Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

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I find it hard to imagine Google being leaked, though. The sheer amount of data (drive files, gmail data, etc) Google has in its silos makes it almost impossible to copy anywhere else other than on Google's own servers or another giant's DCs. Even just the metadata of every GMail message is probably a few dozen exabytes at the least. Any sort of Google data leak that would allow for you to find a random person would require a persistent backdoor into their systems.

The only realistic attack on Google would be some targeted/filtered dump of celebrities or perhaps entire GSuite organizations' emails and files - and even then it would only make headlines, not cause any real trouble for Google outside of <1% of their regular user base ditching for protonmail or what have you.

  I find it hard to imagine Google being leaked

Not all their data, and not all at once, but a little here, a little there.

  The sheer amount of data

It won't be possible to collect all of Google's data. It will get easier to collect more and more of it though (as storage grows larger and the net becomes faster). I wouldn't be surprised if all the email Hotmail handled in the 90s could fit on a consumer 20TB drive from today.

> The sheer amount of data (drive files, gmail data, etc) Google has in its silos makes it almost impossible to copy anywhere else other than on Google's own servers or another giant's DCs

my first computer had a two Megabyte Harddisk - around twenty years later my Phone has a 256 Gigabyte MicroSD card

it's going to happen

People also generate more and more data.

That's another great point, and it does mean that users always have less to worry about when it comes to recent data. But when it comes to a user's old data... well, you see where I'm going with that :)

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