Re:Why ProtonMail is more secure than Gmail
by geofft on Monday October 23, 2017 @11:52AM
(#15534075)
I don't know anything about Google's internals, but, like, there's some data. It gets to your screen. There's code written by Google employees that makes that happen. That code gets modified on a regular basis by Google employees. If enough Google employees get together, they can modify that code to do whatever they want.
I expect that any single Google employee does not have access, in the sense that they've locked themselves out of making changes to their systems without a computer seeing multiple human approvals. But there is a point at which someone can fix that computer.
But yes, my point was that the threat model here isn't "one Google employee goes rogue," it's "multiple Google employees with extremely privileged access to Gmail and/or their code deployment servers all decide that they want to read your email without telling you, and nobody blows any whistles," which seems much more far-fetched.
I expect that any single Google employee does not have access, in the sense that they've locked themselves out of making changes to their systems without a computer seeing multiple human approvals. But there is a point at which someone can fix that computer.
But yes, my point was that the threat model here isn't "one Google employee goes rogue," it's "multiple Google employees with extremely privileged access to Gmail and/or their code deployment servers all decide that they want to read your email without telling you, and nobody blows any whistles," which seems much more far-fetched.