Google creates Red Team to curb privacy gaffes

Google has opened a Red Team tasked with discovering privacy issues, ostensibly to curb a string of costly bungles.

The small team is named after the label given to units established to test an organisations’ security posture such as military outfits and physical and IT penetration testers.

Engineers within the team would examine all Google products including its Chrome web browser to sniff out privacy gaffes before they become bad headlines.

News of the group followed a recent $US22.5 million ($21.3 million) fine imposed by the US Federal Trade Commission on Google to settle charges that the company bypassed user privacy settings in the mobile Safari browser.

Google was seeking highly skilled engineers to build the team.

In a job advertisement first reported by Kaspersky’s Threat Post, Google sought a data privacy engineer for its US office who would “have an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of modern web browsers and computer networks, enjoy analysing software designs and implementations from both a privacy and security perspective, and will be recognised experts at discovering and prioritising subtle, unusual, and emergent security flaws.

“They would research, document, and help remediate design decisions, operating procedures, or processes that may directly or indirectly contribute to future privacy risks.”

The team would work with Google’s new single privacy policy introduced in January which covers some 60 services.

It was designed to simplify privacy for users but had no means for users to opt out which rattled government, regulators and privacy advocates.

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