
ShoeMoney Sues Google Employee For AdWords Violations - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/07/shoemoney-sues-google-employee-for-adwords-violations/
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patio11
I'm absolutely astounded that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often.

There are tens of thousands of Google employees who have access to data which
is commercially sensitive and worth, literally, millions. (To say nothing of
how many search engineers could transfer a million dollars with a single hand-
edit to "remove web-spam" on a single keyword.) Most of them are AdWords
account reps, Google's dirty little secret: we'll pay you $40,000 to about one
step above a call center monkey intellectually, you have no opportunity for
advancement, and the work is soul-suckingly boring next to the Wow I Get To
Work At Google thoughts that brought you here.

(Disclosure: I was once a call-center monkey, though not at Google.)

In banking or finance, there would be an entire department tasked with nothing
but playing Big Brother over these employees. Failure to aggressively monitor
for non-compliance would result in regulatory slap-down.

Does Google strike you as the kind of place where they monitor every entry
made by employees and _have an actual human perform random audits just to be
sure_?

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nessence
this happens in every market, it's called insider trading and to expect google
to be immune is naive. it's a risk and/or cost of doing business.

~~~
patio11
Insider trading? You mean that defined crime with the lock-you-away-in-federal
prison penalties routinely imposed? Investigated by a dedicated government
agency? Which I got an email about four days ago? From the corporate division
whose job it is to sniff out and eliminate insider trading? By, for example,
emailing every engineer 4th class to remind them that earnings announcements
are coming out this week and that all trades of company stock within 4 days of
the announcement are to be made only with signed authorization and that
infringement of the rule is grounds for immediate termination regardless of
whether I have actual insider information or not? That insider trading?

This resembles what you think goes on inside Google? In what way, pray tell?

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jraines
There's a market for keywords, and these employees (we are, I guess, assuming
for this discussion) have insider information on those. Like you said, it's
worth millions, and like stock trading, it's basically a zero-sum game, so if
you become a big winner by cheating, there are people losing unfairly.

Just because it doesn't have the kind of rules around it that you describe
doesn't mean it's not analogous. In fact, I thought that analogy and the
galling lack of such oversight was your original point.

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prawn
If the story as printed is true, the Google employee in question should be
fired.

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froo
_the Google employee in question should be fired._

That should read...

 _the Google employee in question should be fired, out of a cannon, into the
sun._

If this story turns out to be true, I think this might not bode well for
Google, given their current position with antitrust and their dominating
(monopoly?) position in online advertising.

