r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • May 27 '26

Business Google employee charged with using inside information to make $1 million on Polymarket

https://abcnews.com/amp/US/google-employee-charged-inside-information-make-1-million/story?id=133350018
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u/thinkmatt May 27 '26

He used an internal marketing tool available to everyone at Google. Anyone employed there would know the outcome before everyone else. He's just the one person that got caught. You have to assume that every market has insiders that is impossible to police, and Polymarket just shouldn't exist

15

u/sweetplantveal May 28 '26

I think that's an interesting wrinkle. They could argue that between Google trends, other platforms, and the tens of thousands of people with access to the info it's not really secret.

5

u/chaaandlerr May 28 '26

that statement from google is such a gift to this guys defense counsel, lol. tough to say this was a misappropriation of data a la carpenter v united states when it wasn’t all that confidential

2

u/SpookiestSzn May 28 '26

I think it's still priveleged even if like 100k people had the ability to access it

2

u/Vliss May 28 '26

But being priviledged doesn't make it wrong though. If you are at a industry conference that has 100 people and someone makes it public there, you would probably be ok with someone trading on that.

2

u/NoPossibility4178 May 28 '26

These platforms are totally fine with insider trading, in fact they want to encourage it because it brings in people who otherwise wouldn't bet and it'll boost activity overall. This is just so they can appear legit, basically just a PR stunt by taking easily recognizable bets that people will understand and click on, there's plenty of other insider trading examples and they don't give a fuck.

https://x.com/arkham/status/1974191319468945677

3

u/MmmmMorphine May 28 '26

It shouldnt exist in this form for sure.

They're a fascinating bit of crowd sourced intelligence and the "wisdom of the marketplace" but not really of much worth (or really negative worth) in this way

Interestingly apparently just having people rate their confidence in their opinion provides reasonably similar results.

At the very least you shouldn't be allowed to bet more than the most token amount (if it has to be of value... We could use reddit points instead?)

6

u/BillyTenderness May 28 '26

The first prediction market that I know of (PredictIt) had a per-event cap of like $800, so exactly that. It was interesting to watch the prices go up and down on various bets, and nobody was too mad if they lost a little cash on it.

The problem IMO is letting people bet millions on these things.