David Barksdale lost his job at Google after parents complained that the 27-year-old Site Reliability Engineer violated the online privacy of at least four minors, reports Gawker. According to the story, Barksdale used his elite position to tap into Google voice phone logs, accessed Google contact lists and chat transcripts, and in at least one incident, unblocked himself from a Google Talk buddy list after the teen account owner blocked him.
(Msnbc.com contacted Google via phone and e-mail, but Google has not responded with a comment at the time of this post.)
It's not clear whether Google was aware of Barksdale's activities before receiving complaints from parents of the minors. Gawker reports that several complaints were received and acknowledged by the company before Barksdale's July 2010 firing.
Adrian Chen of Gawker writes that the site "obtained an e-mail exchange between one person who complained about Barksdale to Google and Eric Grosse, an Engineer Director in Google's security group at the company's Mountain View, Calif. headquarters. Grosse quickly responded to the complaint with a curt e-mail: 'Thank you very much for reporting; we'll investigate quietly and get back to you if we need anything more.' "
Barksdale, a self-described "hacker," reportedly met the minors through a Seattle technology group — one from which he was barred after evidence of his abuses emerged.
Chen assesses that Barksdale's abuses were not sexual in nature and seemed more about abuse of power, on one occasion retrieving and flaunting the name and address of a 15-year-old's girlfriend after the teen refused to disclose her name, which was in the teen's Google Voice phone account. "You must have heard some pretty wild things if you think me getting fired is newsworthy," Barksdale told Gawker via e-mail.
Indeed, privacy complaints about Google (and that other omnipresent online entity, Facebook) are so common now, it's starting to feel like a "dog bites man" sort of story.
As Ryan Single recently wrote on Wired's Epicenter blog (in a post delineating Google's better practices), "They hold onto search and other profile data for too long, and their 'anonymization' of the data after 18 months could be easily reversed. They still turn on the creepy 'Web History' by default for all account holders, which is an egregious privacy choice (however, this 'feature' only records your searches and the places you visit from a search result page, unless you use the Google Toolbar in your browser, which records everything when ‘Web History’ is enabled)."
Those ads associated with words found in your Gmail or searches — the ones that follow you everywhere on the Internet? That's the least of your worries, it seems. Bots — not humans —scan your e-mails for keywords, and they really couldn't care less about your girlfriend's name or whatever. The bots just want you to know that Zappos shipping is free!
The problem is with people, and until Skynet, there's no getting past that reality. Speaking of egregious pop culture references, who here hasn't played "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," embracing that tingly feeling of power you get when your search engine superpowers to uncover even the most benign intimacies belonging to people you know in real life?
With elite access comes great responsibility, sometimes too tempting to resist. That creepy Google engineer stalker guy isn't so much an anomaly as he is evidence that your online privacy is gone gone gone, and it ain't never coming back.
Helen A.S. Popkin is always going "blah blah blah" about online privacy, then she asks you to Friend her on Facebook, or follow her on Twitter ... because that's how she rolls.
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