[jtrip]

What you suggest shows that individuals within the Google organisation do not have blatant open access to personal information. What do you think about the access of personal information to the organisation Google itself? Today the data is safe from menial concerns such as a google employee looking over private information, but what about tomorrow when whole troughs of such private information are made available to other organisations, a la Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, for commercial or other nefarious purposes?

The article here talks about how google executives deliberately made privacy settings harder to find because the people were actually using them. The article also suggests, through court documents, that google coerced other manufacturers to do the same.

[throwaway3699]

Xoogler.

This is almost impossible by design. As mentioned before, every field on a protobuf is tagged for sensitivity, meaning right down to the bare disks there is privacy controls on data.

Engineers under orders to decrypt & copy data literally could not, without a delegated authority from senior people (some will be GDPR officers too), and there would need to be a staggering level of process failure just to get at the data for a few users.

Ultimately you have to decide if you trust Larry & Sergey, nobody else could make this happen. But insider risk just isn't going to happen from a company that treats user data like military treat classified documents.

[jeffbee]

I’m suggesting that based on my experience google has better organizational defenses against individuals or even groups intentionally or accidentally setting a privacy-invasive agenda than other organizations with which I have first-hand experience.

[asdff]

The whole issue is google already has a business model that is a privacy-invasive agenda. The cat you describe has left the bag years ago.