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Google Engineer Spied On Teen Users
bonch writes "Former Google employee David Barksdale accessed user accounts to spy on call logs, chat transcripts, contact lists. As a Site Reliability Engineer, Barksdale had access to the company's most sensitive information and even unblocked himself from a teen's buddy list. He met the minors through a Seattle technology group. Angry parents cut off contact with him and complained to Google, who quietly fired him."
More than enough reason for no business to store any business e-mail on their servers and no one with any e-mail which has real world value.
You are basically suggesting that no one uses the Internet anymore. End-to-end encryption aside, there will always be a system administrator with the technical ability to snoop data stored or in transfer. The only reason you can slam Google here is because they actually caught the guy.
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
"And it’s important, for example, that we’re all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act... "
The "Patriot Act" was given as just one example, not as the main reason. The old "security versus privacy."
After RTA it appears that David Barksdale violated Google internal policies so that means some Federal ECPA laws were violated, specifically 18 USC 2701(a).
The exceptions outlined in voluntary 18 USC 2702 and mandatory 18 USC 2703 don't apply either.
If Google doesn't have a policy of handing privacy violations over to AUSA/Federal or local law enforcement then I would urge a review of Google's policies.
Holy shit, Pope Benedict must be a majority shareholder at Google!
It said quietly fired, not quietly transferred to a different regional office.