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Comment by 2muchcoffeeman | Hacker News Reader

Wait what? I can bribe a human at google to flip a switch and there are no checks and balances in place to discover a change made to a 20K a day account?

How many google insiders can take bribes like this? Have they gotten rich from it?

What’s the minimum spend to get official help then?

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Considering there are over 150,000 people working at Google, I would assume the odds one of them would take a bribe to be pretty good. That said, it certainly doesn't prove this has ever happened.

There are 150,000 people at Google. But how many people can, on their own and without being noticed, flip that switch. And how much are they getting paid that they are willing to risk their job/career/a lawsuit to flip that switch? I assume their compensation from Google at that level is already pretty healthy, so it's not like they'd need that money for a necessity.

It sounds unreasonable. But then again look at how many people complain about being banned by Google or Facebook for no reason and without recourse.

Maybe all it takes is to know a guy who can complain about the account in the right way that it automatically gets suspended and waiting for a human to take a look takes however many weeks.

Maybe 20k a day is still small fry according to Google. That’s only 7million a year. Apparently Coke has a total marketing budget of 4 billion a year. Couple of the big guys on board and 20k a day is just a rounding error.

There is a reasonably well documented underground economy of bribing Instagram employees to verify accounts (blue checkboxes) [0] and steal sought after usernames.[1]

Amazon employees have been convicted of bribery for taking $ to "leak information about the company’s search and ranking algorithms, as well as share confidential data on third-party sellers they competed with on the marketplace".[2]

If this happens at Facebook and Amazon, I can imagine it happening at Google.

[0] https://mashable.com/article/instagram-verification-paid-bla...

[1] I did not find any citable evidence on the first page of Google, but it's something I've heard from friends that are into influencer stuff. Supported by a quote from [1]

"he decided to message someone with an interesting handle (a.k.a. username). That someone said they were able to take over that account because he worked at Instagram."

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/11/former-amazon-employee-sente...

How long before some enterprising soul offers Bribary as a service?

I can see it now - and intermediary that links willing briber with willing bribee in an anonymous way. Kinda like task rabbit for big tech...

I'm just joking right?

I don't believe it. A single person likely can't flag a customer without a few checks and balances.

A single user, let alone a single employee, can certainly flag a variety of things. A user flag by itself seems unlikely to permaban a not-tiny customer, and maybe a single employee flag seems the same. However, employees are better positioned than the general public to understand the combination of small actions that will yield a big result when cranked through the mysterious nonlinear algorithm. The employee wouldn't have to understand the algorithm, because theoretically no one does. (Hello alibi!) She would just have to observe its judgments as part of her normal employment duties.

Haha.

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