Amid mounting government scrutiny over consumer privacy, Google has fired a software engineer following a related policy breach. Engineer David Barksdale has been "dismissed" for "breaking Google's
strict internal privacy policies," Bill Coughran, Google's SVP of engineering, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. An engineer in Google's Seattle office, Barksdale "allegedly accessed information of
several users who were minors," a company spokeswoman tells
The Wall Street Journal.
Gawker first reported the news on Tuesday.
As The Journal notes, "The privacy-breech comes amid probes in the U.S. and overseas for what it has said was
the inadvertent collection of personal data on unsecured WiFi Internet networks, as well as a privacy flap in February over the release of a social-networking-type service called Buzz."
Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »
