Google's engineers are notoriously loose-lipped (which is a good thing!!!). There's no way they would be able to keep a secret like this. Anytime a customer's private data gets accessed, you either a) need approval by someone or b) "break the glass", which is only reserved for oncall fires. Either way, it gets audited.
The only way I would believe something like this is if an executive/higher up requests data access, gets it, and the person auditing looks the other way.
And the source for that claim is not even a Google engineer, but apparently somebody who heard how Google engineers are "notoriously loose-lipped".
From which loose-lipped Google engineer did you get that information about "needing approval", "breaking glass" and "audits"?
> The only way I would believe something like this is if an executive/higher up requests data access, gets it, and the person auditing looks the other way.
It's much easier to believe once you remember how Google actually makes its money [0].
In that context it not only becomes believable, but it actually fits perfectly into their MO [1].
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-...
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2016/03/09/google_ventures_yield...
Your first link explains how Google doesn't actually give your data to anyone else. Your second link is about a company that Google Ventures invested in. The equivalent would be that some company claims a YC-backed startup stole some of their IP, and that somehow YC is at fault, which is silly. Google isn't even a party to the lawsuit (further, it's not clear that the company who sued even won and to an extent it looks like they might be a patent troll).
> From which loose-lipped Google engineer did you get that information about "needing approval", "breaking glass" and "audits"?
A bunch of it is public: https://cloud.google.com/access-transparency. Access Transparency provides the access logs to the customer, and Access Approvals allows a cloud customer to prevent Google from accessing their data without approval from the company. But yes, you could also go searching HN for discussion of these topics and probably find quite a lot from people.
Nobody said Google "gives data away", the article explains how Google monetizes the data.
> Access Approvals allows a cloud customer to prevent Google from accessing their data without approval from the company
All Access Approval does is prevent individual Google employees from accessing the data, which is not the same as "Google as a whole". It also seems to have a long list of Google services were it does not apply as no AT logs are created or other exceptions apply.
And while that might be nice, it's neither special, nor does it change the nature of Google's business, it's just virtue signaling and building plausible deniability along the lines of "We really do care about privacy! At least in as so far as we don't want to get regulated!"
You know, just like claiming how Google "doesn't give data away", when in reality it very much sells all the useful insights, said data gives, to the highest bidder.
With the scale of surveillance data available to Google, this is how they have their cake and eat it too.
Once you know that note-taking apps (e.g.) are a hugely growing space, it's easy to use publicly available data to find the startups making a splash. Not once did Google's data tell them Startup X is an acquihire target. And yet, here they are at Startup X's door.
And even if they don't access file or email content, metadata like access data like Play Store performance, Google searches for competing products, and Google Analytics data, might seem like fair game.
If there's no infosec and it's just infra and developers and CTO's signing contracts with vendors, even Google, you have an issue.
Got a source for that?
I have resorted to using an old school notepad for my development ideas pretty much. A software company I used to work for got shuttered just 3 months after a big software company paid the startup a visit to observe operations back in 98, I've always been wary of corporate espionage since.