Google Engineer Fired for Spying on Teenagers
A Google engineer has been fired after he abused his privileges within the company to spy on at least four underage teenagers.
Gawker Media reports that 27-year-old David Barksdale was fired from his position as a Google Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) in July 2010 after he accessed the user accounts of at least four minors he met through a technology group in Seattle.
Though it's unclear how many people were victims of Barksdale's disregard for user privacy, his victims include both male and female users. One case saw Barksdale tap into call logs from Google Voice after a 15-year-old boy he had befriended refused to reveal his new girlfriend's name. Barksdale is said to have accessed his logs, obtained the girlfriend's name and phone number and then threatened to call her. Another time he unblocked himself from a user's Gtalk list, despite the fact that the user in question clearly didn't want to talk to him. Gawker cites an anonymous source that says Barksdale also accessed chat transcripts and contact lists, and in one case actually quoted from an IM conversation he had looked up without the user's knowledge.
Though it's definitely creepy and unsettling, Gawker's source doesn't believe Barksdale's harassment was sexual in nature.
"My gut read on the situation was that there wasn't any strong sexual predatory behavior, just a lot of violating people's personal privacy," the source said.
Gawker spoke to a former SRE at Google who was able to shed some light on how Barksdale was able to access this information.
"There's a whole bunch of trust involved. There's a lot of data inside Google, and I'm willing to bet some of it is really valuable. But for me and the people I worked with, it was never worth looking at."
SREs are responsible for responding to technical difficulties that crop up in all Google products. As a result, SREs have access to sensitive data as well as user accounts for the services they're tasked with over seeing.
Once they found out about the breaches in privacy, parents of the victims withdrew their children from the technology group where they had met the Google employee. Soon after, Barksdale was kicked out of the group. Google was informed in July and fired him.
Google's Senior VP for Engineering told TechCrunch that Barksdale was fired for breaching the search giant's internal privacy policies:
"We dismissed David Barksdale for breaking Google's strict internal privacy policies. 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."
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well then, he wasn't a sexual predator, just a plain ole' creep.
Sooo... if someone is not a git and blatantly flaunting that they are violating privacy, they probably won't get caught?
Brilliant.
He should have tapped into a Barber Shop rather than the kids lives.
Sooo... if someone is not a git and blatantly flaunting that they are violating privacy, they probably won't get caught?Brilliant.
Same as if you work for the DOD and have a top secret clearance and expose confidential documents....they are trusting you to keep that stuff controlled. It would actually be very easy to walk in an copy stuff onto a thumb drive and walk out the door with it. It is all built on trust.
Of course if caught, they wont just fire you, you also get charged with treason but that is not the point I am making
This kind of stuff happens all the time but you usually don't hear about it. Good for Google to give him the boot.
hmmm gee this guy wasn't caught by googles system, he was caught by complaints from the victims/parents.
we all worried this would happen, this one time it was a least case scenario, however the guy was an idiot and blatantly threw out proof how stupid he was. this is the only guy they publicly caught, what about the ones they didn't publicly out, and what are the ones who haven't been caught doing? a through investigation should be done of all it's employees activities by an independant watch dog group.
Well, this creep definitely presents him as a creeper but he certainly doesn't LOOK creepy
/end sarcasm
looks like his dog is about to pinch one on his shoe.
now imagine your personal information floating around Google, Facebook, Tweeter, etc. and some support people who are paid 10-20$ an hour having access to all that. Now imagine someone wants to get all info about you. They can just bribe one of those support techs and they can easily target you. Before this was much harder than today. I wonder why people willingly trust all their private information to companies like Google and Facebook. Those companies spit on the privacy. If people knew how the data is kept in their datacenters and how open it is to anyone in those companies then they would not do trust them...
Wait what? A company that spies on people fires one of their employees for spying?
There are people out there in society that we all pay (one way or the other) to dig around in our confidential data. Medical records, financial data, employment records... the list goes on. Having been one of them, I can tell you, the shine wears off pretty quickly. Before long it's just "data". That said, if someone's going to get up to no good, you can't stop them... you can only react after the fact. Incidents like this wouldn't surprise you if you really understood the enormity of it all. What's surprising is that this trust is abused so seldom. Personally, it makes me feel pretty good about my fellow man.
I am gonna get thumbed down for this:
I feel sorry for the guy. He did something really dumb, and I hope he learned from his mistake. Being in IT means that often you are a gatekeeper to some pretty touchy information.
You have to /ignore that info or you will lose your job though. It is mostly not about the info, it is about making stuff work properly, which happens to be keeping the information of an organisation moving. It is often not the CEO with the top password, it is the CIO or CTO with that one.
This isn't just a problem with websites and the internet. Your private medical data at a doctor's office or clinic is accessible by any number of underpaid, un-motivated office assistants, medical assistants, etc.. Hell, I bet the janitor could get your records if he wanted to. I've heard stories of people trying to use medical records to blackmail patients. Maybe someone who works at your doctors office is also your neighbor, and they're jealous of your swimming pool. Some psychopath might just take your medical records and tell the whole neighborhood how you have herpes or an irritable bowel, just to hurt you, no other reason.
The problem with any security is that its always monitored by humans, and humans are always susceptible to greed, anger, jealousy, stupidy, insanity, etc... Think about that the next time some cop pulls you over for speeding, you better hope his/her spouse wasn't just caught cheating on them.
Jobs are hard to find these days, and this idiot blew a good job. Makes me sick!
Apparently this guy owns a lot of bright t-shirts, too. Could these clues have prevented these crimes from happening?
If that's a Google office, my ideas of them have been shattered
Way to go creep, you just lost what was probably a great career over doing something so childish and stupid.
That guy just looks like a pedofile.
I'm betting that Google was paying him to do this, but they got busted, so he took the blame.
I'm kidding, of course, but Google sucks anyway. I wouldn't be surprised at all if they had a top-secret department that does this to politicians and public officials.
Anyone in google can spy in your chats, emails, geographic location, etc... now imagine you have and android..... they probably even know when you go to the bathroom.... another reason to root your phone and don't trust google to protect your privacy for you.
Nice digital lynching Google! I guess this is an example of termination with extreme prejudice. It's one thing to fire someone for cause but quite another to make them unemployable by publicizing the fact.
Look at the Google Ad right below the comment field:
"Cell Phone Spying".
Doesn't look like Google is protecting anyone's privacy.
I'm betting that Google was paying him to do this, but they got busted, so he took the blame.I'm kidding, of course, but Google sucks anyway. I wouldn't be surprised at all if they had a top-secret department that does this to politicians and public officials.
They don't need a whole department for it. It took one guy and an hour or so on Google to hack Palin's Yahoo account. 'Hacking' stupid people is easy
They don't need a whole department for it. It took one guy and an hour or so on Google to hack Palin's Yahoo account. 'Hacking' stupid people is easy
Are you suggesting he figured out her password because it was simplistic? Because I don't think that is how it went down. Other than that, what difference would it make if the victim was smart or not?
Where do I get that sweet privacy cloth that's in the picture?
"One case saw Barksdale tap into call logs from Google Voice"
This is why no one should be using google voice! Every thing you say is being recored and stored! Bigoogle Brother is HERE!
Someone said
'Wait what? A company that spies on people fires one of their employees for spying?'
ahaha quite true, with Google there is no Privacy.
Here is issue is nothing to do with the employer. It's about a nefarious employee!
It's not Gtalk it's Gstalk
Just one more reason i avoid google!! Not saying any of the other search sites are alot better, but when they (google) drove around scooping wifi data all respect and honor they had from me was gone. Shame of it is a good friend of mines son works for this 9000 pound gorrilla!!!
No one @ Google questioned why he came to work in a Pebo Bear outfit each day?! This sounds like a case for the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Department!
This guy is a mess!