Ask HN: The world has trusted Google with their data. Is this now rational?

12 pointstpmx8 comments

I'm not concerned about the competency of Google employees. I'd like to think the people in charge of the security aspects are best in class, and that the developers in general have a relatively high class of security awareness.

The threat model I'm concerned about now is the politically motivated insider.

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Was it ever rational? I think people do because they see little alternative.

For a while they seemed like very competent apolitical people who would take care of this problem for you.

And for a while, people saying "thats too much trust to give" seemed like paranoids, if not dismissable conspiracy theorists.

Yep.

> The threat model I'm concerned about now is the politically motivated insider.

This overestimates the impact that a single employee or a single team can have in a company of Google's size.

It depends wildly on where that single employee is placed within that hierarchy.

If someone inside google deleted my gmail because I liked the wrong video that would be a disaster.

Yes, part of security being "best in class" means no employees can do anything sketchy without help and even then it leaves it a trace. I'm sure all the huge companies make a lot of effort to make that true.

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