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Comment by WisNorCan | Hacker News Reader

In a company approaching a million employees, someone is doing something illegal/unethical every day.

At that scale it doesn’t say anything about the culture as you are observing the outer ranges of a distribution.

That’s why you build systems that don’t allow for abuse whenever possible. And when it’s not possible, you create an audit trail.

For example, I trust Google to make my individual search history difficult for employees to access, specific search results difficult to change, and confidential data difficult to access.

Google has had corrupt employee problems in the Adwords department: https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/07/shoemoney-sues-google-empl...

I trust the security and audit trail on Google's engineering side. I definitely do not in other areas of the company.

Do you have any reason to have that trust? Absent any evidence, I'm inclined to think that they do very little to protect my data. Had they any stringent controls in place, I feel like their PR or marketing would have communicated some of the specifics publicly.

It's oriented towards Cloud customers, but there is some information here:

https://cloud.google.com/security/overview/whitepaper#data_a...

The Data Processing Terms for google cloud also provide some details (mostly appendix 2)

https://cloud.google.com/terms/data-processing-terms

You have to agree to those seperately, they are meant for GDPR compliance. GSuite has an equivalent document you can agree to too.

I think there is a widespread understanding that nosing into customer data will get you fired from Google immediately.

There was a case the other year that the media picked up so I read about it.

As for why they don't usually talk about it might be because (examples):

- they don't want people to think about how much data they have

- saying: "we punish people who abuse their positions" indirectly hints that this is happening. Why would there be such a policy if that couldn't happen?

- (guessing) aren't really the brightest ones when it comes to marketing and PR. So far they've been saved by having products thats sells themselves.

Correction: "getting caught" nosing into other people's data will get you fired. Who knows how stringent the controls are.

Former employee and it's been a few years, but for what it's worth I was actually very reassured by what I saw there in terms of internal data security. For all products I worked with or knew something about in an engineering capacity, there was no unlogged access to personal data. Access to personal data without clear, approved reasons would result in termination. The controls were extremely strong.

I'd be more concerned in Google's case about "legitimate" but still problematic uses of data: disclosure to law enforcement, crazy specific ad targeting, machine learning for military applications, etc.

We definitely have systems in place so that employees can not just randomly look at customer data, and when it is necessary it is always logged.

Even if we need to debug customer issues we would need a good reason to look at data over just metadata. There are strict requirements for what can go in logs and dashboards also as you can imagine.

> Absent any evidence, I'm inclined to think that they do very little to protect my data.

Well I think the evidence is mostly that people aren't having their personal data leaked by Google employees isn't it?

Are those logs available anywhere? Can users see when Google employees have looked at their data? Have those systems been audited by a third party to ensure they're working properly?

I'm sure most Google employees are good people, but your basically telling everybody to trust you that Google's doing it right, but not providing any evidence to back it up.

I used to work at google too. End users don't get casually notified when someone looks at their data. But there are definitely audit logs inside the company. I worked on a product and you couldn't look at the data without running a special command, logging in with your account and describing what you were doing, and they audited those afterwards (didn't happen too much I guess). Here's an article about someone fired when I worked there https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8003925/Google...

I know of cases in telecoms where a couple of BT workers got 10+ years for conspiracy - provided information to a gangland hitman to murderer someone's parents.

And anecdotally in BT you would hope if you got caught for naughty shit you would rather the Local Police, The Met or The Service caught you instead of the internal security.

This part of that article is concerning:

> After the site broke the story, Google confirmed the engineer had been sacked in July after his actions were reported to the company via email.

Sounds like he was only fired after one of the victims reported him.

For enterprises, yes, with the significant caveat that some types of data look ups cannot be communicated to the customer because they're at the request of the government.

> Are those logs available anywhere? Can users see when Google employees have looked at their dat

For Google Cloud, we have access transparency logs which let you see when and why your data was accessed.

https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/audit/access-transpare...

You left out a key bit of information: It's for Google Cloud customers with Platinum or Gold support.

Most GMail and Google Drive users can't see the access transparency logs.

You're right, Access Transparency is specifically for enterprise GCP customers (at least currently).

Well, plenty of data gets stolen all the time. Would be tough to trace it necessarily to a Google employee.

But if you say so, anonymous internet user, it must be true. (just kidding, sort of. I appreciate the info. But absent a neutral 3rd party audit, we're all just wishing and hoping.)

These things are usually audited by third parties. E&Y or PWC or Deloitte or etc.

For some strange reason that I can’t put my finger on, as creepy as I think Google’s whole business model is an the amount of data they track especially for Android users, I still trust them not to let any random employee to access customer data.

It makes sense in theory, but it’s also a short road away from mass employee surveillance when trying to keep watch over hundreds of thousands of employees to attempt to eliminate any potential outlier risks.

This seems like a great way to give a free pass to any corporate behavior, anywhere.

Megacorp is harvesting organs and murdering people? Who cares just look at it statistically, it's only four people on the harvest team. Statistically speaking Megacorp is the most well behaved of them all!

Stop trying to look at everything through the prism of distributions, it's a bad tool in many scenarios.

Consulting the internet it looks like they have 560,000 employees.. which is quite a lot, but only halfway to a million.

Technically you could say any company is "approaching a million employees".. some just slower than others.

The statement is true, but it's innacurate and misleading.

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