services announced major partnerships with companies like Best Buy, Meta and Pfizer, helping to drive profit. Net income also increased to $14.3 billion in the fourth quarter.

Excerpt from:

How Google, Apple and Amazon fared in Q4 - Becker's Hospital Review

Im entering year two of my second startup, this time as CEO, and Ive been thinking a lot about best practices for starting and building a company. I spent nearly a decade working at Google and more than three years at Alphabets X, the moonshot factory. There I cofounded Xs first cybersecurity startup, Chronicle, before venturing out and founding Stairwell. Along the way, I learned some important management lessons and philosophies that continue to help me.

Every CEO talks about having a strong culture and values; but to be impactful, they should be your guiding principles. A light that shows the direction when one isnt clear. When I joined X, it reminded me of what Google was like when I joined in 2006. X had a sense of empowerment, a sense that its possible to actually change the world. When I launched Stairwell, it was with that same sense of purpose and optimism. We did so by defining our core values on day one, before we wrote a single line of code.

These values became the guardrails of our best selves. One of the most important values we have is diversity of perspectives. You need to make sure you have diversity of voice, opinions, and talents to foster innovation and growth. This is an important lesson I learned at X and Chronicle, where we hired a bunch of people from Google. For some of them, there wasnt a clear enough distinction about what was different from their previous job and culture and the new one we were building. The identity and cultural development that comes from being part of something new needs to be made real. Values need to be reflected in all aspects of your company.

I learned about the power of being bold while working at X and launching Chronicle into orbit. From drone deliveries and internet balloons to wearable devices and self-driving cars, the DNA of X projects is to go bold. The philosophy behind X was refined by Astro Teller, the Captain of Moonshots, who came up with a quirky metaphor dubbed #MonkeyFirst to explain why you should tackle the hard aspects of a project before investing resources on the easiest stuff. Specifically, if your goal is to teach a monkey to read Shakespeare on a pedestal, teach the monkey to read first before building the pedestal. This keeps you from wasting time if it turns out you cant pull off the biggest part of the challenge.

I applied that mindset here at Stairwell, to how we tackle the problem of cyber attacks for customers. Weve built a product that has two components it integrates both external malware feeds and internal security data. It would have been easiest to focus first on one, but the magic is in both components, so we dove in and built them simultaneously. And well continue to apply the principle of MonkeyFirst to every new component.

During my time at Google, I never met a salesperson because functions were so siloed. This changed when I launched Chronicle, which started inside the strong experimental and collaborative culture at X. It was common for product and sales teams to meet, and this created a more direct feature feedback loop between customers and engineers. At Stairwell, we make that collaboration even stronger. My executive team and engineers are in frequent contact with sales, who are in close contact with customers. They pass requests directly to engineers without going through internal workflow systems. Engineers also interact with customers. We have dedicated Slack channels for each customer where engineers and sales team discuss product features and share threat information. We even integrate user feedback management directly into our platform in a way that is transparent to all users and allows them to upvote other users feature requests.

This helps our product team better understand the target market and customer expectations. For example, the platform was initially built to alert customers to advanced persistent threats (APTs) that had evaded antivirus; but after getting customer feedback through these channels, we decided to expand the capabilities. Beyond detecting evasive APT threats, we now provide customers with context about the alerts theyre triaging from other products, so customers can easily determine whether a file is malicious or not and catch false negatives.

I advise business leaders to focus on problems over solutions. Its easy to get passionate about cool technology, but theres got to be something to fix first. Falling in love with a problem brings opportunity, while falling in love with a solution brings burden. The key is to keep a fresh mindset and look at different ways for solving problems. Its common for engineers who have spent many months coding a feature/functionmaybe engineering a particularly tidy and cool designto get territorial over the code when someone else tries to change it. They are focused on their part of the solution at the expense of alternative ways that may help the larger team thrive even more. At Stairwell, we aim to keep our sights set on how we can best solve our customers problems.

If youre relying on positional or hierarchical authority to get things done, youre not building a team or a culture in which people feel empowered to try new things. For me, one of the most important things for any culture is that childlike sense of wonder. At Google there was a 20% Rule, which allowed employees to spend time on self-initiated projects that werent expected to see a near-term financial impact for the company. While it may not be feasible for startup employees to tinker on their own projects during work hours, I try to bring that spirit of innovation to Stairwell. We encourage employees to try new things, even if they arent detailed in the product plan. For example, our lead designer recently surprised me with a new UI layout that was an exploratory side project. He had received support from a solutions engineer and a product manager, and when they showed it to me, it blew my mind. It took courage and a level of psychological safety to tinker like that and not feel beholden to what was established. Allowing employees to try something different can improve both the product and company morale.

My experience working at Google, X, and Chronicle was rich with leadership lessons, both ideas that I want to mirror and those that help me choose a different path. Regardless of where I work, Ive found that having an open mind and being flexible help projects and products succeed.

Mike Wiacek is the founder of security company Stairwell. He honed his threat-hunting skills at the NSA and the Department of Defense, created an intelligence team at Google, and cofounded Chronicle, which was spun out of Alphabets X, the moonshot factory.

Originally posted here:

Leadership lessons from Google and Alphabet's X - Fast Company

Google Ads has rolled out Enhanced Conversions for Leads. Spotted as a beta test earlier this month, this option offers an alternative to the existing Google Click ID-based offline conversion tracking method.

Why we care. Since this can be configured from your Google Ads account (instead of your CRM), it may be easier to adopt, enabling more advertisers to track their offline conversions. Using that data, Googles systems may be able to make better auction decisions, which could mean more efficient campaigns and better conversions.

For those using the existing Google Click ID-based upload method, this option is still supported.

How it works. When a potential customer fills out a lead form on your site, youll likely receive first-party data including their email address, name, home address and/or phone number. That data can be captured in your conversion tracking tags, hashed and then sent to Google.

When a lead converts, you upload your hashed lead information and Google matches that information to the ad that drove the lead, providing the platform with a more complete picture of the customers full journey.

The issue with the existing offline conversion tracking method. Offline conversion tracking can help Google get a better idea of the value of different leads, which can help it prioritize more valuable leads via the Maximize Conversion Value bid strategy, for example. Despite this potential advantage, offline conversion tracking has not been widely adopted due to the difficulty of implementing it.

Advertisers are used to being able to control most elements of their campaigns through self-service tools, Frederick Vallaeys, co-founder and CEO at Optmyzr said, adding, But those same marketers usually dont control the CRM systems where this valuable offline conversion data lives inside their organization. This dependency on other teams and sometimes even engineering significantly reduces the adoption of OCI [offline conversion tracking].

Since Enhanced Conversions with Leads uses information about your leads that youve already captured (i.e., email addresses), it doesnt require you to modify your CRM systems, making this a more convenient solution for many advertisers.

Get the daily newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms.

Set up methods. Enhanced Conversions for Leads can be configured via Google Tag Manager so long as you have Google Ads conversion tracking set up and auto-tagging is enabled.

Alternatively, it can also be configured using the global site tag directly on your page if you already have conversion tracking implemented this way.

Link:

Google makes offline conversion tracking easier with Enhanced Conversions for Leads - Search Engine Land

Emma Woollacott23 February 2022 at 11:52 UTC Updated: 23 February 2022 at 11:57 UTC

This could have destroyed the Google Payment system flow, security researcher tells The Daily Swig

A flaw in Google Groups has netted a security researcher $3,133 after he discovered that the unsubscribe feature could be abused to remove members without their consent.

More than 20 years old, Google Groups allows people to set up discussion groups with a common mail ID for members. Using this service, members of the group can send a single email that will then be posted in the group chat.

Members can automatically unsubscribe to the group by sending an email to, for example, test_groups_one+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

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However, Sriram Kesavan, founder and director of security at India-based TG Cyberlabs, discovered that it was possible to trick the system into removing Google Groups members at will, without their knowledge.

His technique was to email the group and use the reply-to feature, common to most mailing services, so that any reply would be sent to the unsubscribe email address and the member automatically removed.

Using auto-forwarding allowed Kesavan to make the group removal process invisible to the user concerned.

Kesavan says he was able to use the technique to remove users from a Google Group he set up within his own company and that Google itself uses the service as a Google Payment tracking system.

Read more of the latest hacking news from around the world

I could have literally removed Google employees on several official groups, even if I have no access to it, he tells The Daily Swig.

This could have literally destroyed the Google Payment system flow, and could have caused delays on their internal payments.

When Kesavan reported the issue to Google, it was at first rejected as intended behaviour. With permission, he then submitted a full write-up, which won him the a $3,133.70 reward.

Initially the person who was attending to my report was not given sufficient information from my side to decide and finalize it as a valid security issue, he says.

Later, when I decided to send a write-up which had all the information, they realized the impact of this issue and the team decided to patch this ASAP, so a quick and simple patch was applied in order to prevent users from exploiting it.

A Google spokesperson said the company was unable to comment.

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Google Groups unsubscribe feature abused to remove members without consent - The Daily Swig