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Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

wsj.com

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Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#151

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

jkingsbery wrote: post #143
clubm8 wrote: post #14

> The practice, which violates company policy, is particularly pronounced in China, according to some of these people, because the number of sellers there is skyrocketing. As well, Amazon employees in China have relatively small salaries, which emboldens them to take risks. Sounds like Amazon is finding out the hard way that you need to pay for trust , not just skill. When you pay the absolute bare minimum to your em…

(Disclaimer: I'm an Amazon employee, but I can only speak my own opinion on this matter.) A couple factual problems with this: first, the employees that have access to this sort of data are in white collar roles, and are hardly being paid "absolute bare minimum." Second, when Amazon interviews employees, we ask about our Leadership Principles ( https://www.amazon.jobs/principles ), one of which actually is that leade…

Does it really matter what a company talks about when they interview employees? Prevailing culture that is shaped by what the organization rewards seems way more important.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#152

Post by manfredo »

cm2187 wrote: post #139
fipple wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that China has a state sponsored IP exfiltration program (like Alexander Hamilton funded for the US in the 1700s). So the same logic doesn’t apply to Indian, Turkish, etc. employees.

Like pretty much every other major country in the world, including the US.

How many Chinese companies are giving Americans access to high level permissions in their computing infrastructure?

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#153

Post by fipple »

cm2187 wrote: post #139
fipple wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that China has a state sponsored IP exfiltration program (like Alexander Hamilton funded for the US in the 1700s). So the same logic doesn’t apply to Indian, Turkish, etc. employees.

Like pretty much every other major country in the world, including the US.

If every country has this then China’s is the Lebron James of them.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#154

Post by Ivoirians »

asdf1234tx wrote: post #145

On a some what related note, I read that google allows people to read my email. Google itself, and third parties. I've got friends who store important authentication, financial, and legal information in their emails. Makes me wonder about some of the btc thefts where the vector was never determined, and the victim was fairly competent.

If you read that original WSJ article, Google allows companies to access your email if you give them access to your email. As in, if you install e.g. Kiwi [1] and agree to let them manage your inbox, then they have API keys that they could use to read your emails. Sometimes users just give their username/password to the 3rd party.

But, like I said when the original story came out, those headline writers really know what they're doing. "Google allows 3rd parties to read emails" directly implies your incorrect interpretation. Like, even on the original article, people who hadn't read it were expressing shock in the comment section that their personal emails were being read by Google engineers.

[1] https://www.kiwiforgmail.com/

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#155

Post by jlarocco »

Latteland wrote: post #64
jlarocco wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are those logs available anywhere? Can users see when Google employees have looked at their data? Have those systems been audited by a third party to ensure they're working properly? I'm sure most Google employees are good people, but your basically telling everybody to trust you that Google's doing it right, but not providing any evidence to back it up.

I used to work at google too. End users don't get casually notified when someone looks at their data. But there are definitely audit logs inside the company. I worked on a product and you couldn't look at the data without running a special command, logging in with your account and describing what you were doing, and they audited those afterwards (didn't happen too much I guess). Here's an article about someone fired…

This part of that article is concerning:

> After the site broke the story, Google confirmed the engineer had been sacked in July after his actions were reported to the company via email.

Sounds like he was only fired after one of the victims reported him.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#156

Post by jlarocco »

morgante wrote: post #121
jlarocco wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are those logs available anywhere? Can users see when Google employees have looked at their data? Have those systems been audited by a third party to ensure they're working properly? I'm sure most Google employees are good people, but your basically telling everybody to trust you that Google's doing it right, but not providing any evidence to back it up.

> Are those logs available anywhere? Can users see when Google employees have looked at their dat For Google Cloud, we have access transparency logs which let you see when and why your data was accessed. https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/audit/access-transpare...

You left out a key bit of information: It's for Google Cloud customers with Platinum or Gold support.

Most GMail and Google Drive users can't see the access transparency logs.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#157

Post by morgante »

jlarocco wrote: post #156
morgante wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are those logs available anywhere? Can users see when Google employees have looked at their dat For Google Cloud, we have access transparency logs which let you see when and why your data was accessed. https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/audit/access-transpare...

You left out a key bit of information: It's for Google Cloud customers with Platinum or Gold support . Most GMail and Google Drive users can't see the access transparency logs.

You're right, Access Transparency is specifically for enterprise GCP customers (at least currently).

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#158

Post by carapace »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #150
carapace wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple at least sits on a huge pile of cash, yet Jobs colluded to steal billions from his own employees, the very folks who made the whole thing possible. You can't police that sort of sickness, it won't be healed by passing the right laws.

Laws won't work but asking nicely will? They can't steal from you if they're in prison.

Your original statement was, "This is more of a political issue than a cultural one." I'm not saying it's not political, I'm saying it's also cultural, when we revere and lionize people like Jobs and Schmidt rather than putting them in prison.

Law is a tool for managing human wickedness. If we weren't wicked we wouldn't have invented law. That shows trivially that character is more fundamental than policy, eh?

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#159

Post by AnthonyMouse »

carapace wrote: post #158
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws won't work but asking nicely will? They can't steal from you if they're in prison.

Your original statement was, "This is more of a political issue than a cultural one." I'm not saying it's not political, I'm saying it's also cultural, when we revere and lionize people like Jobs and Schmidt rather than putting them in prison. Law is a tool for managing human wickedness. If we weren't wicked we wouldn't have invented law. That shows trivially that character is more fundamental than policy, eh?

> I'm not saying it's not political, I'm saying it's also cultural, when we revere and lionize people like Jobs and Schmidt rather than putting them in prison.

Whether we put them in prison is the policy decision. Culture influences policy in the same way that policy influences culture, but they're not the same thing -- and there are two different cultures here. One is that of the executives making the corporate decisions, the other is that of the voters/representatives making the political decisions. They could be wicked and we could still put them in jail.

> If we weren't wicked we wouldn't have invented law. That shows trivially that character is more fundamental than policy, eh?

If people weren't as wicked we wouldn't need laws. If we had better laws people wouldn't be as wicked. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The undesired results are created by the existence of bad laws as well as the absence of good ones.

And more to the point, it's easier to change laws than culture. What would you suggest is the best way to affect the culture of corporate executives? Not even they can easily change it without a policy change, because the culture is derived from the existing policies and the corresponding consequences. The executives who cheat and steal and don't get caught are the ones who get bonuses and promotions and end up running the largest corporations.

Culture isn't static, it evolves based on the environment -- and the biggest part of the environment we have any control over is the laws. Bad laws suppress wages and cause economic inefficiency and wealth inequality, so here we are. Half the regulations on the books were passed under the guise of taking from the top, but the people actually at the top have the resources to avoid them so what they really do in general is take from the middle. But the middle is the place we wanted the people at the bottom to get to -- so all we're doing is making it harder for them to do that while pushing the people who are already there further down.

If you want to improve the culture, get rid of the bad laws and actually enforce the good ones.

Re: Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes

#160

Post by grkvlt »

gaius wrote: post #138
manfredo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience things like "ban all muslims" end up being more race-based in the sense that they target any brown-ish West Asian or South Asian people. How many Sikhs have been targeted because people think they're Muslims? Regardless the point is not that explicitly religiously based or race based policies are okay, it's that refusing to staff certain positions in offices abroad or to require that employees be US…

the government banning Muslims from entering the country. Which government did that then?

Apparently it was an actual policy that the current United States administration wanted to implement, but I think it got shot down by the Supreme Court or Congress for being unconstitutional. So I guess the point is that it is a genuine example of a thing that governments might want to do...
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