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Comment by lucidrains | Hacker News Reader

When I was working at Uber, we had a case of a guy stalking his ex-girlfriend's every movement through the backend. They eventually found out, fired him, and stepped up auditing.

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Uber had many instances of this over the years, including one of the top executives stalking a journalist.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/19/7245447/uber-allegedly-t...

You might say the problem was in the founding DNA: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40352868

Didn't this happen at Google a few years ago? I recall something about a guy that was accessing his ex's Google data, like email, chats, contacts, and so on.

Yikes, didn't know this was an issue at Google as well. That is scary

These days pretty sure things are much more regulated and locked down for the giants. It would take a conspiracy with multiple employees in the right groups to access that type of data and there'd be a trail that gets detected fast.

You mean like when some eBay execs banded together to harass a user?

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/30/1126078948/live-spiders-and-c...

Wow! Never heard about that. The narrative is usually: Some rando, low-level employee went rogue. As soon as BigCorp was made aware of the situation, the rando was terminated and law enforcement was notified. BigCorp conducted an internal audit and found no other data was accessed. Nothing to see here.

Thank God for "state-affiliated media" (https://www.npr.org/2023/04/05/1168158549/twitter-npr-state-...)

That may not be a good example because it is not clear if it involved those eBay execs actually improperly accessing information that eBay had.

It seems to be a campaign by eBay execs who were physically harassing a couple that published a newsletter the execs did not like. That would only require finding out where they live.

I just found that out in a few minutes from information on their website and a guess that they probably live not too far away from where their company is, followed by a public records search based on that guess which verified that the guess was right and gave me their address.

I remember hearing that the Gmail team could use a real random gmail account during testing.

Yep: https://www.gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalke...

Should've sued him.

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