[soundgecko]

Any Microsoft product? They shouldn't use any Google product by the same token.

Report: Android malware up 614% as smartphone scams go industrial http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/26/android_malware_bloo...

From http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...

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 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.

In other cases involving teens of both sexes, Barksdale exhibited a similar pattern of aggressively violating others' privacy, according to our source. He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back. (He later apologized to one for retrieving the information without her knowledge.) In another incident, Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer.

[javert]

I completely agree. If you want to keep something secret, do not use Google products.

I don't recommend taking the time, but if you were to trawl through all my posts on Hacker News, you'd find that I've said this about Google several times in the past, before the breaking of the NSA scandal.

[cmpxchg8]

I do not use Google products either, but you need to add more companies to that. You can't use Facebook, or Yahoo products.

Funnily enough I stopped using Google products because they keep alienating me with their decisions like the Real Names policy or killing Reader. Taking my privacy back is an added bonus.

That also means no Android phone, although FirefoxOS phones look promising.

[flagnog]

the problem will be that people you interact with use Google or MS products, then the data leakage happens on their side of the conversation.

[rayiner]

In light of the second article, I find it ridiculous that people are asserting they have an expectation of privacy in google communications when apparently random creepy engineers have access to that data! I'd at the very least expect strong internal lockouts on customer information, with keys limited to "need to know" people...