>You cannot have an "only the good guys" backdoor.

So what? If I store a document in a private Google doc. I know that technically a Google employee could read it if they really wanted to, but the policies, security, and culture in place make it have a 0% of happening. It's possible to design proper access systems where random people are not able to come in and utilize that access.

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observationist 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So you think there's no Google employees with privileged access gooning on private images, stalking, selling access, disrupting individuals, etc?

Schmidt notoriously had a backdoor, and I'd be far more shocked if executives did not have backdoor access and know all the workarounds and conditions in which they have unaccountable, admin visibility into any data they might want to access.

These are human beings, not diligent, intrepid champions of moral clarity with pristine principles.

	▲	happyopossum 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Google employees with access? Yes. Google employees without audited and multiple levels of approval? No. I can tell you there are not. Any Eng at Google can read the entire codebase for gdrive, if there were backdoors it would become public knowledge very quickly.

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bigyabai 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It's possible to design proper access systems where random people are not able to come in and utilize that access.

How quickly "Hacker" News forgets Snowden.

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wang_li 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>I know that technically a Google employee could read it if they really wanted to, but the policies, security, and culture in place make it have a 0% of happening.

We know it's non-zero as they have already had occasions when it has happened that Google employees used their access to stalk teenagers.

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charcircuit 4 hours ago | parent [-]

And such access kicked off an internal investigation and got him fired. Privacy is taken seriously.

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jtbayly 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is such a backwards take. You are ignoring that the system you cite as evidence that secure systems with backdoors can be designed and protected from random access has not been perfectly protected.

And you say it's stronger now.

Ok, so which country or neighbor is going to be the one to hack our national encryption system with a back door the first time? The second time? The third time? Before we manage to get it right (which we never will), what damage will be done by the backdoor? Probably something like Salt Typhoon, which you also conveniently ignore as a counterfactual to your claim.

	▲	charcircuit 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It not being perfectly protected is by design. Security comes with trade offs. >Before we manage to get it right (which we never will) Keep in mind that modern encryption isn't perfect either. You can just guess the key and then decrypt a message. In practice if you make the walls high enough (requiring a ton of guesses) than it can be good enough to keep things secure.

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wang_li 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>And such access kicked off an internal investigation and got him fired. Privacy is taken seriously.

The complaints of the victim's parents kicked off an internal investigation, months later. It's not like google found this and took care of it on their own. Also, it has happened before too.

	▲	charcircuit 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Google's internal privacy controls and monitoring are much stronger today than when that happened.