Of the 600 financial sector workers surveyed on Wall Street and London’s Canary Wharf who lost or left a job last year, 41 percent admitted to taking confidential company data with them. Exactly half, 50 percent, said they would steal company information if they were fired tomorrow, and 39 percent said they would download it if they felt their job was at risk.

Nearly a third, 28 percent, would use the information to negotiate their next position. The most commonly stolen data: Customer contact lists that could be leveraged at a new job.

Cyber-Ark’s study isn’t the first to uncover such employee sentiments. A similar effort by the Ponemon Institute earlier this year found that close to 60 percent of people who left or lost their jobs in 2008 took company data with them. “I’m not sure that malicious intent and future employment are mutually exclusive,” Larry Ponemon, chairman of the Ponemon Institute, told eWeek at the time.

“Clearly the responses show that obtaining future employment was a significant motivating factor,” Ponemon added, “but when we see a high percentage of individuals who took information knowing full well they were acting in violation of company policy, that hints strongly at the presence of malice.”

Everyone loves Google. Sounds like so much hyperbole now, but at the time it was essentially a truism.

Eight years later, that’s no longer really the case. Today, Google seems a distorted reflection of the ideals that made it so beloved. Google’s enormous success and relentless pursuit of new markets have inspired some to take an evil-empire view of the company. And Google (GOOG), by virtue of its protean business model and the arrogant righteousness with which it executes on it, perpetuates that view–although the company likely considers those who hold it to be Luddites.

Sure, everyone loved Google in 2001. But in 2008 they fear it. The Google of 2001 was a fascinating corporate anomaly, a company known for its colorful campus, lunar exploration grants and a cafeteria so good it was profiled in Food & Wine. The Google of 2008 is a different beast entirely. It’s a company accused of privacy violations in the states and abroad. It’s a company whose fast-broadening reach has given it unchecked power. And, it’s a company that last month came within three hours of a Department of Justice antitrust suit.

No wonder it’s fallen off the TRUSTe/Ponemon Institute’s list of the top 20 most trusted companies in the United States.

And it’s quite a tumble Google’s taken. The company ranked 10th in the Ponemon opinion surveys conducted in 2006 and 2007. This year it didn’t even merit a ranking. Quite a blow for a company for whom user trust is critical. But then consumer perception is a fickle animal, as Google founder Sergey Brin once noted. “Some say Google is God,” Brin said back in 2003. “Others say Google is Satan.”

Seems the latter camp’s picked up quite a few new members in the ensuing years….

[Image Credit: Google Blogoscoped]