> A new report on old privacy incidents [2017] suggests that at least one Nintendo leak came from a Google employee showing off private YouTube videos to a friend.
I think you're overvaluing the power of recruiting agencies
"Google says it was "non-intentional" because they only showed it to a friend", I don't think they purposely leaked it for internet clout
https://www.404media.co/google-contractor-used-admin-access-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40577812
YouTube employees or contractors might also have leaked unannounced PlayStation news:
One of the open secrets about how advertising works in the modern era is that brand synergy demands planning years in advance. Google employees, back in the day, could see the marvel cinematic universe release plan out to several years if they knew where to look, as well as console launch dates, major product releases, and other things of that nature. This is because the advertising sector has high-touch, high-value customers, and those customers expect their marketing plan to go off without a hitch. So Googlers have to make time and schedule things like DiRT testing and new feature validation sensitive to those schedules; Warner Bros isn't going to want to hear it if their Superman ad dropped 2 days early because a feature flag was misconfigured.
When Google was smaller, this was fine. But as a 100,000 person company, I believe it is completely infeasible to expect every Googler to keep those secrets. At those scales, you can't really even use the threat of firing to maintain secrecy because you can't really guarantee that the person who's going to replace the fired one is going to be more loyal. So inevitably, either Google locks down its internal infrastructure (turning it into a company other than the kind of company it was in the past), they cap their employee growth (which implies capping their growth in general), or they start losing high value customers who can't trust them to keep a secret.
In practice, they are definitely doing the first two to some extent and that is changing the flavor of the company internally. Part of the secret sauce of old Google is it didn't keep secrets from itself.
Pretty much all these sites can view every bit of content you submit to them for moderation purposes. Many of them state your data can teach learning models.
If you really want it private, you don't want it on the cloud/social media sites.
There absolutely is for anyone who cares to use it. That sort of defeatist mindset is super counterproductive, and ends up putting more people in harm's way.
We're talking about people choosing to upload unencrypted content to a cloud service that is obviously publicly available. The security/privacy properties of this action I think should be obvious even to less technical users.
The actual article headline really does make reading the article pointless.
Part of Nintendo leak was Google employee sharing private YT video with friend
https://www.404media.co/google-contractor-used-admin-access-...
"Google Contractor Used Admin Access to Leak Info From Private Nintendo YouTube Video"
This is how companies harm users by using low-trust, low-attachment contractors to handle private data.
