[wang_li]

>I know that technically a Google employee could read it if they really wanted to, but the policies, security, and culture in place make it have a 0% of happening.

We know it's non-zero as they have already had occasions when it has happened that Google employees used their access to stalk teenagers.

[charcircuit]

And such access kicked off an internal investigation and got him fired. Privacy is taken seriously.

[wang_li]

>And such access kicked off an internal investigation and got him fired. Privacy is taken seriously.

The complaints of the victim's parents kicked off an internal investigation, months later. It's not like google found this and took care of it on their own. Also, it has happened before too.

[charcircuit]

Google's internal privacy controls and monitoring are much stronger today than when that happened.

[jtbayly]

This is such a backwards take. You are ignoring that the system you cite as evidence that secure systems with backdoors can be designed and protected from random access has not been perfectly protected.

And you say it's stronger now.

Ok, so which country or neighbor is going to be the one to hack our national encryption system with a back door the first time? The second time? The third time? Before we manage to get it right (which we never will), what damage will be done by the backdoor? Probably something like Salt Typhoon, which you also conveniently ignore as a counterfactual to your claim.

[charcircuit]

It not being perfectly protected is by design. Security comes with trade offs.

>Before we manage to get it right (which we never will)

Keep in mind that modern encryption isn't perfect either. You can just guess the key and then decrypt a message. In practice if you make the walls high enough (requiring a ton of guesses) than it can be good enough to keep things secure.

[hulitu]

> Privacy is taken seriously.

With bug fixes and performance improvements ? Your privacy is very important for us, that's why we collect it all.