The Vice Motherboard has obtained internal Google documents stating that the company has fired dozens of employees for data abuse. The documents describe investigations into cases where Google employees used their positions to steal, leak, or abuse data they had access to.
According to these papers, between 2018 and 2020, the company fired dozens of employees for abusing access to internal tools and data (including information about users and employees).
For example, in 2020, Google laid off 36 employees due to security concerns. 86% of these allegations were related to the abuse of confidential information, for example, the transfer of internal Google data to third parties.
Another 10% of charges in 2020 related to misuse of various systems, including accessing user or employee data, helping others to access that data, and modifying or deleting user or employee data. For comparison, in 2019 this figure was 13%.
An anonymous person who provided the documents to reporters said that in 2019, 26 people were fired from Google because of such allegations, and, in comparison, in 2018, 18 people.
A Google spokesman that was contacted for comment said:
With regard to user data, we severely restrict employee access [to such information] using various security measures, including: access to user data is limited only to the required circle of persons, for access to such data, you must provide justifications before providing access to confidential data a multi-stage check is carried out, monitors anomalies and abuses.
The number of such violations, both intentional and unintentional, is invariably low. Each employee is trained annually, and we investigate all allegations and violations, and then take corrective measures, up to and including layoffs.
Let me remind you that we also talked about the fact that Google recruits a team of experts to find bugs in Android applications.
