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In a company approaching a million employees, someone is doing something illegal/unethical every day. At that scale it doesn’t say anything about the culture a

In a company approaching a million employees, someone is doing something illegal/unethical every day. At that scale it doesn’t say anything about the culture as you are observing the outer ranges of a distribution.

nostromo 8y ago
That’s why you build systems that don’t allow for abuse whenever possible. And when it’s not possible, you create an audit trail. For example, I trust Google to make my individual search history difficult for employees to access, specific search results difficult to change, and confidential data difficult to access.
- AJ007 8y ago
  Google has had corrupt employee problems in the Adwords department: https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/07/shoemoney-sues-google-employee-for-adwords-violations/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/07/shoemoney-sues-google-empl... I trust the security and audit trail on Google's engineering side. I definitely do not in other areas of the company.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Do you have any reason to have that trust? Absent any evidence, I'm inclined to think that they do very little to protect my data. Had they any stringent controls in place, I feel like their PR or marketing would have communicated some of the specifics publicly.
  - skybrian 8y ago
    It's oriented towards Cloud customers, but there is some information here: https://cloud.google.com/security/overview/whitepaper#data_access_and_restrictions https://cloud.google.com/security/overview/whitepaper#data_a...
    - wongarsu 8y ago
      The Data Processing Terms for google cloud also provide some details (mostly appendix 2) https://cloud.google.com/terms/data-processing-terms https://cloud.google.com/terms/data-processing-terms You have to agree to those seperately, they are meant for GDPR compliance. GSuite has an equivalent document you can agree to too.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    I think there is a widespread understanding that nosing into customer data will get you fired from Google immediately. There was a case the other year that the media picked up so I read about it. As for why they don't usually talk about it might be because (examples): - they don't want people to think about how much data they have - saying: "we punish people who abuse their positions" indirectly hints that this is happening. Why would there be such a policy if that couldn't happen? - (guessing) aren't really the brightest ones when it comes to marketing and PR. So far they've been saved by having products thats sells themselves.
    - jjeaff 8y ago
      Correction: "getting caught" nosing into other people's data will get you fired. Who knows how stringent the controls are.
      - mycelium 8y ago
        Former employee and it's been a few years, but for what it's worth I was actually very reassured by what I saw there in terms of internal data security. For all products I worked with or knew something about in an engineering capacity, there was no unlogged access to personal data. Access to personal data without clear, approved reasons would result in termination. The controls were extremely strong. I'd be more concerned in Google's case about "legitimate" but still problematic uses of data: disclosure to law enforcement, crazy specific ad targeting, machine learning for military applications, etc.
  - rifung 8y ago
    We definitely have systems in place so that employees can not just randomly look at customer data, and when it is necessary it is always logged. Even if we need to debug customer issues we would need a good reason to look at data over just metadata. There are strict requirements for what can go in logs and dashboards also as you can imagine. > Absent any evidence, I'm inclined to think that they do very little to protect my data. Well I think the evidence is mostly that people aren't having their personal data leaked by Google employees isn't it?
    - jlarocco 8y ago
      Are those logs available anywhere? Can users see when Google employees have looked at their data? Have those systems been audited by a third party to ensure they're working properly? I'm sure most Google employees are good people, but your basically telling everybody to trust you that Google's doing it right, but not providing any evidence to back it up.
      - Latteland 8y ago
        I used to work at google too. End users don't get casually notified when someone looks at their data. But there are definitely audit logs inside the company. I worked on a product and you couldn't look at the data without running a special command, logging in with your account and describing what you were doing, and they audited those afterwards (didn't happen too much I guess). Here's an article about someone fired when I worked there https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8003925/Google-engineer-fired-for-privacy-breach-after-stalking-and-harrassing-teenagers.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8003925/Google...
        walshemj 8y ago
        I know of cases in telecoms where a couple of BT workers got 10+ years for conspiracy - provided information to a gangland hitman to murderer someone's parents. And anecdotally in BT you would hope if you got caught for naughty shit you would rather the Local Police, The Met or The Service caught you instead of the internal security.
- scarface74 8y ago
  For some strange reason that I can’t put my finger on, as creepy as I think Google’s whole business model is an the amount of data they track especially for Android users, I still trust them not to let any random employee to access customer data.
- siruncledrew 8y ago
  It makes sense in theory, but it’s also a short road away from mass employee surveillance when trying to keep watch over hundreds of thousands of employees to attempt to eliminate any potential outlier risks.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
crunchlibrarian 8y ago
This seems like a great way to give a free pass to any corporate behavior, anywhere. Megacorp is harvesting organs and murdering people? Who cares just look at it statistically, it's only four people on the harvest team. Statistically speaking Megacorp is the most well behaved of them all! Stop trying to look at everything through the prism of distributions, it's a bad tool in many scenarios.
rando444 8y ago
Consulting the internet it looks like they have 560,000 employees.. which is quite a lot, but only halfway to a million. Technically you could say any company is "approaching a million employees".. some just slower than others. The statement is true, but it's innacurate and misleading.

nostromo 8y ago

That’s why you build systems that don’t allow for abuse whenever possible. And when it’s not possible, you create an audit trail. For example, I trust Google to make my individual search history difficult for employees to access, specific search results difficult to change, and confidential data difficult to access.

AJ007 8y ago
Google has had corrupt employee problems in the Adwords department: https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/07/shoemoney-sues-google-employee-for-adwords-violations/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/07/shoemoney-sues-google-empl... I trust the security and audit trail on Google's engineering side. I definitely do not in other areas of the company.
jjeaff 8y ago
Do you have any reason to have that trust? Absent any evidence, I'm inclined to think that they do very little to protect my data. Had they any stringent controls in place, I feel like their PR or marketing would have communicated some of the specifics publicly.
- skybrian 8y ago
  It's oriented towards Cloud customers, but there is some information here: https://cloud.google.com/security/overview/whitepaper#data_access_and_restrictions https://cloud.google.com/security/overview/whitepaper#data_a...
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    The Data Processing Terms for google cloud also provide some details (mostly appendix 2) https://cloud.google.com/terms/data-processing-terms https://cloud.google.com/terms/data-processing-terms You have to agree to those seperately, they are meant for GDPR compliance. GSuite has an equivalent document you can agree to too.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  I think there is a widespread understanding that nosing into customer data will get you fired from Google immediately. There was a case the other year that the media picked up so I read about it. As for why they don't usually talk about it might be because (examples): - they don't want people to think about how much data they have - saying: "we punish people who abuse their positions" indirectly hints that this is happening. Why would there be such a policy if that couldn't happen? - (guessing) aren't really the brightest ones when it comes to marketing and PR. So far they've been saved by having products thats sells themselves.
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    Correction: "getting caught" nosing into other people's data will get you fired. Who knows how stringent the controls are.
    - mycelium 8y ago
      Former employee and it's been a few years, but for what it's worth I was actually very reassured by what I saw there in terms of internal data security. For all products I worked with or knew something about in an engineering capacity, there was no unlogged access to personal data. Access to personal data without clear, approved reasons would result in termination. The controls were extremely strong. I'd be more concerned in Google's case about "legitimate" but still problematic uses of data: disclosure to law enforcement, crazy specific ad targeting, machine learning for military applications, etc.
- rifung 8y ago
  We definitely have systems in place so that employees can not just randomly look at customer data, and when it is necessary it is always logged. Even if we need to debug customer issues we would need a good reason to look at data over just metadata. There are strict requirements for what can go in logs and dashboards also as you can imagine. > Absent any evidence, I'm inclined to think that they do very little to protect my data. Well I think the evidence is mostly that people aren't having their personal data leaked by Google employees isn't it?
  - jlarocco 8y ago
    Are those logs available anywhere? Can users see when Google employees have looked at their data? Have those systems been audited by a third party to ensure they're working properly? I'm sure most Google employees are good people, but your basically telling everybody to trust you that Google's doing it right, but not providing any evidence to back it up.
    - Latteland 8y ago
      I used to work at google too. End users don't get casually notified when someone looks at their data. But there are definitely audit logs inside the company. I worked on a product and you couldn't look at the data without running a special command, logging in with your account and describing what you were doing, and they audited those afterwards (didn't happen too much I guess). Here's an article about someone fired when I worked there https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8003925/Google-engineer-fired-for-privacy-breach-after-stalking-and-harrassing-teenagers.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8003925/Google...
      - walshemj 8y ago
        I know of cases in telecoms where a couple of BT workers got 10+ years for conspiracy - provided information to a gangland hitman to murderer someone's parents. And anecdotally in BT you would hope if you got caught for naughty shit you would rather the Local Police, The Met or The Service caught you instead of the internal security.
scarface74 8y ago
For some strange reason that I can’t put my finger on, as creepy as I think Google’s whole business model is an the amount of data they track especially for Android users, I still trust them not to let any random employee to access customer data.
siruncledrew 8y ago
It makes sense in theory, but it’s also a short road away from mass employee surveillance when trying to keep watch over hundreds of thousands of employees to attempt to eliminate any potential outlier risks.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

crunchlibrarian 8y ago

This seems like a great way to give a free pass to any corporate behavior, anywhere. Megacorp is harvesting organs and murdering people? Who cares just look at it statistically, it's only four people on the harvest team. Statistically speaking Megacorp is the most well behaved of them all! Stop trying to look at everything through the prism of distributions, it's a bad tool in many scenarios.

rando444 8y ago

Consulting the internet it looks like they have 560,000 employees.. which is quite a lot, but only halfway to a million. Technically you could say any company is "approaching a million employees".. some just slower than others. The statement is true, but it's innacurate and misleading.