Google Fires Employee Accused Of Spying On Kids

For a Google engineer who was fired in July, it apparently wasn’t enough just to Google people in order to stalk them. Instead, he allegedly abused his access and violated the company’s privacy policies to snoop on users.

Valleywag reports the man spied on four teenagers, peeking in on emails, chats and Google Talk call logs for several months before the company discovered what was going on.

A Google spokesman confirmed the firing to Valleywag:

“We dismissed [redacted] for breaking Google’s strict internal privacy policies. We carefully control the number of employees who have access to our systems, and we regularly upgrade our security controls-for example, we are significantly increasing the amount of time we spend auditing our logs to ensure those controls are effective. That said, 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.”

TechCrunch reports the firing marks the second time the company has canned someone for privacy violations.

GCreep: Google Engineer Stalked Teens, Spied on Chats (Updated) [Valleywag]

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