Hacker News Reader

> made an educated guess

Grandparent deleted their post, but, assuming they just said "they correlated across IP" -- it's actually easy to guess, since the snoop would be able to detect and ignore a NAT IP -- it would be accessing thousands of accounts.

AFAIK Google's SRE's are more fancy sysadmins than performance engineers. Sysadmins often have the keys to the kingdom, though one would hope a sysadmin on project X only has the keys to project X.

View on HN

...one would hope a sysadmin on project X only has the keys to project X.

That is indeed how Google works.

Working at big banks and credit card processors I can tell this sort of insider abuse happens everywhere. And firing a bunch of people instantly for breaching policy actually does work as a good dis-incentive. Whether this raises the question due to the amount of data the Google knows about everyone of us could the impact of any potential insider abuse be magnified is a something for debate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com