[asoberbeck]

> Google sucks up a lot of data, and is in a position to do a lot of bad stuff with it, but historically they have never told my spouse about my affair, my government about my accounts in the caymans, or leaked my nude pictures to my grandma. (I don't actually have any of these!)

You've been lucky, then: https://www.gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalke...

"""It's unclear how widespread Barksdale's abuses were, but in at least four cases, Barksdale spied on minors' Google accounts without their consent, according to a source close to the incidents. In an incident this[2010] spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her. [...]"""

[esprehn]

Fwiw that was 12 years ago, and a lot of the Google infra has changed quite a bit since then to make looking at user data much harder and track access more explicitly.

[londons_explore]

I really want Google to advertise this...

Ie. I want them to commit to "No human who works at Google will ever see your email or photos without you knowing about it". And then splash that statement all over TV ads.

Set up some system so every time an engineer sees user data, the owner of that data is sent a notification (and there are legit reasons for that, like investigating a bug a user has reported). It doesn't need to be for every kind of user data, just the super sensitive ones like the text of emails.

[joshuamorton]

While it doesn't work for consumer accounts, https://support.google.com/a/answer/9230474?hl=en already exists, and https://cloud.google.com/cloud-provider-access-management/ac... goes further, requiring your consent before access. Although it doesn't work for certain legally mandated things