Google engineer fired for stalking teens (Privacy 0 – Evil 1)

This article was just published today by the UK Telegraph, entitled “Google engineer fired for privacy breach after stalking and harrassing teenagers.” Here is a snippet of the article taken from the Telegraph:

The 27 year-old, a “site reliability engineer” based in Kirkdale, just north of Seattle, allegedly spied on several minors’ Google accounts without their consent.

The search engine giant, based in Mountain View, California, confirmed on Wednesday that Barksdale was sacked for violating Google’s “strict internal privacy policies”. It declined to provide further details.

But according to reports in America, the engineer allegedly accessed the accounts of four teenagers without their knowledge. It remains unclear how many accounts he accessed.

So that’s pretty creepy right? However what I really want to talk about is this little gem of a video that was released a short while ago by ConsumerWatchdog entitled Google is Evil. It specifically focuses on Google chatting up kids and trying to get their personal info. Very relevant and not really as funny as before in light of the Telegraph article. Check out the video here: