The harassment stuff isn't a zero tolerance thing. They even told us to go ahead and ask out other employees if you're interested, but just don't press if you get a no.
It's pretty clear he accessed data he shouldn't have, and for that a zero-tolerance policy makes total sense.
How about a red light camera? Pretty commonplace to push a yellow light, and when you get the envelope in the mail from the city ticketing office you probably know what it's about.
If you break the first type, you are out the door, no questions asked.
If you break the second type, you might be out the door depending on why you did it, who you did it for, who you report to, if you're part of the "in group" or whatever. In some cases, they're forgotten until later when someone wants to demonstrate an "ongoing pattern."
Given that Facebook HR trawls user data to send job spam I find this claim quite ironic.
At my last job, a company that sells houses, people looked up each other's data for fun. I was kind of annoyed that one of the college hires found how much I paid for my house but that was the norm.
Okay, I should probably specify that I didn't tell anyone my address. People don't even know my legal name. I worked at and bought my house through Redfin. Redfin gets my info from my Redfin account. A little different than looking up an address on Zillow.
In their defense, privacy policy is probably better now.
Right now I can't tell if people are excited to tell me there are way to uncover my home address or they think those methods are socially appropriate and not an invasion of my privacy.
Why would looking up a public record be an invasion of your privacy? If you want to hide it, buy your primary residence through an LLC incorporated in a state that doesn't disclose its members.
Even without providing your address, many US county government websites (the Recorder's office, Clerk's office, etc) allow for online lookups by name.
This is precisely how RedFin, Zillow, Trulia, and the like are able to obtain that same data...
If it was accessing user data, of course he should be fired.