Google fires employees to abusing access confidential user data

Search engine giant Google has fired several of its employees, who miss used the tools that were used to access user data. Content creator Motherboard on August 4, 2021 reported that the internal company documents were used for investigation. The report added that some of the employees of Google kept a watch on other employees with the help of the tools that violated the policies of the search engine.

36 of its employees were fired in 2020 and most of them were removed for mishandling confidential information. For instance, some of the confidential information was also shared with people outside the company. 18 people were fired in the year 2018 and 26 were fired in 2019. These were due to security related issues. A spokesperson from Google while talking to a leading daily explained that the employees are restricted with the help of many industry leading safeguards.

The spokesperson added that it limits access to user data only to the necessary people and they would also need to give a justification while accessing such sensitive data. Before any employee is granted access to such data, they need to go through a multi-stage review. They are also constantly monitored fir any violations or anomalies. The news has been reported after a new book had surfaced that mentioned that the Facebook employees tend to abuse their access towards user data.

It was between 2014 and 2015 when the social networking giant had hired 52 people that would be able to access user data for personal reasons. A report mentioned that an engineer had used his access to the user data to track a woman he was with in a hotel room after they had a fight. There are more tech companies whose employees have also abused their access to user data. Even Snapchat had abused access to data to spy on people with the help of internal tools. It was also reported by Motherboard in 2019.

Photo Credits: CNBC