Google Fired Engineer David Barksdale For Accessing Users' Gtalk & Gmail Data

Google has confirmed that it has fired Site Reliability Engineer David Barksdale for accessing users Gtalk and Gmail private data. Google said that the fired employee could use the data to spy on and harass people which included 4 minors.

Gawker #-Link-Snipped-# -

“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.”
Bill Coughran, Senior Vice President, Engineering, Google
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The report repeatedly points out that how much sensitive data people have shared with Google that Google's employees can use if they wish (of course this is against their policy).