That rummaging, though, is extremely restricted from the perspective of traditional privacy concerns -- it's not like someone at Google gets to look up what John Q. Smith searched for on this day. The analogy would be more like, "would you consider it private if a robot could look at each safe deposit box and add a special flyer to the ones with gloves in them, and then only in special circumstances does anyone get to look at anonymized box/flyer pairings to see if the robot did it right?"
The team members, as part of their responsibilities for
troubleshooting technical issues related to the site and
Google’s products, have access to users’ accounts.
Apparently Barksdale exceeded this authorized access to
spy on a group of specific people he’d met.
Another former site reliability engineer told Gawker that
Google gives such engineers unfettered access and “does
not closely monitor SREs to detect improper access to
customers’ accounts, because SREs are generally considered
highly experienced engineers who can be trusted.”
