- Image via Wikipedia
If you were to Google the term “privacy,” right now, here’s what you wouldn’t get. You wouldn’t get complaints about a corporate owned web service that can show you pictures of your house that you didn’t take or put online. You won’t find a story about how your personal emails are scanned (albeit, your information is not taken out) to find relevant advertising terms for the sidebars. But what you might find, at least today, at least in Google’s news search function, is a story about how one Google employee completely disregarded the privacy of the users.
The employee in question was a Site Reliability engineer, or SRE. This is considered to be enough of an advanced position that Google didn’t monitor him very closely; it was a position of trust. This SRE, named David Barksdale, used his administrative permissions to access the call logs of a fifteen year old user in order to obtain the name and phone number of the user’s girlfriend. Apparently, there were at least four cases of Barksdale accessing underage user’s accounts without their consent. Coming from a company so widely used as Google, which deals in such a powerful commodity as information, privacy violations of this magnitude, not to mention creepiness, are more than a little troubling.
Google is trying hard to patch up the damage done to their geek-friendly, “not evil” reputation. Barksdale has been fired. The company has stated that they regularly upgrade their security controls and are substantially increasing the amount of time they spend reviewing security logs, in order to reduce the possibility for such privacy abuses in the future. Google also says that they exercise careful control over how many of their employees have access to the systems. Given that Google may have more access to personal information than any other corporation in the world, we should all hope that these improved security practices will be enough to protect our privacy in the future.
