[p4bl0]

I've always wondered if privacy conscious engineers who work at Google do actually use Google's services for their personal lives (Google Drive, Google Photos, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Keep, Google Docs, etc.)? And if so, do they continue to use them when after leaving the company?

I ask this question here because there seem to be quite some (ex-)Google employees in this thread.

[makerofthings]

I work at google and I use google products. Sure, some giant automated heap of code is processing your data and deciding how many grammerly adverts to show you, but your data is about as safe as it can be from loss or from humans. There are so many controls and checks in place when working with user data it's difficult to get things done some times (and quite rightly too).

[0xpgm]

How do we explain the deletion of the $135 billion Australian pension fund data that happened to UniSuper?

Due to "an inadvertent misconfiguration of the GCVE service by Google operators due to leaving a parameter blank"?

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...

[dehugger]

It seems that they explained things fairly clearly in your link? What kind of answer are you fishing for?

[0xpgm]

I'm responding to makerofthings' comment that data is about as safe as it can be, because there are so many controls and checks in place. If there were many controls and checks in place, would data loss of such a high profile customer occur?

[p_l]

Note that the data loss occurred at least partly because the customer was provided with very much pre-beta offering that essentially didn't have all of the control plane done yet.

That's honestly a very hard issue to track because such legacy setups often can slip by later tooling, in this case the part where it was set to "auto expire" after certain time, but instead it became a production environment.

[googler_thrwy]

Google is large enough that you will hear plenty of opinions on this. In my bubble (Zurich, Security) the overall sentiment seems to be "I trust Google handling my data way more now compared to before I joined".

[Balinares]

Yes, absolutely. The privacy enforcement infrastructure at Google is superlative.

[morning-coffee]

But does it still give it all en-masse to the NSA? https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/five-things-to-k...

[bananapub]

please try to be less of an idiot.

despite Google's recent pivot to suckling at the US defence department money teat, Google spends lots of money tellign the US (and everyone else's) government to fuck off in the courts, and and the finding out that the NSA had hacked Google's backbone led to a near instantaneous decision to encrypt all traffic on it, at a pretty large cost to the company in energy and effort.