Google fired engineer for breaking internal privacy policies

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/google-engineer-spying-fired/

137 86 16 years ago

robk• 16 years ago

This is pretty serious and the fact it's turned into a story is one of the more damaging things you could expect to see about Google w.r.t. privacy. SREs are indeed very privileged and in many cases have carte blanche on their associated products. It's saddening one of them used his rights for nefarious purposes and broke some of the trust around Google's handling of personal data. I hope this leads to better auditing at least internally - seems like something that better transparency of access would have brought to light earlier.

Kadrith• 16 years ago

While it is no guarantee of any change I like that they are not attempting to sweep this under the rug. There are a lot of companies where people have access to a lot of sensitive data. All you can do is screen the employees, limit their access where possible and audit their use of the security.

But then someone needs to audit the auditors. Just before I started here we used to have an employee who would look in the Oracle database used by Lawson to check payroll data. Nobody knew for a long time since he was the UNIX admin and DBA.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

I don't know where 'here' is but you might want to edit that comment.

TheAmazingIdiot2• 16 years ago

Hard call. They offer great free services and have changed the landscape of email, phone, and document communication. Yet they are one entity with all the information of DeJa News, Keyhole Maps, YouTube, DoubleClick, GrandCentral, Gizmo5, DocVerse, and their own email and app offerings. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google)

So yes, it is refreshing to see transparency of "Engineer fired for snooping where they shouldnt". But we keep using them as a service, so it's a hard problem to combat. After all, the price is right. Just costs your privacy.

ZeroMinx• 16 years ago

While I enjoy bashing big corporations as the next guy, this isn't really a Google problem.

If you're on the internet, your information will always be available to someone. On the internets, as in real life, this power can be abused.

Appreciate the fact that they're open about it.

TheAmazingIdiot2• 16 years ago

Trust me. I'm not bashing.

I have a blackberry hooked up to Google Voice and Mail servers. They know my name, address, all my phone numbers, all my emails, my contact lists, frequency I receive calls on my Google number, text transcription of voicemails. They also can potentially record every call I receive and make with GV.

Considering the benefit I get from just Mail and GV, the datamining is a cost I'm willing to make. I also know if my phone is lost, I dont lose my data. And I can back it up elsewhere.

And I am somewhat happily shocked that they came such forthright that they "fired him for snooping". Most places will only say "They no longer work for the company".

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

Funny, I got called out yesterday for being paranoid that a google employee could snoop on your data.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1689025

Good to see google is taking a hard stance on this.

jan_g• 16 years ago

>After all, the price is right. Just costs your privacy.

It is worth pointing out that payable cloud services may also cost you your privacy. It has happened before, various data leaks, stolen passwords, etc.

js2• 16 years ago

I'm not a big fan of Gawker, but why not link to the original story instead of the meta-story?

http://gawker.com/5637234/

epi0Bauqu2• 16 years ago

Because HN auto-banned it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692807

Anechoic• 16 years ago

That link just goes to a empty HN page

VMG2• 16 years ago

any details?

cristinacordova• 16 years ago

TC followup - http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/google-engineer-fired-secur...

nkassis• 16 years ago

I think google manned up well on this one. They will always have this problem. At least it seems they have less (that we know off) incidents than the government does. It's pretty incredible how many stories of government employees snooping (even selling it to organize crime) information stored in their databases.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

That was my first take as well, but after reading up a bit on it it seems that they tried to make it go away by not charging him, when if you look at the severity of this case they had every reason to.

So they tried to sweep it under the rug by just letting the guy go.

If an employee of mine had ever snooped on end-user data and would have used that data in order to get real-world effects in the lives of those users I'm fairly sure I would have registered a complaint with law enforcement.

Google has their 'image' to be aware of, but in this case just letting the guy go may not be the best way to preserve that image.

jonknee• 16 years ago

Not that I have any information, but it could be that the parties affected did not want to pursue legal action. All we know about the story is a quote from Google and a speculative article from Gawker.

stevefink• 16 years ago

I'm impressed with how transparent Google was with handling the issue. Unfortunately, things like this can and will occasionally happen. You can either put up your own Postfix server if you do not like it - or you can thank Google for continuing to provide such a kick ass free service.

As for David Barksdale, good luck to you, you will need it.

cperciva2• 16 years ago

He was fired? That's all?

From all reports, it seems that this Google employee accessed data which he knew he had no authorization to access. That sounds like a textbook case of computer crime -- why hasn't he been arrested yet?

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

Read the gawker/valleywag article, it goes a lot further than that:

http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...

pvg5• 16 years ago

He did have authorization to access it. He didn't have authorization to abuse it in the way that he did. It's all kinds of icky but what do you think was so obviously criminal about it that you expect him to be in jail?

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

That he went way beyond accessing the data but apparently used it to coerce people in real life.

shasta2• 16 years ago

Google likely wanted to keep this quiet, but if they'd turned this over to the FBI, I'm sure there would have been no trouble finding laws he'd broken.

cperciva2• 16 years ago

Unless Google's policies were written by bungling idiot, Barksdale would have authorization to access information required for him to fulfill his duties. The information he accessed very obviously goes well beyond such authorization.

nowarninglabel• 16 years ago

Assuming California law, I'd say there a fair number of potential violations available for prosecution with a focus on Penal code section 502 http://www.privacyprotection.ca.gov/privacy_laws.htm Though I am no lawyer, I'm sure a civil case could also be made. Will be interesting to see what actions the affected parties take.

jakarta• 16 years ago

Maybe Google should add more questions related to ethics in their rigorous interview process.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

At first glance, google comes off pretty good on how they dealt with this, but you have to wonder how come a single engineer has access to google voice and google mail and IM data of end users. SRE's as these employees are labeled (site reliability engineers) are 'highly experienced engineers who can be trusted'.

It goes beyond just snooping too, apparently this guy changed end-user settings which had specifically made to lock him out, and spent a lot of time and effort to use his position at google to achieve real world effects with the people he was snooping on.

This guy has a serious case of sysadmin god complex and while I'm really not sure if it is ok for him to be exposed with name and picture I hope he'll never be in a position of such responsibility again, and I hope that google will perform better oversight of the people that have access like this.

The only thing that got the ball rolling here was the parents of some of the kids alerting google.

yrb2• 16 years ago

I got the impression that SRE basically have low level access to the storage stack. So wouldn't be subject to most of the normal application level logging that I would assume would red flag this behaviour pretty fast.

The only way to get around this is to have someone audit all their actions constantly, which you need someone equally or more familiar with the systems they are working with.

I think that is pretty impossible to implement that level of overview with humans, the best way to go normally is the 'buddy system' so no one can access a system unless they have a 'buddy' with them. Like the military do in nuclear weapon silos.

jacquesm9• 16 years ago

Access to the low level storage stack would not allow you to query with so much detail and would likely not have an interface that would allow you to modify user settings at will. So he must have used some higher level tools.

tptacek5• 16 years ago

Regardless of how Google is playing this in the press, the question people need to be asking isn't about the rogue employee. It is: "what are the controls being put in place to prevent SRE's from accessing sensitive data inside Google apps, and what specific forms of information is Google considering sensitive for those purposes, and is there a class of employee at Google that is expected to be exempt from these controls?"

eogas• 16 years ago

I think you expect too much of the press. You see, asking this question makes a lot of sense, but it doesn't make a whole lot of money. The press will run with whatever gets ratings (or sells papers if you roll that way).

novum• 16 years ago

SRE at Google is a position of high trust and engineering seniority. There will always be a need for a certain (very few) people to have access to sensitive user data -- that's why this breach is so embarrassing for Google. The most we can hope for, at this class of employee, is better auditing of their access logs. The engineering exec quoted in the article promises they will perform more detailed audits.

hugh34• 16 years ago

The most we can hope for, at this class of employee, is better auditing of their access logs.

And better selection of the people put into that position?

Is it indicative of the downside of Silicon Valley's youth culture that you can wind up in a position of "high trust and engineering seniority" at the age of 27? You don't see many 27-year-olds in other ultra-high-trust professions, do you?

Besides, this guy just looks creepy.

btilly5• 16 years ago

And Google has answered that question. See http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/14/google-engineer-spying-fire... for the following passage:

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, 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.

I would assume that the logs he is talking about are logs of accesses made by Google employees to data covered by the privacy policy.

(Disclaimer, I am an SRE at Google. I do not speak for Google.)

tptacek5• 16 years ago

First hit: http://jobs.metafilter.com/173/Site-Reliability-Engineer-at-...

Required Skills/Qualifications:

* BA/BS in Computer Science, MS or PhD is preferred.

* 0-15 years experience.

* 3+ years developing web-based applications.

brisance• 16 years ago

"For evil to flourish, all that is needed is for good people to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke.

Google's mere dismissal of the guy comes across as pretty evil. According to the article, there was a previous instance of malfeasance. If the bad PR behind all these privacy breaches were taken more seriously, Google would probably have to clean up their act and users would benefit as a result.

cdibona2• 16 years ago

Wait, are you saying that we should be reacting to the PR (we didn't, he was let go some time ago) or to the act? I would always rather we react appropriately to the act. (disclaimer, work at google, blah blah blah)

Pyrodogg• 16 years ago

Probably going way off deep end here... Sometimes I wonder if someone in the process shouldn't be licensed by the state in the interest of protecting the interests of the public. Just like doctors, lawyers and engineers.

That way, if something goes horribly wrong, someone's ass is more on the line than them just losing their paycheck.

msisk6• 16 years ago

As someone who formally worked in an engineering profession that required state licensing and now working doing the same job Mr. Barksdale did (not for Google, though), I can't see any sort of licensing helping with this sort of problem.

And I think at this point Mr. Barksdale ass is pretty much screwed -- it's unlikely he'll ever get a job doing this sort of work again.

It's a tricky problem. I know to do my job I need root access to everything. I guess at Google scale you could compartmentalize so the same person doesn't have free access across services.

But at some point you just gotta trust your people.

OTOH, perhaps I just don't understand -- what this fellow did is so over the top it's difficult for me to understand why he would do such a thing. It's wrong on so many levels -- it's just not something I can comprehend.

nostrademons• 16 years ago

My read on it was that he's a typical Aspergian nerd (of which there are several at Google), and it never occurred to him that what he was doing was not-okay. A lot in the story seems to support that. Why else is he hanging out with high schoolers - who don't even like him? Why does he feel the need to brag about his position at Google and the power it gives him?

Some people are born knowing all the rules to social interaction. But others have to learn them through painful trial and error. A lot of us got that out of the way in middle school, high school, and college, before we were given the responsibility to do anything truly damaging to ourselves and others. Maybe he just had the bad luck to not seriously screw up until he's at an age where everyone will blacklist him for it.

towndrunk• 16 years ago

I'm surprised all of Googles interviewing tricks didn't catch this.

thought_alarm• 16 years ago

No worries. I don't personally know anyone who works for Google, so I guess I'm safe.

However, I do know people who work at a local ISP, and I'm sure as hell not passing my email through those servers.

btilly5• 16 years ago

If you hang out here long enough, you will likely get to know people who work at Google. (Like me.)

VMG2• 16 years ago

Use encryption, Bob.

braindead_in• 16 years ago

Are GV calls all recorded? Is it there somewhere in the TOS? Even if its there, the consent of the other party is required to record calls. Otherwise its a offense. Right?

lippe_maia• 16 years ago

this isn't that surprising. this stuff happens all the time at any company that has that many employees. a person i know who is a software developer at facebook told me that everyone there looks at people's private stuff and reads people's private messages when they want to and you just have to be discrete about it so that no one (i.e. users) notices.

enneff2• 16 years ago

I can tell you that it does NOT typically happen at Google. If you so much as joke about this stuff people will give you negative reactions. I was genuinely shocked to read about this today as I never would have expected any Google employee to be so unethical.

If what you say about the practices at Facebook is even remotely true then it is disgusting and shameful behaviour.

spaznode2• 16 years ago

Still kind of alarming, I mean I do personally know some google employees and none would even remotely consider doing anything like this for both philosophical and practical reasons. Either way it's kind of scary that some douche fucker "quality assurance" dweeb had enough access to do this kind of thing.

I think we ought to have some kind of equivalent HIPPA act for ALL data personally identifiable to us, not just in medical contexts. That'd put the fire under googles ass enough to take our privacy seriously. Fuck Eric Schmidt and his "change your name at 18" bullshit. We know who that fucker is right now.

124816• 16 years ago

Did you ever see the full quote of the "change your name" stuff?

> Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.

Which makes sense to me. Hell, I wish I could delete some videos and/or photos of me on various sites.

Lately Schmidt has been making statements like this though; they are reasonable when complete, but some reporters snip out five words (or, just paraphrase or interpret) and create a news storm. CEOs are supposed to be good at avoiding that sort of thing.

> equivalent HIPPA act for ALL data personally identifiable

We ought to start with getting the same level of laws for voip, IM, and email that phone and mail have. "All PII" is too vague, but those seem like a slam dunk.

thesethings• 16 years ago

I'm going to temporarily put aside what this guy did (which is really bad, but people with bad intent aren't common), to discuss what this tells us about Google (which is about The System, and cause for larger concern).

If anybody from Google can (anonymously if necessary) step in and answer questions, it'd be great.

* Different gmail accounts. Google knows they're all you.

In the original Gawker story, this caught my eye:

"...pulled up the person's email account...[and] a list of other Gmail addresses that the friend had registered but didn't think were linked to their main account—within seconds"

Keeping separate Gmail accounts is how many protect against "Google knows everything about me." In fact on Google's "What Google knows about you" page, it never crosses accounts (unless you've manually connected them). This story basically tells us the "What we know about your account" page is a bit misleading. Of course most folks in IT know it's a bit naive to think one could never figure out that different gmail accounts are related. But it was interesting that Google pretty formally knows the relationship, but doesn't tell you right where it should.

* SREs, and their level of access.

It's not so much that I care is a specific group has lots of access. I care that not that many groups do in total. This story makes me concerned that actually many groups have lots of access. Despite the "elite navy seal" vibe presented in the Gawker story about SREs, I'm now thinking that many, many teams have this kind of access. (Previous to this story, I was led to believe that SREs were quite low level (not in importance. but in nature of responsibilities. Very performance oriented, having little reason to have access to an individual user's data.).

Please feel free to jump in and correct this, Google peeps. It would make me feel better.

* What this does for SaaS and web apps in general

I love Google Docs and sincerely believe that most web apps that allow across-the-net collaboration are good for us. And are preferable to The Old Way. I want people to TRUST their stuff to Google (and Github and Amazon, etc).

I hate security FUDers who love to derail conversations of great possibility with some far out scenario, "Can my enemy see my Google Docs?!?!"

I'm way less worried about a few creeps who work at Google (they work everywhere...) and more concerned about laissez-faire access processes.

nl2• 16 years ago

"...pulled up the person's email account...[and] a list of other Gmail addresses that the friend had registered but didn't think were linked to their main account—within seconds"

This surprised me too. In the absence of any further comment from Google, I'd be very interested to see some journalists doing some investigation here.

Assuming that this is real and not mis-reporting or user error, I'm guessing Google links using either their google.com cookie, IP address and/or browser identification. Any of those methods have potential for errors (in particular they mean you should never share a browser with another person in case your account ends up linked. That seems.... extreme..)

heinel• 16 years ago

Not a journalistic investigation, but a while back I decided that I need a new gmail account. I signed it up using some different credentials, including a different name. However, I did not mention my old gmail account in the entire sign-up process. After I activated my new account, I got an email on my old account referencing the new address I just signed up for and a verification code "in case something happens."

From this it seems to me like this is not a deliberate maneuver to deceive, but rather just an oversight.

fhars• 16 years ago

Giving people responsible for performance tuning access to user data is almost inevitable if you run anything remotely like unix. After all, it may require tweaking kernel parameters, changing init sctripts or reinstalling applications compiled with different optimizer settings. All of these operations require root, which is an all or nothing affair in unix. (You can do some tricks with /etc/sudoers to restrict what else people who need root for a specific task can do as root, but writing a sudoers file that allows serious performance tuning and is still airtight might prove a challenge.) This has in fact been criticized as a major design flaw of the unix authorization model. To prevent problems like these you need a more fine grained authorization model that separates access to the system and its configuration from access to the data, so that even if I can replace an application with something else, I still cannot make it write data to a location of my choice. This would reduce the number of people who I need to absolutely trust from everybody who may need to change some minor configuration file to the handful of people managing the security kernel of the OS. Systems like that are possible, but not easy to implement and mange correctly and sometimes inconvenient to use, so peole go the easy way and assume that everyone that is a member of a group mentioned in /etc/sudoers is trustworthy or at least lack the criminal energy to bypass the restrictions sudo can enforce. Most of the time, this works.

anongoogler• 16 years ago

Google does something smarter than that. http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/pdf/ds_gsa_apps_... explains what.

rufugee• 16 years ago

Wow...it appears Daniel Faraday left the island and took up programming...

Charuru• 16 years ago

So this genius violated policy, and then bragged about it to his victim / the person who have the most reason to report him?

He's totally dumb.

heyrhett• 16 years ago

I love that this is on the front page at the same time as Don Dodge's blog article about what an amazing job google does at hiring people: http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/09/how-t...

cdibona2• 16 years ago

You hire 20k people over 10 years and make not one mistake? Iknow you are being snarky, but there is no perfect hiring process, no matter what you measure.

spaznode2• 16 years ago

This is a really big deal guys, it means nothing at all how comfy we feel knowing google peeps personally. The fact is there is no regulation or oversight dictating how seriously google needs to take our privacy other than random - easily ignored - blips like this. We need government intervention/oversight to make this stuff go away. The gov is already there unofficially anyway, let's not kid ourselves about that. Google gave that little piece away years ago. No us company with that much personal data would be allowed to exist otherwise. I would know, did gigs at bellatlantic long before "it" happened and uncle sam was and always has been there just the same. More about what they're allowed to officially charge you with in court - don't think they couldn't know either way at some level..though probably what they were doing really was in our national best interest. Not judging, just saying..we need offiial public oversight or be left at the mercy of what the corporation decides to do with our data. The same data that provides the overwhelming majority of revenue via advertisers. It's just sick is all.

vegai• 16 years ago

I'm amazed, positively. I wouldn't have thought they would be taking the users' privacy so seriously.

code_duck• 16 years ago

I'm a lot more concerned about the data centers full of government employees wiretapping innocent people for no apparent reason. A fair bit came about concerning this a year or two ago, with ex-employees stating that the system was routinely abused for amusement. What's up with that these days?

Xurinos2• 16 years ago

Just to keep this into perspective, we are reading about this because it is Google. But every system and every relay through which your email passes is a point where somebody with less then well-meaning intentions can read your email. We may be able to somewhat rely on Google to enforce some privacy policy, given publicity pressures, but some danger lies in all the carriers between point A and point B.

It is a shame that PGP only took off in the hardcore user community. If it was made insanely accessible to users -- maybe even transparent -- maybe we could have a better assumption of privacy for our communications (as well as a potential reduction in spam?).

Google fired engineer for breaking internal privacy policies

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