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Remember when Google got in trouble for helping advertisers sell illegal drugs and even Larry Page knew a what was going on? I doubt Facebook cares. https://ww

by AJ007 7y ago

Remember when Google got in trouble for helping advertisers sell illegal drugs and even Larry Page knew a what was going on? I doubt Facebook cares. https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-sting/ https://www.wired.com/2013/05/google-pharma-whitaker-sting/

danso 7y ago
Actually this story did make me think about an even older article about Google [0]: in 2010, when a site reliability engineer was fired after allegedly spying on teens' Google accounts. At the time, it really underscored to me how much power – and potential to abuse it – that insider employees have. Particularly site reliability and security engineers, who inherently need to have this kind of power and access do do their jobs: > "If you're an SRE, for instance, on Gmail, you will have access to mailboxes because you may have to look into the databases," the former Google SRE—who did not work with Barksdale—explained to us by phone. "You'll need access to the storage mechanisms," he explained, pointing out that in order to determine the cause of a technical issue with Gmail, an SRE might have to access emails stored on Google's servers to see if data is corrupted. I'm assuming in the years since, Google's SRE have mechanisms in place to audit and log the use of sudo-level access and powers. Twitter, on the other hand, seems to not have implemented this, at least as of 2015 [0] I can imagine FB having decent auditing and logging when it comes to internal access of private data of user accounts. But not when it comes to ad accounts, considering the level of scammy activity these ad accounts had when BuzzFeed News reported on them [2] [0] https://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats https://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-te... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21467921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21467921 [2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-subscription-trap-free-trial-scam-ads-inc https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...

by AJ007 7y ago

danso 7y ago

Actually this story did make me think about an even older article about Google [0]: in 2010, when a site reliability engineer was fired after allegedly spying on teens' Google accounts. At the time, it really underscored to me how much power – and potential to abuse it – that insider employees have. Particularly site reliability and security engineers, who inherently need to have this kind of power and access do do their jobs: > "If you're an SRE, for instance, on Gmail, you will have access to mailboxes because you may have to look into the databases," the former Google SRE—who did not work with Barksdale—explained to us by phone. "You'll need access to the storage mechanisms," he explained, pointing out that in order to determine the cause of a technical issue with Gmail, an SRE might have to access emails stored on Google's servers to see if data is corrupted. I'm assuming in the years since, Google's SRE have mechanisms in place to audit and log the use of sudo-level access and powers. Twitter, on the other hand, seems to not have implemented this, at least as of 2015 [0] I can imagine FB having decent auditing and logging when it comes to internal access of private data of user accounts. But not when it comes to ad accounts, considering the level of scammy activity these ad accounts had when BuzzFeed News reported on them [2] [0] https://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-teens-spied-on-chats https://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-te... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21467921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21467921 [2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-subscription-trap-free-trial-scam-ads-inc https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...