Beware the webinerds
Hello again, Hotmail? The cyberstalking engineer Google doesn't want you to knowabout
- Dubbed a "silly, good-natured nerd," former Google site reliability engineerDavid Barksdale was a little more than "silly." He was downright scary.
- The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, doesn't want to tell you when his engineers arespying on you.
Remember those kids that were convinced monsters lurked under their beds at night? And they made their weary parents religiously confirm that there were, indeed, no occult creatures living under the box springs?
Well, they grew up to be overly suspicious adults. And even with the Internet revolution, they're the ones still paying their bills via checks, calling instead of texting, and convinced that digital goblins are perusing your email, spying on your children, and reading your dirty chat messages.
It turns out, we'd better retract our snickers and jeers. Because their paranoia was grounded.
Proving that there's no such thing as a friendly, harmless enginerd, David Barksdale, a 27-year-old former Google engineer, was recently outed for cyberstalker abuses of his position.
In laypeople terms? Barksdale was caught spying on a few Google accounts. Teenagers' Google accounts. After he'd made their acquaintance at a technology meetup in the Seattle area.
Gasp! Shock! OMG!
And how has the Empire That Is Google handled the egregious privacy breaches? By saying it won't tell anyone if this happens again.
It's certainly nice to know that Google's got your back, isn't it?
While Google may think sacking the geek is good enough, the Peeping Techie could find himself trying to hack his way out of jail time, too.
How does the average webizen maintain cyber cred without running back to Hotmail? We're not sure. But we must admit, Yahoo Mail is looking mighty fine right about now.