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It seems like the person you're responding to has a problem with them selling their data in real-time to 3rd parties, rather than just any Google employee knowi

by tommit 3y ago

It seems like the person you're responding to has a problem with them selling their data in real-time to 3rd parties, rather than just any Google employee knowing where they are heading.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
Yes that’s the specific issue. We didn’t fear specifically they could read our data; the key management systems available appeared sufficient at some level (although the gcp audit system had some issues, particularly access audit is available as a IAM decision log rather than point of use, so any access bypassing IAM or that failed in the service but succeeded in an IAM call would appear a positive access, etc - aws does the right thing here). More of concern is they appeared more than happy to harvest utilization information for the profit of others, and in our business that was a potentially serious side channel.
gardenhedge 3y ago
surely google employees can't look up peoples locations..
- pessimizer 3y ago
  Surely they can. Who would be locking them out? Another google employee. So the useful questions are which google employees can look up people's locations, and through what process?
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Some people need to be able to do that as part of their job. Either directly for some good reason, or indirectly (they are a DB admin). The question is what controls they have to ensure only those people can look such things up and that they don't abuse those rights.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    I can't speak for now, but you have to apply for access. For PII it goes to a VP. De-anonymizing a Gaia ID is about as secure as it gets. Disclosure: this is 6 year old info. YMMV.
  - gardenhedge 3y ago
    that's completely different. Can an accountant or marketing person look up a persons location vs can any developer vs can any map developer vs specific people with proper access controls
- IX-103 3y ago
  From what I've heard that type of information is only held on a special higher-security "logs" cluster and the code accessing that data is subject to additional review by Google's privacy division before it is allowed access to the data. I think there may be special ways to manually access some of that data, but even requesting that capability would automatically trigger an audit after the fact.

by tommit 3y ago

It seems like the person you're responding to has a problem with them selling their data in real-time to 3rd parties, rather than just any Google employee knowing where they are heading.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

Yes that’s the specific issue. We didn’t fear specifically they could read our data; the key management systems available appeared sufficient at some level (although the gcp audit system had some issues, particularly access audit is available as a IAM decision log rather than point of use, so any access bypassing IAM or that failed in the service but succeeded in an IAM call would appear a positive access, etc - aws does the right thing here). More of concern is they appeared more than happy to harvest utilization information for the profit of others, and in our business that was a potentially serious side channel.

gardenhedge 3y ago

surely google employees can't look up peoples locations..

pessimizer 3y ago
Surely they can. Who would be locking them out? Another google employee. So the useful questions are which google employees can look up people's locations, and through what process?
- bluGill 3y ago
  Some people need to be able to do that as part of their job. Either directly for some good reason, or indirectly (they are a DB admin). The question is what controls they have to ensure only those people can look such things up and that they don't abuse those rights.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  I can't speak for now, but you have to apply for access. For PII it goes to a VP. De-anonymizing a Gaia ID is about as secure as it gets. Disclosure: this is 6 year old info. YMMV.
- gardenhedge 3y ago
  that's completely different. Can an accountant or marketing person look up a persons location vs can any developer vs can any map developer vs specific people with proper access controls
IX-103 3y ago
From what I've heard that type of information is only held on a special higher-security "logs" cluster and the code accessing that data is subject to additional review by Google's privacy division before it is allowed access to the data. I think there may be special ways to manually access some of that data, but even requesting that capability would automatically trigger an audit after the fact.