Google employee fired for privacy breach

We trust Google with personal data and hope that the company will ensure maximum confidentiality. In fact, she can not. Even despite the titanic work of Google in screening out potential candidates, among the 20 thousand employees there will definitely be a “black sheep”.

A Google programmer spied on users of Gmail and Google Voice for several months before he was discovered. Today, the company has officially confirmed this fact and recognized the problems in providing confidential information.

27-year-old David Berksdale (David Barksdale) was dismissed in July 2010. He served as Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) and had unlimited access to user accounts.

It is not known how many people were subject to surveillance on his part, but we are talking about at least four cases. One of the victims was a 15-year-old friend of David, who refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, and David conducted a brief investigation into the Google Voice logs. In another case, he forcibly removed the lock from himself in another Gtalk contact list. At the same time, Burksdale called himself a "hacker."
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The programmer’s behavior was not sexual in nature and its reasons are not completely clear yet, but there’s a violation of someone’s privacy.

It should be noted that SRE engineers have privileged status on Google. They have full access to the database and can access it at any time of the day. In Google, there is no special position for the supervision of the actions of SRE - they are considered in a sense, "elite" programmers who can be trusted. That is why the activity of Berksdale was not detected within the company, but only on a tip from the victims .