Internal document: Google fired dozens of engineers between 2018 and 2020 for abusing their access to data and tools
Some allegations potentially center around accessing Google user or employee data. — Joseph Cox — Google has fired dozens of employees between 2018 and 2020 … Tweets: @josephfcox , @josephfcox , @josephfcox , and @josephfcox Tweets: Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : Google statement on the leaked figures for insider data abuse https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : Google fired 36 employees in 2020, 26 in 2019, and 18 in 2018 for security related incidents https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : Most of the allegations related to mishandling of Google information. 10 percent though were misuse of systems, which can include accessing Google user data https://www.vice.com/... https://twitter.com/... Joseph Cox / @josephfcox : New: Google has fired dozens of employees for abusing access to data or tools in the past few years, according to leaked internal document. Can include proprietary data, but also potentially user data. Google previously fired engineer for reading chats https://www.vice.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The leaked figures land two years after an internal Google email warned staff that accessing company information without permission could mean termination — a warning that activist employees read at the time as 'need to know' policing aimed at organizers (that 2019 warning email). The new counts — 18 fired in 2018, 26 in 2019, 36 in 2020 — suggest enforcement of those rules was escalating, not easing.
Timing matters: the escalation overlaps with the period when Google said it fired a staffer for leaking employee information to media and placed two on leave for sharing internal docs and tracking a colleague's calendar (those 2019 labor-tension dismissals) — and after Wired noted the company hadn't pursued high-profile leaks about Project Dragonfly or Andy Rubin's exit package with its usual tenacity (that uneven-enforcement report). The irony that the abuse-count document itself leaked to VICE's Joseph Cox underscores how porous Google's own access controls remain.
First-order effects
- Google's engineers now operate under visibly enforced insider-threat rules, with terminations for data and tool abuse rising from 18 to 36 across the three years — and the company confirming only that most allegations relate to accessing user or employee data.
- Joseph Cox and VICE gain a rare quantified window into Big Tech insider-misconduct enforcement, forcing Google to respond publicly to numbers it never intended to disclose.
Second-order effects
- Employee activists can point to the pattern alongside the earlier 'need to know' complaints and calendar-tracking case to argue security enforcement doubles as a tool against internal transparency — a dispute Google later carried into a confidential settlement with six engineers over its anti-union campaign.
- Rival platforms face pressure to publish comparable insider-abuse figures or explain why they don't, since Google's numbers set a reference point for what 'normal' termination volume looks like at hyperscale.
Third-order effects
- If insider-access terminations keep climbing, the structural question shifts from individual misconduct to whether 'need to know' architectures — built for security — become the de facto governance layer over employee dissent, with regulators and labor boards eventually asked to draw that line.
The trend: Big Tech firms are hardening internal access enforcement just as labor tensions turn every data-related firing into a contested governance story.