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."

Comments

Do No Evil

[whisper_jeff]

Google's policy may be "Do No Evil" but each individual's policy may differ...

Re:Do No Evil

[Richard_at_work]

And the quietly letting him go rather than warning others about this persons actions is ... whose policy?

Re:Do No Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless he is charged and convicted, let's not hang a man in the realm of public opinion. He was fired, and hopefully he learned something.

Re:Happens on every website.

[Aqualung812]

This is Google. They drive up and take pictures of your house.

OMG! Pictures of my house, on a public street, where thousands of people can drive by and see it? MY PRIVACY IS RUINED! I might as well post my SSN on the Internet now!

This just in!

[mdm-adph]

Individual person does nefarious actions -- name of company he works for used in title of news article for salacious reasons. More at 11.

Re:This just in!

[Combatso]

so you think they should have left out Googles name? I for one will think twice about how private any emails / chats sent through google really are. Without getting in to a 'think of the children' rant here... the real story is this guy was spying on teenagers conversations, chatting with them... and actually unblocked himself... if one rogue employee at google can do this, than many more can... and I stand by theory that anything than can happen, will happen... So yeah... the company name belongs here..

Re:Did Google do enough?

[bberens]

Google has no grounds to prosecute the guy. The kids/parents may have some grounds based on harassment or something but the guy legitimately had access to that data, he just abused it. It happens, he was fired. I love these posts which act as if "my company" could never hire anyone who would abuse their access to data. It happens regularly at every company I've ever worked at to some degree or another. When it happens, you deal with it. *shrug*

Cannot really be prevented

[gweihir]

As anybody with real system administration experience knows, what protects user privacy is that you do not look at their data without explicit permission. That means people with this level of access have to have certain personality traits, and a high level of personal integrity is the most important one. I guess this is just another failed Google hiring process result.

What now needs to follow is criminal proceedings resulting in a a rather unpleasant punishment. Oh, wait, the US does not have working privacy laws...

Re:More than enough reason for no business

[jgagnon]

Exactly... any admin worth their position could extract similar information from their corporate network. This was an inside job like any other inside job. It's only news because it is Google.

If this has been an admin of Facebook or MySpace it would have had similar impact. It should be no surprise that any information you give to a company is available to their admins to use or abuse.

Re:More than enough reason for no business

[arivanov]

It was not Google who caught the guy which is what is worrying in this case, it was the parents of the kids involved.

I would have expected a shop of their size to have proper security and use at least some of their precious IPR on log analysis.

Re:More than enough reason for no business

[Trepidity]

I dunno, at places I've been the low-level sysadmin access is not very closely monitored. "Official" access through the normal APIs is logged and monitored, but when the Unix sysadmin has root on the database machine, he could be grepping through the database for all anybody knows.