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I meant for things like audit logs based on your account for every single thing you do.


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Only if you are ingesting those logs, correlating them with users and storing that data somewhere.

You need logs of some form to know what users did, or tried to do.

I'm not talking about 3rd party analytics.


It’s very domain specific. We log everything, no one looks at it, but when things go south that’s when we do the investigative work. I say “log everything” you might need it later

Exactly. Can every piece of data logged be tied back to a legitimate business purpose? What’s needed here is a mentality change: These logs should be thought of as liabilities rather than assets. You should log only what you need, while you need it, and then turn off the log when you’re done. If your mentality is “log everything, always, because maybe we’ll need it later” then these privacy and security trash fires should be expected.

Yes but my audit logs are special and everyone just loves them, although they playfully act bored

Is there some line you don't want it to cross? As tech progresses, there will be increasingly more about everything you do that gets logged.

I suppose they already have a complete log of all your transactions, so may as well make it function better.

I think there is certainly a place for audit trails etc, but it again comes back to how that data is used. An access log is an access log, but it's a difference if you analyze it to find people looking at data they have no reason to look at, or if you analyze it to track who spends how long on their toilet break. And a lot of what's offered by current "bossware" clearly falls in the latter category.

Yeah you store the log of every number.

But then they can read the logs and track you anyway?

Nah, I was thinking in terms of behavior. Some (expensive) devices suck for detail on logging to the point of uselessness for forensic purposes, for instance. It'll compress a dozen criminal concepts into a single entry such as: "A user logged off"

"Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company..."

Why would you ever want to entrust a log of everything in your company to a third party service? Honestly curious.


Sure. But most other places (unsure about Apple) don't automatically ship those logs off to the maker of the OS for centralised bulk collection, analysis, and monetisation.

Yeah, that may be a little too detailed for customer reporting. It works for me for personal logging though.

Hmm, I think that anything you do not consider ‘just logs’ should be somewhere in your main database instead.

You forgot also making sure you aren't logging things you shouldn't log. Some are obvious maybe like passwords. Others might be less obvious like the title of every window on the user's desktop which Facebook Oculus logs. Those titles end up including every page of every website you've visited, the title of every document you've edited, and every video you've watched.

Yep, that might be true for certain industries.

But logs don't count as the transactional data that needs to be kept for legal reasons.


Of course it makes technical sense to just log everything. Especially at a company with the culture of google.

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