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Comment by cavisne | Hacker News Reader

Google has been around since 1998 with people putting every dark secret and worry into search queries. Not once has someones searches been leaked by employees, despite highly political people working at these companies with a lot to gain by leaking to a journalist or similar.

Likewise with private messages on Facebook, order history on Amazon.

Big Tech has way more to lose than the small "privacy focused" alternatives, and clearly for them to go this long with this many employees its through design not luck.

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> In the case of one 15-year-old boy Barksdale met through a technology group in Seattle, Washington, he allegedly tapped into the boy's Google Voice call logs after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend. Barksdale then reportedly taunted the boy with threats to call the girl.

This doesn’t quite refute your assertion of no leaks of searches but it is just as egregious. You are right about incentives too.

The gcreep was a huge wake up call for Google, back in ~2010 when this happened. I can tell you that Google took very drastic action internally as a direct result of this (my estimate is that it spent about 100 engineer years, including some very senior SWEs, in this, though that's just a guess) to make it very unlikely for this (an SRE abusing production access) to ever happen again. I'd still say that one incident in 20+ years is a huge success given the scope.

> Google revealed to TechCrunch that a second Google employee had also been caught violating user privacy and was also dismissed. Google didn't reveal any details about what or when this occurred, other than to say the other case didn't involve minors.

I agree largely that the efforts have been successful but there’s more than one incident. I’ll even speculate wildly without any evidence that there have been more than two.

Upvote. Employees are the actual enforcement of tech ethics. See Google project maven pushback

It's a moral race to the bottom when the salary's good and competition is fierce. It's great that Google pushed back against Project Maven, but nothing stopped the other 21+ companies from participating.

Oh wow. Do you really want to die on that hill? Big tech is responsible for a HUGE MOUNTAIN of absolutely hideous shit, destroyed lives and dead people—and you’re telling me that the engineers with a freely adjustable consciousness that built this machinery uphold some sort of ethics? The same guys that created algorithms optimised to glue children to screens for most of the day, driving young people into depression and suicide, and allowing the emergence of „alternative facts“?

And yes, Amazon employee #18447272. You are just as responsible for empowering Bezos to fuck over the WaPo as the rest of them. Employees of big tech corporations are the silent accomplices of the tech oligarchy we’re headed into.

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