Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Time For Someone to Google Themselves a New Job


It seems that Google just can't catch a break when it comes to stories involving horrific acts of privacy violations. If their not taking pictures of your home while you are dancing nude in your window, they are going through the personal emails and voice accounts of minors. The latter is just such the case for now former Google employee David Barksdale. 




Nerd Jesus is not only jobless,
 but he's also single, ladies.
Google fired Barksdale from his engineering job this past July for, as Google's press release states, "breaking [Google's] strict internal privacy policies". The reason sounds pretty vanilla on paper. In reality, what is really behind his firing is amazing (but mostly creepy and pathetic). Apparently, the bright white skinned computer whiz's position at the base of the most powerful force on the internet went to his pointy little head and made him do some things that'll probably make your skin crawl a bit. Or at least make you change your passwords a few times. 


When not writing the screenplay to the next Matrix film whilst sipping flavored coffee in the back of his local Denny's establishment (assumption, of course), David enjoyed befriending 15 year old boys and girls in a popular Washington based tech chat room.Twenty seven year old David became so attached to his new brethren that he, on four separate occasions, thought it proper to use his mystical Google powers to hack into his young friend's Google email accounts, chat logs, and even their Google Voice accounts. If you were to de-friend David on a particular service, he was known to hack his way into your account and reverse the de-friending. 


In one particularly creepy instance, David became upset when one of his 15 year old e-friends refused to give the name of his new girlfriend. Not one to be denied such information, Barksdale snooped through the boy's various accounts, got the young lady's phone number, and threatened to call her. The boy went to his parents for help with the aggressively creepy internet god, who then contacted Google. Several other parent-to-Google phone calls eventually led to the eventual  termination of Barksdale's employment (and his World of Warcraft budget, we're afraid).  


It's also reported that David would invite his young buddies to meet up and catch a movie.
While none of the incidents seemed to be worthy of Dateline's 'To Catch a Predator', it's enough to make any Google user a little weary of how much and with whom they trust their personal information. And it certainly makes you wonder who your kids, or perhaps youself, are talking to in those instances where the name comes before the face here on the world wide creepy web. 


Good luck to you in your search for employment, David Barksdale. We understand Facebook is always looking for people who share similar respect toward piracy. Just don't expect us to accept that ominous friend request. Then again, we just might be a little out of your age range.

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