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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

There was a Google SRE who stalked women through their Google accounts. I wonder if I can find that HN thread...

update: Found one of them,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692754 ("Google fired engineer for breaking internal privacy policies" (2010))

It's not linked in there, but the Wired writeup adds that (0) there were at least two SRE's fired for something like this and (1) Google chose not to report this to law enforcement, seemingly prioritizing its public image over its users' safety.

https://www.wired.com/2010/09/google-spy/ ("Ex-Googler Allegedly Spied on User E-Mails, Chats" (2010))

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Do I really need to point out the differences between these two stories or can we agree they're not actually comparable?

I mean, the Google one seems much worse because this happened:

> Google engineer who allegedly used his internal clearances to access private Gmail and GTalk accounts so that he could spy on and harass people, including four minors.

In this article, it says some people in Tesla posted a few pics of funny signs and pets on an internal message channel read by some tens of people, and at least one intimate, but not nude pic. Which is not what I thought when I first read the headline here.

I guess there were some more concerning things, like someone approaching the car naked, but it doesn't have any context and that could be something they might be reporting as a crime for all I know. The article doesn't say one way or another and leaves us to assume that all incidents are the same as the people captioning pet pictures, but there's no clear relation.

Both violate user privacy and imply a need for better data privacy protections.

One was targeted and the other was not, but they are in the same class of issues even if the severity is different.

Google's was a rogue employee that was caught. Tesla seems to be a cultural problem where employees think it's OK.

> Google's was a rogue employee that was caught. Tesla seems to be a cultural problem where employees think it's OK.

While having it be ok as corporate culture is a bit worse, fundamentally the problem is that private personal data is available to these corporations so at that level it is the same problem.

The only systems which are safe are those which either never send private data outside of local (local to the user) devices, or, where data sent out is encrypted client-side with keys which are generated, stored and only ever available to the client.

Anything else, will be abused.

The average person actively wants big brother to look after their messages and keys because they lose them.

They still expect the same sort of treatment that they get from their traditional health care providers and banks etc, with strong regulations enforcing the correct behavior.

Ding ding. Humans gonna human.

https://nypost.com/2022/11/26/twitter-liberals-nervous-about...

There is indeed a culture problem.

Well, in my case, I fail to see how these stories are incomparable; they're not identical but they seem, at least, comparable. What makes them so fundamentally different that someone is wrong to share that story as an example of "something like this" story?

Tesla's example is most alarming to me since people who seemingly have no business purpose to access highly sensitive data have access to it. Culturally people feel safe sharing this data on internal chats which means they don't think coworkers will report the data access violations and since the content is spreading "like wildfire" there's a significant number of people at the company who are abusing data access as opposed to an individual abusing their elevated access.

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