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Comment by gnu8 | Hacker News Reader

> reduce the surface area by which an employee can extract data from the facility

Is that what they must do? A software engineer at a FAANG could exfiltrate 1000x more data with their skills and their privileged access. I think they should be treated like call center employees.

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The FAANG employee is in high demand and therefore has implicit leverage, the call center employee does not. Whether one thinks they should or not does not matter, because the economics won’t allow it.

But the FAANG employee has a lot more to lose. By getting fired, they could be loosing $200,000+ at a minimum. A call center employee typically makes maybe $30,000 per year, if that.

You have it backwards. The call center employee doesn't have a savings, misses rent, gets evicted and their kids taken away. The FAANG employee has a fat fucking savings account, and can live comfortably for at least 6 months while casually looking for another job.

Well, if you’re caught stealing from your employer good luck finding another job, and keeping those savings from the lawsuits coming down on you.

Many tech companies completely fail to do any kind of background check. It's easier to become an administrator at Reddit then it is to become a gas station clerk.

This would be a great anecdote if companies handling sensitive data weren't using contractors that get paid about as much as those call center workers...

At which point malice isn't even required to start losing private info to breaches

The amount of money needed to get a FAANG employee to exfiltrate data is by far higher than the amount of money needed to get a call center employee to exfiltrate data. That lowers the attack probability significantly since the payout must be a lot greater.

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