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When they talk about documents it's more about Google docs (sheets, ...) created internally by employees. Getting access to personal information within Google
by hknd 7y ago
When they talk about documents it's more about Google docs (sheets, ...) created internally by employees.
Getting access to personal information within Google is very, very difficult - it's not like you can query the user's sql table and get all the PII.
Everything PII related is highly protected.
Internal documents though are created on a "public to all" basis - e.g. let's say you create a document with some ideas or issues with the next Pixel phone. This doc would be accessible by anyone in the company by default (you can obv change that).
It's an awesome philosophy if everybody plays by the rules and doesn't leak stuff to the outside world.
Sometimes people create "Ideas Docs", "Best practice docs", "Design Docs", "Algo Docs" etc, and then receive feedback from random Googlers which accidentally stumbled upon them.
It's also a fantastic way of knowledge transfer as anyone can look up the design doc for problem X of product Y and read about it.
- saalweachter 7y ago> Internal documents though are created on a "public to all" basis - e.g. let's say you create a document with some ideas or issues with the next Pixel phone. This doc would be accessible by anyone in the company by default (you can obv change that). False; Google docs have always[1] been private by default, and must be explicitly shared, either with individuals, groups, or made world-readable. [1] I mean, I wasn't around for the earliest releases of Google docs, but even before Larry was CEO the sharing was off by default. That's just a sane default, because if you forget to share your document the first person you send it to will let you know, but if you forget to unshare you only find out the hard way.
- cromwellian 7y agoI’ve been at Google for 10 years and I don’t think that’s true. I distinctly recall the public by default era.
- saalweachter 7y agoYou've got years on me, and my memory from before 5-6-7 years ago is fuzzy, but it's definitely not new.
- nostrademons 7y agoI started 11 years ago and left 5.5 years ago and new Docs were public by default the whole time I was there. When I left there were murmurs about making Docs private by default but it hadn't happened yet.
- lallysingh 7y agoWiki pages are another source of information, definitely not private by default.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]