This is how it should work. But there is no way to verify if that is also how it actually works. So it amounts to a pinky promise and from any large company that to me is not enough, so while I appreciate your candor and your belief in that your employer is abiding by this I hope you will forgive me from having a lot of lingering skepticism.
Fundamentally it’s impossible to prove a negative, so agreed that it’s a pinky promise. I would say that I am a little closer to the problem space than just ”believing” from my time working in this area and dealing with these issues.
I routinely dealt with situations where connecting workspace data with other teams, even with explicit opt-in from users, at best required building incredibly detailed data scrubbing and log redaction to ensure no user data persisted outside of the workspace systems, in case it might accidentally end up used for some non-workspace purpose. At worst it was simply not possible, or not worth the other teams time to build things to a standard that would satisfy legal and privacy.
For sure, it’s possible there is some secret system or accidental data exposure, as I said, can’t prove a negative. But I will freely confess that I was someone who was generally skeptical of Google’s approach to data handling and always believed Gmail data and everything else was mined for every purpose until I joined Workspace. Once I was inside and saw how carefully it was treated and how many rules there were around anything you do with user data even within the Workspace teams, I was honestly nonplussed. It made product development harder.
Yeah, that statement is an oversimplification of an oversimplification. The idea behind it philosophically is that it is far easier to prove that something exists/is happening than to prove that it is not. Essentially that if someone is going to make the claim that google is doing X, the proof is easy: a single instance of it happening. To prove google is not doing X requires you to create a collection of all of googles actions, prove that it is a full collection of their actions, and then prove that within that collection exists what the topic of debate is. Therefore, while it is not technically impossible to prove that google is not doing X, for the purposes of debate we should treat it as if it is and the burden or proof should rely on the person claiming that google is doing X.
Of course, as people living in the world we don’t necessarily need full proof to try and protect ourselves from the actions of an entity we don’t have full knowledge of. But saying “I don’t want to give google X data because of what they theoretically could do with it” is different rhetorically from saying “I believe that google is doing X with the data, and if you don’t prove otherwise it’s probably true.”
