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Former Google Engineer Used Access to Spy on and Harass Teens

by Amar Toor on September 15, 2010 at 10:40 AM

kirkland, wa. google headquarters
During his tenure as an employee at Google, 27-year-old David Barksdale belonged to an elite group of Site Reliability Engineers, or SREs, giving him total access to some of the company's most closely guarded personal data -- including private Gmail accounts. Instead of using this access to respond to technical difficulties, however, Barksdale reportedly spent a lot of his time stalking teenagers... and reading their private chats.

Although the breadth of Barksdale's privacy violations remains unclear, Gawker confirms that the now-former engineer spied on the Google accounts of at least four minors, whom he had met through a technology group in the Seattle region. According to sources close to the situation, Barksdale repeatedly accessed the teens' chat transcripts and contact lists, even after some of the minors took steps to cut communication with him. When one teenager tried to block him on Gchat, for example, he promptly unblocked himself. In another case, he hacked into the Google Voice call logs of a 15-year-old boy, after the teenager refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend.

Because SREs have to remotely access Google's services throughout the day, or at odd hours, Barksdale's actions went largely unnoticed. When some of the teens' parents began to speak out about his intrusions, however, he was promptly kicked out of the group, and, in July, was quietly fired by Google.

Creepy as the engineer's violations may be, a source close to Barksdale believes that his online harassment probably wasn't sexually motivated. "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," a source told Gawker. Barksdale confirmed that he was indeed fired, but declined to discuss the matter in further detail. "You must have heard some pretty wild things if you think me getting fired is newsworthy," his e-mail reads.

Google, meanwhile, says it's doing everything to make sure that something like this never happens again. "We dismissed David Barksdale for breaking Google's strict internal privacy policies," reads a statement from Bill Coughran, Google's Senior Vice President of Engineering. "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."

Tags: Engineer, gchat, Gmail, google, privacy, PrivacyIssues, SiteReliabilityEngineer, spying, Stalker, teens, top, web

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