[thakoppno]

> 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.

[afc]

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.

[thakoppno]

> 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.