Sep 15, 2010 13:44 GMT  ·  By
Former Google site reliability engineer accused of snooping through the accounts of minors
   Former Google site reliability engineer accused of snooping through the accounts of minors

Google has confirmed firing one of its engineers, who according to some reports snooped private information from user accounts and harassed minors, for actions that broke internal privacy policies.

According to a Gawker Media article, the Google engineer's name is David Barksdale, he is 27 years old and was dismissed back in July.

Citing an undisclosed source close to the incidents, Gawker reports that Barksdale abused his powers as a Google Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to spy on several underage users, who he met through a Seattle-based technology club.

In one case, he is said to have rifled through the Google Voice call records of a 15-year-old, after the boy refused to reveal the name of his girlfriend.

In at least three other cases involving minors he allegedly misused his access to read chat transcripts or remove a ban directed at him from someone's Gtalk.

It doesn't seem that the harassment was sexual in nature, but nevertheless his actions consisted gross privacy violations and enraged the parents of the victims.

Barksdale was kicked from the technology group where he originally met the minors and his superiors at Google were notified of his abuses in July. Some time later the same month, the engineer was let go.

"We dismissed David Barksdale for breaking Google's strict internal privacy policies," Google's Senior Vice President of Engineering Bill Coughran, told Gawker.

"We carefully control the number of employees who have access to our systems, and we regularly upgrade our security controls–for example, we are significantly increasing the amount of time we spend auditing our logs to ensure those controls are effective. "That said, a limited number of people will always need to access these systems if we are to operate them properly–which is why we take any breach so seriously," he explained.

According to TechCrunch another Google spokesperson revealed that a similar incident where user privacy was violated by an employee with access to the company's servers occurred one time before and had the same outcome for the abuser.