Gawker has a fascinating -- not to mention disturbing report -- on a former Google engineer named David Barksdale who allegedly accessed the online accounts of four underage teens that he met at a Seattle area technology group. According to Gawker, the 27-year-old engineer was fired from his job at Google's Kirkland office in July. [Post updated with statement from Google].

Gawker's Adrian Chen and Sergio Hernandez report:

In an incident this spring involving a 15-year-old boy who he'd befriended, Barksdale tapped into call logs from Google Voice, Google's Internet phone service, after the boy refused to tell him the name of his new girlfriend, according to our source. After accessing the kid's account to retrieve her name and phone number, Barksdale then taunted the boy and threatened to call her.

In other cases involving teens of both sexes, Barksdale exhibited a similar pattern of aggressively violating others' privacy, according to our source. He accessed contact lists and chat transcripts, and in one case quoted from an IM that he'd looked up behind the person's back. (He later apologized to one for retrieving the information without her knowledge.) In another incident, Barksdale unblocked himself from a Gtalk buddy list even though the teen in question had taken steps to cut communications with the Google engineer.

We've reached out to Google for comment on the report, and we'll update the post if we hear more. Meanwhile, here's Gawker report: "Gcreep: Google engineer stalked teens, spied on chats."

UPDATE: Here's Google's statement on the firing of Barksdale from Senior Vice President of Engineering Bill Coughran:

“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.”