The team members, as part of their responsibilities for 
  troubleshooting technical issues related to the site and 
  Google’s products, have access to users’ accounts. 
  Apparently Barksdale exceeded this authorized access to 
  spy on a group of specific people he’d met.


  Another former site reliability engineer told Gawker that 
  Google gives such engineers unfettered access and “does 
  not closely monitor SREs to detect improper access to 
  customers’ accounts, because SREs are generally considered 
  highly experienced engineers who can be trusted.”