Google has fired engineer David Barksdale for accessing private information from users’ Google Voice, Gmail, and instant messaging accounts. The users were apparently teenagers. Barksdale was working as a site reliability engineer or SRE at the company’s Kirkland, Washington facility. SREs have access to some of the company users’ most private information. Barksdale was evidently bragging to an online group he belonged to about being able to do this kind of thing. He evidently took pride in his hacking skills. Gawker broke the story.
And it seems this isn’t the first time it’s happened, either.