Not the Usual Yada Yada

I WAS AT LUNCH," said Allegra Tudisco, the new marketing coordinator I'd hired in September, "and I introduced myself to everyone at the table. They all gave me their names except this one guy, who seemed kind of shy. I asked him who he was and he said his name was Larry, so I asked him what he did. And he said he was Larry Page, the CEO. I had no idea."

Google had reached a cultural milestone. The company had grown so large that Larry and Sergey no longer had time to interview each hire personally. That proved a problem for Larry a week later when he visited our new nine-person office in New York. They refused to let him in because they didn't believe he was who he claimed to be.

Mostly, however, the growth meant we had more going on. More work on infrastructure, more deals in negotiation, more salespeople calling on clients, and more products in development. One of those products was a toolbar that tucked a search box right into users' browsers, enabling them to conduct Google searches without going to Google.com. The product had been worked on by Joel Spolsky, a contract developer, based on prototypes developed by my UI team colleague Bay Chang. Googler David Watson created the first working version, and Eric Fredricksen finalized the software we actually launched. Larry was very keen to get it out the door.

The Google toolbar came with more than just a search box. It had "advanced features." One displayed a green bar with a relative length approximating the PageRank of the web page the user was visiting. PageRank was Google's assessment of the importance of a page, determined by looking at the importance of the sites that linked to it. So, knowing a page's PageRank could give you a feel for whether or not Google viewed a site as reliable. It was just the sort of geeky feature engineers loved, because it provided an objective data point from which to form an opinion. All happiness and joy. Except that when the "advanced features" were activated, they also gave Google a look at every page a user viewed.

To tell you the PageRank of a site, Google needed to know what site you were visiting. The Toolbar sent that data back to Google if you let it, and Google would show you the green bar. The key was "if you let it," because you could also download a version of the toolbar that would not send any data back to Google. The user could make the choice, though Larry and the engineering team believed—and hoped—that most people wouldn't pass up the advanced features just because Google might learn their surfing habits. We're talking free extra data here. While knowing the PageRank of a page might have only nominal value to users, knowing the sites users visited would be tremendously valuable to Google. The PageRank indicator provided a justification for gathering it.

I thought it was an enormous privacy tradeoff. I knew we planned to anonymize the data and wouldn't match the list of visited sites to a user's identity. Still, it felt creepy to me and I figured I wouldn't be the only one. So how to inform users without scaring them off?

If we said that turning on advanced features showed Google every web page a user visited, many people would never download any version of the software. That would be a disaster. The Toolbar was a secret weapon in our war against Microsoft. By embedding the Toolbar in the browser, Google opened another front in the battle for unfiltered access to users. Bill Gates wanted complete control over the PC experience, and rumors abounded that the next version of Windows would incorporate a search box right on the desktop. We needed to make sure Google's search box didn't become an obsolete relic. To do that, we would turn Microsoft's strength to our advantage and pit one group within the Redmond-based company against another.

If the Google toolbar became so popular that people downloaded Internet Explorer just to run it, then the browser gang within Microsoft might defend us when the Windows mafia inevitably tried to snuff us out. In the meantime, we would piggyback on the world's most popular web browser to gain millions of users.

The wording users saw when downloading the Google toolbar had to be subtle and assuage their concerns while downplaying the risks. We could just bury it in the EULA (end user licensing agreement) in tiny type and no one would be the wiser. Almost nobody reads the legalese terms of use before installing software. Knowing that, I considered long and hard and came up with an appropriately nuanced response—the two lines I referred to earlier.

"PLEASE READ THIS CAREFULLY," I wrote on the first line in large bold red letters. On a separate line beneath it, also red and bolded, came the words "IT'S NOT THE USUAL YADA YADA." The text that followed was equally subtle: "By using the Advanced Features version of the Google toolbar, you may be sending information about the sites you visit to Google."

That seemed to cover it.

Maybe I had been drinking the Google Kool-Aid too long, but I believed that telling our users explicitly what we were up to and giving them the power to decide if they wanted to play along was the right thing to do. I didn't want to leave the information lying about where they might stumble across it—I wanted to set it as tablets before their eyes, scribed in burning letters a hundred feet high.

There was a less altruistic reason as well. I thought we could forestall future criticism and distrust if we were forthright about our actions. That would spare me, as the person responsible for user communication, a great deal of pain.

Yes, I expected we would scare off some potential users, but those who did sign up would completely understand the tradeoff they were making. I believed the value of the Toolbar would become so obvious to them that they would evangelize to others. Eventually even those who had been hesitant at first would become convinced.

Bay, our UI guru, worried the language would frighten away too many users unnecessarily, though he didn't insist we change it. Eric, the Toolbar's creator, expressed concerns as well, but agreed that talking to people about privacy up front would reassure them nothing sinister lurked in the shadows.

I felt the truth of that deep in my soul. Those two sentences sparked an epiphany in me, that we could be the company that never tried to sneak an unpleasant truth past its customers. The company that always went overboard to be completely transparent about its actions. The company that did no evil. I would advocate as strongly as I could that we engage the issue of privacy and educate our users about exactly what information we collected. Surely that aligned with our core values.

When the Google toolbar launched in November 2000, the installer included the language as I had written it, bold red font and all. The page users saw after installing the Toolbar also called attention to the information collected and offered links to Google's privacy policy and instructions on how to disable the reporting function. People noticed.

Instead of a hue and cry there was a yawning silence. When users emailed us with concerns, we politely quoted the language on the installation page and reiterated that we had fully described all the options available to them. When the issue bubbled up on message boards, users who had already downloaded the Toolbar pointed to the bright red message and asked what more a person could want regarding notification. Those who downloaded the Toolbar with advanced features made a fully informed choice. Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch confirmed it with a user study that led him to conclude, "The red Yada Yada message definitely works: it catches users' attention, and in a positive way."

For years, people talked about Google as a brand that could push hard against edges Microsoft could never approach without setting off alarms. The Yada Yada message was a big part of that.

News organizations from CNET to MIT Technology Review to USA Today and the Washington Post referred to Google's disclosure language in articles about the company and users' privacy, always giving Google the benefit of the doubt because it so clearly went out of its way to inform users about its intentions.

I believed that we had discovered the golden rule of user communication, and the cynical marketer in me rejoiced. We could defuse any controversial issue by rolling out our secret weapon: a brilliant and devious strategy that happened to be built on absolute honesty. It really was the best policy.

I may have taken that policy too far. With each new product we introduced, I refused to support grudging admissions about things users might have some interest in knowing. I demanded in-your-face, kimono-wide-open, wart-revealing, naked-before-the-eyes-of-God, full- frontal fact-flashing. I had been converted like Paul on the road to Damascus by the lightning bolt our bold red letters had deflected from our young brand. The more you informed people, the more they trusted you not to abuse them. Just as with MentalPlex, the lesson seemed as clear and sharp as shattered crystal. Yet, once again, others considered the same data and saw things in a different light. The issue of user privacy wouldn't arise again for months, but it would never cease to come back, no matter how many times we ignored it.