Google sacks engineer for violating privacy policies

WASHINGTON: Google has sacked one of its engineers, David Barksdale, for breaching privacy policies after it was alleged that he had harassed several underage teens and spied on their private data.

According to News.com.au, 27-year-old Barksdale, who worked as a site reliability engineer at Google's Kirkland office near Seattle in Washington, repeatedly took advantage of his position to access users' accounts, violating the privacy of at least four minors during his employment.

Google senior vice president of engineer, Bill Coughran, confirmed that his dismissal was a result of violating internal privacy policies.

"We dismissed David Barksdale for breaking Google's strict internal privacy policies. "It's unclear how widespread his abuses were, but in at least four cases, he spied on minors' Google accounts without their consent," Coughran said.

"We carefully control the number of employees who have access to our systems, and we regularly upgrade our security controls. 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," he added.

Barksdale reportedly first met the teens at a "technology group" in Seattle.

Coughran further assured that Google was constantly working to improve internal privacy controls and added: "We are significantly increasing the amount of time we spend auditing our logs to ensure those controls are effective."