Facebook fires engineer accused of stalking, possibly by abusing data access

Employee allegedly called himself 'professional stalker' on Tinder as site seeks to launch dating app and faces privacy scandal

Facebook has fired a security engineer after he was accused of stalking women online possibly by abusing his "privileged access" to data, raising renewed concerns about users' privacy at the social network.

The controversy, which came to light after the employee allegedly called himself a "professional stalker" in a message to a woman he met on Tinder, is particularly bad timing for Facebook, which announced this week that it is launching an online dating feature while it continues to battle a major privacy scandal in the US and the UK.