Title is difficult to decipher, here’s what it’s about:<p>> 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.
Related side note: I've always had a suspicion that one of the ideas I was working on using Google Colab was viewed by an employee and leaked, because someone wrote a blog post with the exact same idea (very niche) before I got round to releasing mine (I ended up not bothering due to being gazumped), and a Google Colab employee tweeted that blog post. (Puts on tin foil hat.. I stopped using Colab after that.)
Original source and article:<p><a href="https://www.404media.co/google-contractor-used-admin-access-to-leak-private-nintendo-youtube-video/" rel="nofollow">https://www.404media.co/google-contractor-used-admin-access-...</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40577812">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40577812</a><p>YouTube employees or contractors might also have leaked unannounced PlayStation news:<p><a href="https://insider-gaming.com/how-youtube-leaks-work/" rel="nofollow">https://insider-gaming.com/how-youtube-leaks-work/</a>
This sort of thing is extremely bad news for Google.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
From my experience with any kind of work that concerns interesting, private (multimedia) data, all of it will be used and abused by employees. I once worked on the backend for the tax return calculations and people there were just looking up anyones private (financial) data left and right, e.g. to see how much their dates were making, where they were living, when exactly they were born, etc...
reblog of paywall article. Orginal has better, clearer information.<p><a href="https://www.404media.co/google-contractor-used-admin-access-to-leak-private-nintendo-youtube-video/" rel="nofollow">https://www.404media.co/google-contractor-used-admin-access-...</a><p>"Google Contractor Used Admin Access to Leak Info From Private Nintendo YouTube Video"<p>This is how companies harm users by using low-trust, low-attachment contractors to handle private data.