David Barksadale, whose online teen-stalking exploits we detailed yesterday, was actually the second engineer fired by Google for snooping on users. He was, however, the first to target kids.

Google told TechCrunch that Barksdale's firing represented the second time it had terminated someone for snooping user data. The company didn't give any other details, except to day that the previous incident did not involve minors. Barksdale, in contrast, spied on at least four underage teens via services like Google Voice and Google Talk. The parents of those kids are probably wondering why Google waited for history to repeat itself before "significantly increasing the amount of time we spend auditing our logs," as the company says it has now done, finally.