3 ms·

Sort of? Unusually for a company of this size there's a ton of standardization and cross-company consistency. In this case, I believe the whole company (aside

by jefftk 4y ago

Sort of? Unusually for a company of this size there's a ton of standardization and cross-company consistency. In this case, I believe the whole company (aside from very recent acquisitions still being migrated) used the same logs access framework. I think this is part of why Google has earned itself a reputation for killing things: if you require everything to use the same set of internal systems, and can't just leave old projects limping along on a fork of a deprecated system, the cost of keeping old things around is higher. (I worked at Google until June)

saagarjha 4y ago
I cannot speak for my employer, but I can speak in general terms that I agree that companies of this size have processes to try to avoid this kind of thing from happening. This is true at Google scale but also true once your company passes a certain size+age, although of course it can continue to mature. The thing is that these processes don't actually work, because in the end someone is going to do something dumb anyways and you really can't stop them. The same way your processes aren't going to stop an outage, someone is going to correlate data they shouldn't and somehow lack the tact to go "hey maybe I should not be doing this". Often various pressures will make it seem like something they should do. And when they do it they will cost the company an incalculable amount of user trust, to say nothing of the irreversibility of a privacy incident. Someone will do a writeup of it after it is discovered by the press but at that point the damage is done. (FWIW, I'm not even including the stuff that goes on with executive approval, where they make decisions on how likely they think they are going to be discovered and sued for large amounts of money. Of course this would bypass any policy…but it's usually kept under wraps for obvious reasons.)

by jefftk 4y ago

saagarjha 4y ago

I cannot speak for my employer, but I can speak in general terms that I agree that companies of this size have processes to try to avoid this kind of thing from happening. This is true at Google scale but also true once your company passes a certain size+age, although of course it can continue to mature. The thing is that these processes don't actually work, because in the end someone is going to do something dumb anyways and you really can't stop them. The same way your processes aren't going to stop an outage, someone is going to correlate data they shouldn't and somehow lack the tact to go "hey maybe I should not be doing this". Often various pressures will make it seem like something they should do. And when they do it they will cost the company an incalculable amount of user trust, to say nothing of the irreversibility of a privacy incident. Someone will do a writeup of it after it is discovered by the press but at that point the damage is done. (FWIW, I'm not even including the stuff that goes on with executive approval, where they make decisions on how likely they think they are going to be discovered and sued for large amounts of money. Of course this would bypass any policy…but it's usually kept under wraps for obvious reasons.)