 "James Snow")
"We have multiple layers of security and we have our own secret sauce underneath. For zero day attacks, we cannot only detect and intercept for our consumer users, but we can do that for business users as well. We call this network effective security. When something new comes out, if we caught it in one user in Sydney, we can protect everyone in India in real time," said James Snow, global product strategist for Google who leads the team for security and compliance for Google for Work products in an interview. Edited Excerpts:
You mentioned before that Google has the largest IP network globally?
Google has the largest IP network globally-on any given day the internet traffic that passes through our IP network might vary from 25 to 38 per cent of overall internet traffic per day -and that is from searching, to advertising to YouTube videos to Google apps. Our internal joke is that internet wasn't fast enough so we had to open our own. We have invested in all the different layers of (network) infrastructure to help protect our users that in ways that companies can't simply replicate and be not out of business. Just to give you an idea, all the data that enters are network is encrypted thrice and is replicated multiple times.
There is concern about data privacy when it comes to Google. Google Now probably knows more about a person that the person itself. Google is perceived as reading users' data?
About the consumers, all the services that they use they can control what data Google has about them. So for example, Google Now is not turned on by default. A user has to explicitly say I would like to use it to turn it on. And if next week you decide not to use it anymore, you can turn it off anytime. You as an individual are empowered to manage that data. It is the same for Google drive or Gmail-you can migrate it to Microsoft or any other service. We have those tools. You are in control.
When it comes to businesses, they are in different category. The companies are the data controller and we are the processors. So the businesses will instruct us what to do with the information. For our business customers for emails, chats and documents, we do not do anything with that information. It is literally in the silos-all that we have captured in our privacy policy for businesses, schools and governments. We cannot use that data for advertising or any other purpose.
But Google does use consumer data for advertising?
The short answer is yes, but the long answer is probably more important. The information that we gather, we do not sell or share that with any third party. Your data is not put up for the highest bidder; we do not do that at all. What we do is, we use that data for our own platforms internally, but this will vary with products. For example, Google Drive, even for consumers, Google doesn't use your notes, or home work or shopping list or whatever you have uploaded; we are not using any of that data for any advertising.
For Google Maps, if you turn of location history, we might use that to make restaurant recommendations and other such things, but then again you can still control that data. You can choose not to use Google Maps, or you can use it in incognito mode, in that mode, we would not be able to create your profile. Nobody is forcing you to sign it. We want you to sign in, because we want you to have better experience. Based on your location history, we can highlight and recommend you the places you might like to go.
Google Now is supposed to be there as your assistant-turning on when you have to leave for airport, or when you have some agenda set, or you are meeting somebody-it uses your emails -the idea is to bring all that data together and the more we know about you, the better we can do. But again, as a user, you are in control. Then all we know about is all anonymised. It is not being handled by a human sitting there-all that data is being handled by machines. Even when we use it from the advertising perspective, they do not know you personally. The advertiser does not have an access to you again.
It is again anonymised data which says ten people who were interested in GOLF have got this advertisement, but the advertisers do not know who those ten people are. So if you think Google is making money out of you, no, that is not it. Advertisers pay Google to reach out to target audience, but we will show that advertisement to you only if that is relevant to you as a person and you will click on that if it is important to you.
How much data Google has stored in its data centres?
Think about all the information that is available on internet today. Multiply it by 25 or 30. We have copies of the internet that we keep on our own infrastructure for analysis and testing. That is just for search. For YouTube, every minute we are uploading 13 hours of video. We are the largest email provider. It is properly amazing and is constantly growing. This is where we start talking about benefits of cloud provider. It lets us operate at scale and the cost of storing that information is nearly zero. So idea of our enterprise products, we are giving unlimited space.
How are you using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to improve security?
I will give some examples. The volume of spam generated has gone through the roof over last 4 to 5 years. But because we are the largest email provider, we can easily detect, who these spammers are, and we can sort it out for out, without you having to do anything. Another thing we do is (embed) antivirus, anti malware, anti ransom ware in our products, especially in our work products. We have multiple layers of security and we have our own secret sauce underneath. For zero day attacks, we cannot only detect and intercept for our consumer users, but we can do that for business users as well. We call this network effective security. When something new comes out, if we caught it in one user in Sydney, we can protect everyone in India in real time. With AI and ML, we can not only protect the users, but also identifying those people (attackers). We can also use these (technologies) to automate everything to make things more productive, and that is the next level of it.
