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Comment by kijin | Hacker News Reader

> Can Google employees access your files?

Do bears shit in the woods?

Quoting from google.com/privacy: "We restrict access to personal information to Google employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information in order to process it for us, and who are subject to strict contractual confidentiality obligations and may be disciplined or terminated if they fail to meet these obligations."

Speaking as a Googler, everything I've seen indicates a strong company-wide emphasis (both technological and process/policy) on user privacy. Not only who CAN access your individual data, but who DID access it and why.

I've updated my post. I didn't mean does everyone have access, I meant is it even technically possible for someone with proper access to view the original file. If files are encrypted properly then no one at the company would be able to access them.

Clearly unencrypted. They dedup, enable OCR searching, transparent online access to office style documents, etc.. These features would not be possible if they encrypted your bytes before being sent over the wire.

You might want to look into Tarsnap. It's more expensive and you don't get the fancy features, but they offer opaque encrypted file handling. Also, there have been a couple niche strong privacy centered providers that have commented in this thread.

I suppose one could create a Truecrypt container and have GDrive sync it in the background. Wonder if Google will ever complain about files they can't process.

Clearly unencrypted. They dedup ...

Just like Dropbox does.

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