SAN FRANCISCO—The social media outlet Facebook, fired an employee for bragging about stalking people with the sensitive user information at his disposal.
The employee, a security engineer at the company, bragged to a woman on the dating website, Tinder, that his job essentially made him a “professional stalker.” The man claimed to use the same stalking techniques he used for identifying real-life hackers in his research of potential dates.
The woman on the receiving end of the bragging was a software engineer and claimed that her prospective Tinder date unearthed obscure information about her. She was unable to confirm the information was obtained through the use of confidential data.
Alex Stamos, Facebook’s Chief Security Officer, released a statement to address the firing of the employee.
“We have zero tolerance for people abusing these policies and we fire anyone who violates them,” said Stamos. “Employees who abuse these controls will be fired — period,” he added.
The scandal comes on the heels of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony on Capitol Hill over data breach and privacy issues. It also comes several days after Zuckerberg announced at the company’s annual F8 developer conference that Facebook plans to add a dating component to its site.
