(RNN) - Facebook said it fired an employee who had access to private information for using that data to stalk women online, according to media reports.
Facebook confirmed to Motherboard that it was investigating the claim on Monday. It confirmed the employee's firing on Tuesday.
The alleged misuse of data came to light on Sunday in a tweet by Jackie Stokes, founder of Spyglass Security.
She said that she had information that a security engineer was using his privileged access to stalk women.
In an excerpt of the Tinder logs, the Facebook employee jokingly called himself a "professional stalker" because of his profession.
Stokes posted an excerpt from the Tinder communication on Twitter, and then provided the information to Alex Stamos, Facebook's chief information security officer.
“We are investigating this as a matter of urgency. It’s important that people’s information is kept secure and private when they use Facebook,” Stamos said in a statement to Motherboard.
The reported firing came on the same date Facebook announced the upcoming launch of a dating service at the F8 developer's conference in San Jose, CA.
I really, really hope I’m wrong about this. pic.twitter.com/NDkOptx8Hv
— Jackie Stokes ???? (@find_evil) April 30, 2018
The social media company has come under fire for its role in a misuse of information by Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm that harvested the Facebook information of as many as 87 million users through an personality quiz app.
In response to this data breach, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress last month on Facebook and its privacy controls.
The European Union and the UK Parliament also want Zuckerberg to appear before their bodies amid concerns over privacy and the proliferation of "fake news" on the site.
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