[rpcastagna]

(I'm a software engineer on Google Drive.)

The answer is no. To the point where it's actually a pain in the ass for us because developing any ML-assisted capabilities for G Suite requires us to only get training data from specific subsets of customers who are under special contract conditions.

If you buy G Suite from a reseller then they might be doing shady shit but we'd terminate their reseller account if we found out about it.

I know people like to bitch about this kinda shit on HN but honestly I and my coworkers spend so much time on protecting our customers' data from literally everyone -- including ourselves -- that I want the chance to bitch back about how hard my job is.

[arduinomancer]

The ironic thing is the big 4 style companies are usually labeled as being careless with user data yet they probably have some of the strictest internal rules/procedures for user data classification and handling.

It’s the startups consumers should be more worried about IMO.

[eb0la]

As a Cloud Platform customer I find security and data privacy it is handed with a lot of care.

Also, I believe all enterprise product purchases are made on trust foundations.

If someone did weird stuff with customer data, it will be out of the market in a couple of days. It might be also a felony in some parts of the world.

[mbrock]

I wonder if this commitment is reflected in any official terms or pledges?

[rpcastagna]

"Google Cloud Security and Compliance Whitepaper" linked elsewhere on this thread: https://storage.googleapis.com/gfw-touched-accounts-pdfs/goo...

Relevant bits start at page 12:

"G Suite customers own their data, not Google."

"There is no advertising in the G Suite Core Services, and we have no plans to change this in the future"

etc.

Ultimately the biggest cudgel you have to wield here is in the sales contract you're signing, but my understanding is that the baseline privacy guarantees are standard for all customers at the strictest level -- people actually opt to reduce the restrictions on their data so that new features get built with their use cases in mind (otherwise we wouldn't know what those actual use cases were).

A lot of companies use G Suite and a lot of them have very strict privacy + security requirements. This is the same platform used by fintech companies, healthcare companies, MegaCorps, etc.

Sort of a thing with all non-web-search Google products: I can't fathom how people see the $5B/quarter "other revenue" line on our earnings statements and think that just doesn't matter and somehow we have to get the "real" money from ads. We definitely did ads-supported-consumer first and we've been doing it the longest and it makes the most money, but how many email providers would kill to have half of that quarter as their annual revenue? G Suite, Cloud, etc are very real businesses in their own right and that's even while being very young and coming from a company that didn't start with any inherent strengths in enterprise markets.