[jmcintyre]

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.

I guess there are similar incidents happening at almost all cloud providers, but even if detected by the company, we don't hear about them because they're really bad PR. All they come up with is, "trust us, things are secured". And no one cares anyway because Gmail, Docs and Outlook.com are slick and convenient.

[superuser2]

In any organization of Google's size, there are bound to be a few bad apples. The organization can still see that as totally wrong and do its best to remove them, whether out of professional integrity or simple self-preservation instinct.

This happens in major, respected newspapers. It happens in an extremely disciplined and well-trained superpower's military. Small town telephone operators were sometimes known to spy on the communications of people they knew, and post office workers would sometimes gossip about postal metadata. Organizations can still have integrity (ok, well, maybe not telecoms) when there are a handful of swiftly punished incidents. I'd be concerned if there was a culture of disregard for privacy or a lack of internal controls, unrestricted access for everyone (Barksdale was a Site Reliability Engineer with a legitimate need to access production data, I believe), or no punishment, but this case doesn't invalidate Google's products.

[Ziomislaw]

Wish I had more upvotes.