An internal Google database obtained by 404 Media shows Google recording childrens’ voices, saving license plates from Street View, and many other self-reported incidents, large and small.
The article contains confirmation to what many people already suspected:
YouTube made recommendations based on videos users had deleted from their watch history, which was against YouTube’s own policy.
It sounds like someone got ahold of a 6 year old copy of Google’s risk register. Based on my reading of the article it sounds like Google has a robust process for identifying, prioritizing, and resolving risks that are identified internally. This is not only necessary for an organization their size, but is also indicative of a risk culture that incentivizes self reporting risks.
In contrast, I’d point to an organization like Boeing, which has recently been shown to have provided incentives to the opposite effect - prioritizing throughput over safety.
If the author had found a number of issues that were identified 6+ years ago and were still shown to be persistent within the environment, that might be some cause for alarm. But, per the reporting, it seems that when a bug, misconfiguration, or other type of risk is identified internally, Google takes steps to resolve the issue, and does so at a pace commensurate with the level of risk that the issue creates for the business.
Bottom line, while I have no doubt that the author of this article was well-intentioned, their lack of experience in information security / risk management seems obvious, and ultimately this article poses a number of questions that are shown to have innocuous answers.
