Can high ranking employees at Google view my personal information?

Citations needed on those violations.

(I work for Google, and cannot access your data)

Not Google-specific, but access to production servers in the industry is heavily restricted to server ops roles so the majority of employees, even high ranking ones, do not have unfettered server/db access.

High ranking Google SRE's, on the other hand, can view your personal information as their job is to run and maintain the production servers where your personal information lives. I don't know what portion of Google employees are SREs but I would guess much less than 5 percent.

I don't agree that Google is a major offender as far as negligent or malicious data/privacy leaks. Their security seems fairly top-notch, especially considering the context of new hacks/leaks that come out constantly from other companies.

"There have been verified stories of personal privacy being violated by others and Google is probably the biggest offender"

What verified stories are you referring to?

From my personal communications with Google employees not directly involved with the tasks of maintaining correct customer data: they themselves did not have access to it, and they knew some people involved in analytics who could only access anonymized variants of said data. So from outside it looks like the access is on the "need to know" basis, as it should be.

Ever hear of rogue Russian submarine commanders?

When Google Photos was mistakenly identifying black people as gorillas in 2015, there was a tweet where the Chief Architect for Social was asking the user who reported the issue for permission to examine the data in his account:

https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/615356310410760193

It's not entirely clear who "we" is in that tweet.

Tangentially related to this - what if there was a major Google information leak, and a bunch of people's lives were unleashed on the net? Think about an Android user (me), who has their 1) google searches, 2) photos, 3) voice searches, 4) location history, 5) phone calls/sms, 6) email, 7) time/date of what apps you've opened, 8) contacts, 9) grocery lists/notes, 10) tasks/reminders, 11) calendar events - practically everything about me - stored with Google. If enough people's information were released, it could be almost a social upheaval.

Beyond just keeping my data out of that ecosystem, I sure as hell hope Google has some serious talent to keep my data safe from outsiders, and insiders wanting to make a splash. I mean, I obviously trust them to some degree. But it's a scary prospect to think what would happen if an enormous trove of Google data were ever leaked.

I'd assume yes.

Definitively yes, and not just high-ranking ones.

A while ago I have been contacted by a Google recruiter several times over e-mail, which I found bizarre, as I did not apply to any job at that time. I asked the recruiter to disclose where she exactly got my mail from and she dodged the answer.

Turns out there's a guy with the same name as me who is also a programmer (except he has been in the field for several years and works on awesome stuff, unlike me) and they were eager to recruit him, since I got the same mail several times over the course of a year from two or three different recruiters.

The only thing connecting me and the other guy was our last name. My e-mail address doesn't mention my last name in the slightest, I did not post it publicly (just tried to google it - zero results) and it's not connected in any way to a service where one could figure out the combination of the email, user and password (such as facebook or linkedin). I've also checked the data breaches on haveibeenpwned and I definitively did not use my real name on the services where the data was stolen.

Considering that the original guy's e-mail address was lumped in CC (fully visible - how professional of them) I can only think that they essentially did "SELECT * WHERE lastname = 'myname'", spammed all the available e-mail address and hoped for the best.

I used to work at Google as an engineer. Accessing user data in production systems was a fireable offense if you didn't have permission to do it, and permission was seldom given - you don't need actual user data to test stuff, since user-like data is sufficient.

Technically, it's possible to access it, bit no one person can do it without oversight.

Don't believe this horseshit. I work in Google Support, and I can assure you that the personal information of users is tightly protected and subject to stupid amounts of security and oversight. Like, to the point of constant frustration by support staff.

Gmail personal data is stored encrypted. Just because algorithms can profile you doesn't mean every google employee can simply read your emails or personal information raw from some db somewhere. I can't even pull up basic technical troubleshooting data from a cloud customer without begging them for the data.

Higher up executives don't necessarily have more access, access is given based upon your responsibilities, and level of need. A VP of marketing is not going to be granted access to a customer's gmail messages, because they don't need that information to do their job. There is no reason to grant them that access, the liability of a leak is far worse than any benefit.

Everything an employee accesses is controlled by a complex system, subject to oauth2 authentication, a permission handling technology, and fido u2f yubico security key 2fa. Everything an employee accesses is logged and monitored. Nobody is able to walk out of there with an archive of user info, that would alert every alarm in the system. Nobody has been able, as far as we know, to phish access into our internal network since we started using yubikeys for everything[1].

The employees with the most access are typically SREs and Developers, and their access is designed to facilitate their jobs. Example: the data in your BigQuery db won't be able to be easily read by any employee, but the right ones will be able to read logs, activity histories, and relevant statistics in order to be able to troubleshoot and diagnose bugs and issues and things. They don't need to know what data the table holds, and therefore aren't given access to read it.

We are pretty far from a major offender of negligence over the security of our user's data. As far as I know, we were hacked by China and the NSA, which immediately prompted us to encrypt our server2server communications, encrypt our storage data, and research and develop novel security best practices. Our development and trial with fido u2f keys, for instance, has resulted in a drop to 0 KNOWN successful phishing attempts, all while making 2fa more convenient than ever[1].

It may be hard to believe, but Google's information about your lives in the machine. Our employees only have access to the bits we need to do our jobs, which always sides on your privacy. Trust me, I wish I did have more access, because trying to troubleshoot in the dark sucks.

But they respect you and your privacy more than they respect me. And they work hard to keep your private information safe, to levels I doubt most companies you regularly use or shop at would ever care to. Remember, just because some company doesn't sell your info to advertisers doesn't make them more trustworthy. They could be storing your info in an unencrypted db with a basic admin/login on a rack of poorly administered and configured servers in a budget datacenter somewhere. Google uses the latest technology, funds new research, and implements a security policy built on state of the art equipment and software other companies could only dream of. This is not a secondary consideration for them, they bust their ass to keep your info safe.

[1] https://www.yubico.com/2016/02/use-of-fido-u2f-security-keys...

An easy way is to walk up to a QA or engineer, tell him "We are reviewing some sessions by customer and we keep getting this error". can you please help me replay customer sessions? This is an executive escalation?