Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has confirmed the firing of an employee who the company says violated its policies by accessing the accounts of its users. The engineer, David Barksdale, apparently abused his privileges to break into the Gmail and Google Voice accounts of several children. Barksdale was discovered and fired in July when the parents of one of the children complained to Google, though it was understood that he was not accused of anything with sexual overtones.

Google acknowledged that the firing of Barksdale is the second such case of its kind in the company. The company told CNN that, "We dismissed David Barksdale for breaking Google's strict internal privacy policies. We carefully control the number of employees who have access to our systems." Google went on to elaborate that as part of its security controls that it has "significantly" increased the amount of time spent auditing its logs to ensure the continued effectiveness of its measures.

Any system administrator and IT manager will know the inevitability of someone having full access to the company's systems in order to maintain it properly. In Barksdale's case, he was an engineer on the company's Site Reliability team, which Google considers to be "highly experienced engineers who can be trusted"--in the words of a former site reliability engineer.

Beyond the considerations over the violation of privacy, this incident does highlight the fact that data stored on Google's system are open to access by at least some of Google's engineers. The bigger question here is whether companies, educational institutions or even governments should place their data with Google by hosting with Goggle Apps. Feel free to leave a comment; would love to hear your thoughts on this matter.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Wired
- check out this article at CNET News

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