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>> In one case, among other information they accessed and copied, an individual subscribed to the calendars of a wide range of employees outside of their work g

>> In one case, among other information they accessed and copied, an individual subscribed to the calendars of a wide range of employees outside of their work group. The individual set up notifications so that they received emails detailing the work and whereabouts of those employees, including personal matters such as 1:1s, medical appointments and family activities — all without those employees’ knowledge or consent. When the affected Googlers discovered this, many reported that they felt scared or unsafe, and requested to work from another location. Screenshots of some of their calendars, including their names and details, subsequently made their way outside the company. Yikes - this seems to go beyond labor organizing within the company.

bobthepanda 7y ago
How can one even be able and allowed to do this? It smacks of gross incompetence on Google's part.
- hknd 7y ago
  Google has a very open culture, e.g. all documents/calendars/... are open to anyone by default. If it's private, you'll need to mark it as private and then nobody has access.
- CGamesPlay 7y ago
  You should be prohibited from viewing anyone else's calendar? It's a pretty core functionality to scheduling meetings. They obviously use Google Calendar internally, where event details can be controlled with privacy settings. That said, when you're stalking someone, it's pretty easy to infer if it's an unlabelled block of time is for a 1:1, doctor's appointment, friend visiting for lunch, whatever. Yeah, the policy should be "employees are not allowed to stalk other employees". Sounds like that's what the policy actually was; I don't see any incompetency.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    I think the part I’m not getting is why event details would be open by default in a work environment. If you need to schedule around someone’s times, all you need to know is if they’re busy or free. At my office this is what is displayed if you look at others’ calendars, but not details unless you’ve been invited yourself.
    - barrkel 7y ago
      This is just a default setting, though. Often it's useful to know what meetings are occurring so you can attend or contribute info, and it's certainly useful to know who's booked a room so you can swap or shift them to video conference if you need the room more.
    - kitsune_ 7y ago
      You have these options as an admin when using GSuite: > No sharing — Calendars aren't shared unless users share their own calendars. Note: If you choose No sharing, your mobile app users can't use the Find a time feature. > Only free/busy information (hide event details)—Only free/busy information displays. >Share all information — All information is public unless users change their own settings. Users can also make individual events private. Then you can manually override these settings as a user.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      Because Google is heavily employee-driven and trusts individual employees to determine what's relevant to solving the problems at hand. My teammates calendar topics are visible to me so that I can notice if they're getting pulled into meetings on topics that I should be meeting with them also. My boss's calendar topics are visible to me so that I'm empowered to ballpark the relevance of my project in context of other things my boss is managing (and so I can notice if my boss is working on something that should be relevant to my project that nobody has noticed is relevant yet).
  - saiya-jin 7y ago
    You shouldn't be able to see exact activity with details, no reason for that. Just availability info. Another point is, how stupid is somebody when they put their personal activities in their work calendar. Google enabled this, and I am pretty sure there isn't a part in the original contract that prohibits that. At our 80k multinational mega corp, we don't see each other's calendars, and we do those meetings with staff around whole globe. No real issues with this. All this looks very much like google trying to paint leavers in as bad light as possible. This vengeful approach is very unprofessional and casts bad light on google and individual managers involved.
    - CGamesPlay 7y ago
      > You shouldn't be able to see exact activity with details, no reason for that. Another point is, how stupid is somebody when they put their personal activities in their work calendar. But is there a compelling reason not to have it? Can you think of any circumstances where having access to someone's event details would make scheduling and communication with them easier? I agree with your second point, of course, and while I have never worked at google I'm pretty confident nobody would bat an eye if you just blocked the equivalent time slot with "personal". But this person didn't do that, and they were open about some of their personal information on their calendar. Probably because they didn't expect one of their coworkers to be a stalker. I guess that was naivety on their part, but this is victim blaming.
    - xamuel 7y ago
      >You shouldn't be able to see exact activity with details, no reason for that. If I urgently need to meet with someone today and I see they've blocked off the whole afternoon for a 4-hour meeting, it could make a big difference if the 4-hour meeting in question is "Critical presentation to the CEO" or "Weekly HR thing that HR spams everyone with but nobody attends and doesn't matter anyway"
      - dragonwriter 7y ago
        > If I urgently need to meet with someone today and I see they've blocked off the whole afternoon for a 4-hour meeting, it could make a big difference if the 4-hour meeting in question is "Critical presentation to the CEO" or "Weekly HR thing that HR spams everyone with but nobody attends and doesn't matter anyway" Unless they are your subordinate, so that you are empowered to judge and direct their priorities, it doesn't. Nothing prevents you from sending them a message (or meeting request) acknowledging that you know they have som thing scheduled but you have an urgent need (and explaining the need) and allowing them to make a decision, or Maki g a similar request of their superior if organizationally appropriate. Your urgent need doesn't transform you into their boss.
- ggambetta 7y ago
  Back in the day while I was at Google, you could look at anyone else's calendar. I thought this level of transparency was really nice. It also was super convenient when trying to schedule a multi-party meeting with people in different offices and time zones. What else are you going to do, and endless email thread asking for availability and doing manual matching? Just don't put your personal activities in your work calendar, I guess? Whenever I had a personal appointment (e.g. doctor), I'd just book a block of "Busy" or "Gabriel OOO" in my work calendar.
  - hrktb 7y ago
    I also don't think the openness on the calendar is the issue, more the stalking part. Just like how seeing where people go on the streets is natural, but sneaking behind someone everyday up to their house becomes something else altogether.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      It's really neither. It's the part where information on someone else's calendar was disseminated to an external third party.
      - Fiadliel 7y ago
        That is not what the note said. It said that screenshots made their way outside the company. I would associate that with an email account that wasn't the work account, a printed page that was taken off-premises, a non-work cloud-hosted storage service, or to a computer that wasn't a work computer. It does not say that the place the information was sent to was any third party. It could turn out that the information was sent to a third party, but that has not (yet) been claimed.
        shadowgovt 7y ago
        Ah, I follow. "Outside the company" could mean "cold storage."
- barrkel 7y ago
  This is how GSuite works, no? I can subscribe to the calendar of anyone in my company. You have to change the visibility to Private to stop it showing the content to other people in the org, and even then it just shows up as "busy".
Traster 7y ago
I think this is probably just a deliberate and horrendous mis-representation. I don't know how Google's internal systems work and would love someone who works there to comment further. However, in the public Google calendar I can set up alerts for all the meetings someone else has (useful for secretaries etc.). And so if you just sign up for those alerts you're going to get: > received emails detailing the work and whereabouts of those employees, including personal matters such as 1:1s, medical appointments and family activities — all without those employees’ knowledge or consent. Except that that is how Google has designed its calendar system. If you put your medical appointments into your calendar without marking them private then yes, they're going to be public. So basically, Google seems to have managed to take a feature in its own Calendar App, and the default behaviour of meetings on Google and dressed it up like stalking.
- jtolmar 7y ago
  Yes, Google uses Google Calendar internally. Signing up for email alerts about somebody else's calendar is definitely weird. But the information you'd get is the same as someone would get if they checked your calendar manually, which is an expected and normal part of Google's culture.
  - koheripbal 7y ago
    No, it is more like checking it manually every single day. ...which is would be akin to following someone in public and filming them. Technically, it's all in public, but it is no less likely to make people feel stalked and unsafe. The underlying part here is that these employees were using the notion of "unions" to organize _politically_. ...and their willingness to act against fellow employees and leak company documents demonstrates just how dirty they would have become had they been allowed to continue. Personally, I don't think they cared at all about worker rights beyond their desire to advocate their politics.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      They have only announced circumstantial evidence that the so-called "stalking" was related to the leak. Remember, the so-called stalking was looking at information that the owner chose to share with the company and didn't mark the "private" flag on (which is available as a default to apply to all meetings).
qazpot 7y ago
Exactly, this looks like the preparation for the witch hunt of the affected people.
googleisevil6 7y ago
I leave my room open and then say- people were watching me not just doing my work but also taking shower and sleeping - that's disingenuous. The calendar doesn't distinguish between medical work or a meeting with union Busters. Google is deliberately muddying waters. Slimy
- docdeek 7y ago
  >> Screenshots of some of their calendars, including their names and details, subsequently made their way outside the company. To extend your analogy, the screenshots would be someone taking photos of you in the shower or sleeping, and distributing them. While they might not have been able to avoid glacing in your open door, they could certainly have avoided taking a photo of the room and sending it to someone else.
DoctorNick 7y ago
Don't be a sucker. This is very standard union-busting behavior: demonize the organizers and make it seem like their organizing behavior is egregious.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  Google isn't some dangerous smelting factory of low paid workers. These people were using the notion of unions to further their desire to push their POLITICS. They didnt care about safety or pay. They wanted to force the company to stop working with the US government on various contracts.
  - neuronic 7y ago
    Safety and pay aren't the only benchmarks which employers should be required to comply with to a certain minimum degree.
    - antpol 7y ago
      Google has one of the best workspace conditions out there though
  - claudeganon 7y ago
    Yeah, why would Googlers ever be concerned about their safety or pay? It’s not like the company ever fixed wages or paid out millions to an exec accused of sexually assaulting an employee. Oh wait...
    - thu2111 7y ago
      Wage fixing was crap, mostly driven by Steve Jobs and stopped when it was discovered/Jobs died. Unionization was not required to solve that, just enforcing existing laws. Isn't it even the opposite - unions are at heart wage fixing cartels, but which claim to be doing it for the benefits of "the workers" against "management". An artificial and essentially Marxist distinction, especially at a place like Google where so many employees have aspects of management responsibility e.g. any tech lead, and where individual contributors are frequently paid more than their managers. As for Andy Rubin, you seem to have assumed that accusation is the same as guilt. But Rubin was being accused by a former girlfriend he dumped: hardly a neutral party. You never heard his side of the story, but I'll give you a hint: he denied it. A senior exec being accused of some sort of sexual misbehaviour happens every day, women know these accusations are frequently treated as true-by-default without anyone caring about the details and use it. Just look at the FBI's own stats on false rape claims as proven by DNA tests. False accusations by women against men with regards to sex crimes is way more common than for any other kind of crime, like an order of magnitude more common. You can't make any assumptions Google or Rubin did anything wrong here, none of us have enough information. But finally, the complainants weren't limiting themselves to wage fixing that for many predated their employment, or Andy Rubin's bedroom habits. They're moaning about enforcement of immigration laws. They know they can't convince the general public to vote for totally open borders because it's an extreme policy that would create massive problems, as is abolition of the Department of Defence. So they've decided to try and get what they want by pressuring firms that act as component suppliers. Organising to make democratically chosen policies unimplementable is not what union protections were meant to be about.
bluesign 7y ago
I couldn't read the article because of paywall. But from the part you quoted. It seems like this can be a plausibly scenario: - Someone (possibly a group of people) is trying to organize a time for maximum attendance for some meeting or protest. - They are checking peoples "public for internal" calendars, maybe sharing between themselves. - "Screenshots of some of their calendars, including their names and details, __subsequently__ made their way outside the company." This means they are not leaking the screenshots to outside from my understanding. As google has access to all data, reason why this calendar screenshots shared etc, and never mentioned here, making me suspect google is at fault here.
ptah 7y ago
why were they able to subscribe to those calendars in the first place? google's privacy even in company sucks it seems
lordlimecat 7y ago
I'd tend to trust the evil corporations take much more than the individual, because google is subject to much more scrutiny and much more liability. Lying and retaliating by big companies tends to be rare because it can affect the bottom line much, much more than a bit of internal dissent. Additionally they're publicly traded so statements on the matter that could be construed as market-relevant must not be false or the SEC starts to take a hard look.
- oblio 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Controversy_and_phase-out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Controversy_and... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_politics#Lobby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_politics#Lobby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion#Rowland%E2%80%93Molina_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion#Rowland%E2%80%... You were saying? The market rarely self regulates, unfortunately. (Ha ha ha, this got flagged :-) )
- dangerface 7y ago
  > google is subject to much more scrutiny and much more liability. Not really if they do something wrong they will get a fine of tens of millions but thats a tiny percentage of their profit, its an operating cost not a punishment. > Lying and retaliating by big companies tends to be rare because it can affect the bottom line much, much more than a bit of internal dissent. Not really again because they have so much money if anything affects their bottom line they create a pr campaign to change public opinion, its super effective even for something thats very easy to prove is dangerous like smoking.
  - lordlimecat 7y ago
    >Not really if they do something wrong they will get a fine of tens of millions but thats a tiny percentage of their profit, its an operating cost not a punishment. And lying gains them a benefit in excess of tens of millions? It's all too easy as a large company to use non-specific (and SEC-approved) language to dismiss the claims: "At Google we have a non-retaliation policy and take all such concerns seriously. We are investigating these claims and will cooperate...." When instead they go out of their way to provide a specific response and claim to have evidence to back it up-- publicly and to the media-- it is thus very credible; they have much to lose if they are lying and very little to gain. On the flip side, the terminated users have zero incentive not to lie if it benefits them; there are no laws against doing so, and there is much to gain in terms of reputation and potential settlements. Lets keep in mind as well that SEC sanctions can be much more significant than simply a fine. Musk made a tweet and was forced to step down. You think Google's going to take action that could piss off both labor boards AND the SEC AND any courts that end up handling potential litigation?
debt 7y ago
Pretty remarkable that all 4 of them engaged in the exact same alleged snooping activity, were all union organizers and were all fired. In a company with thousands of employees, what are the odds.
sodosopa 7y ago
A public calendar is public. No different than how my Outlook calendar is setup organizationally. If you want items to be private, mark them as private. Otherwise if someone setup a blanket alert in my calendar, they’ll get alerted for what I want made public.
- docdeek 7y ago
  I suspect the difference here is that Google alleges thar screenshots of the calendar were taken and distributed outside the company. Viewing a shared calendar that happens to include private events that haven’t been marked private is one thing, but sharing screenshots of the same seems to be something different.
throwaway_tech 7y ago
>When the affected Googlers discovered this, many reported that they felt scared or unsafe Gee I wonder if there is any self-reflection that they work for a company whose primary purpose is to gather this information about everyone...yet when its their information in the hands of employees working for their own company they feel "scared or unsafe".
chooseaname 7y ago
This sounds incredibly creepy without actually knowing how Google's internal mail system works. I will say, this is one reason I never put personal information on work calendars, etc. I block off time, but I don't use a descriptive reason because my manager knows what I'll be doing during that time.
- kyrra 7y ago
  It's very close to normal GSuite Gmail and calendar. https://gsuite.google.com/ https://gsuite.google.com/ Anything you can do with that is how our internal Gmail and calendar works. With lots of use of Groups. https://groups.google.com/ https://groups.google.com/
34679 7y ago
If only I could fire Google for the same thing.
jliptzin 7y ago
That calendar system doesn't force the owner of the calendar to confirm whenever someone subscribes to their schedule?
yikes536576 7y ago
This is scary that you can be punished for using a system, not hacking but just using it. I don't want to give too much details but my company allow you to subscribe to people's PTO calendar. By default, you can see your teammates but you can search other people and add their calendar to your dashboard. To me it seemed like a logical thing to do to add all those people who I interact with to my dashboard. Also I added some of my friends and some higher ups. Just to help me with planning my vacations and sure a bit of curiosity. Now I wonder if my company can use this against me.
- shshhdhs 7y ago
  > This is scary that you can be punished for using a system, not hacking but just using it. This is a revisionist explanation. > Screenshots of some of their calendars, including their names and details, subsequently made their way outside the company. They disclosed other people's internal calendars publicly. That's a clear violation of employer policy and not intended employer use.
nswest23 7y ago
google is trying to distract from the fact that they are firing people for trying to organize and it's working.

bobthepanda 7y ago

How can one even be able and allowed to do this? It smacks of gross incompetence on Google's part.

hknd 7y ago
Google has a very open culture, e.g. all documents/calendars/... are open to anyone by default. If it's private, you'll need to mark it as private and then nobody has access.
CGamesPlay 7y ago
You should be prohibited from viewing anyone else's calendar? It's a pretty core functionality to scheduling meetings. They obviously use Google Calendar internally, where event details can be controlled with privacy settings. That said, when you're stalking someone, it's pretty easy to infer if it's an unlabelled block of time is for a 1:1, doctor's appointment, friend visiting for lunch, whatever. Yeah, the policy should be "employees are not allowed to stalk other employees". Sounds like that's what the policy actually was; I don't see any incompetency.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  I think the part I’m not getting is why event details would be open by default in a work environment. If you need to schedule around someone’s times, all you need to know is if they’re busy or free. At my office this is what is displayed if you look at others’ calendars, but not details unless you’ve been invited yourself.
  - barrkel 7y ago
    This is just a default setting, though. Often it's useful to know what meetings are occurring so you can attend or contribute info, and it's certainly useful to know who's booked a room so you can swap or shift them to video conference if you need the room more.
  - kitsune_ 7y ago
    You have these options as an admin when using GSuite: > No sharing — Calendars aren't shared unless users share their own calendars. Note: If you choose No sharing, your mobile app users can't use the Find a time feature. > Only free/busy information (hide event details)—Only free/busy information displays. >Share all information — All information is public unless users change their own settings. Users can also make individual events private. Then you can manually override these settings as a user.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Because Google is heavily employee-driven and trusts individual employees to determine what's relevant to solving the problems at hand. My teammates calendar topics are visible to me so that I can notice if they're getting pulled into meetings on topics that I should be meeting with them also. My boss's calendar topics are visible to me so that I'm empowered to ballpark the relevance of my project in context of other things my boss is managing (and so I can notice if my boss is working on something that should be relevant to my project that nobody has noticed is relevant yet).
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  You shouldn't be able to see exact activity with details, no reason for that. Just availability info. Another point is, how stupid is somebody when they put their personal activities in their work calendar. Google enabled this, and I am pretty sure there isn't a part in the original contract that prohibits that. At our 80k multinational mega corp, we don't see each other's calendars, and we do those meetings with staff around whole globe. No real issues with this. All this looks very much like google trying to paint leavers in as bad light as possible. This vengeful approach is very unprofessional and casts bad light on google and individual managers involved.
  - CGamesPlay 7y ago
    > You shouldn't be able to see exact activity with details, no reason for that. Another point is, how stupid is somebody when they put their personal activities in their work calendar. But is there a compelling reason not to have it? Can you think of any circumstances where having access to someone's event details would make scheduling and communication with them easier? I agree with your second point, of course, and while I have never worked at google I'm pretty confident nobody would bat an eye if you just blocked the equivalent time slot with "personal". But this person didn't do that, and they were open about some of their personal information on their calendar. Probably because they didn't expect one of their coworkers to be a stalker. I guess that was naivety on their part, but this is victim blaming.
  - xamuel 7y ago
    >You shouldn't be able to see exact activity with details, no reason for that. If I urgently need to meet with someone today and I see they've blocked off the whole afternoon for a 4-hour meeting, it could make a big difference if the 4-hour meeting in question is "Critical presentation to the CEO" or "Weekly HR thing that HR spams everyone with but nobody attends and doesn't matter anyway"
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > If I urgently need to meet with someone today and I see they've blocked off the whole afternoon for a 4-hour meeting, it could make a big difference if the 4-hour meeting in question is "Critical presentation to the CEO" or "Weekly HR thing that HR spams everyone with but nobody attends and doesn't matter anyway" Unless they are your subordinate, so that you are empowered to judge and direct their priorities, it doesn't. Nothing prevents you from sending them a message (or meeting request) acknowledging that you know they have som thing scheduled but you have an urgent need (and explaining the need) and allowing them to make a decision, or Maki g a similar request of their superior if organizationally appropriate. Your urgent need doesn't transform you into their boss.
ggambetta 7y ago
Back in the day while I was at Google, you could look at anyone else's calendar. I thought this level of transparency was really nice. It also was super convenient when trying to schedule a multi-party meeting with people in different offices and time zones. What else are you going to do, and endless email thread asking for availability and doing manual matching? Just don't put your personal activities in your work calendar, I guess? Whenever I had a personal appointment (e.g. doctor), I'd just book a block of "Busy" or "Gabriel OOO" in my work calendar.
- hrktb 7y ago
  I also don't think the openness on the calendar is the issue, more the stalking part. Just like how seeing where people go on the streets is natural, but sneaking behind someone everyday up to their house becomes something else altogether.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    It's really neither. It's the part where information on someone else's calendar was disseminated to an external third party.
    - Fiadliel 7y ago
      That is not what the note said. It said that screenshots made their way outside the company. I would associate that with an email account that wasn't the work account, a printed page that was taken off-premises, a non-work cloud-hosted storage service, or to a computer that wasn't a work computer. It does not say that the place the information was sent to was any third party. It could turn out that the information was sent to a third party, but that has not (yet) been claimed.
      - shadowgovt 7y ago
        Ah, I follow. "Outside the company" could mean "cold storage."
barrkel 7y ago
This is how GSuite works, no? I can subscribe to the calendar of anyone in my company. You have to change the visibility to Private to stop it showing the content to other people in the org, and even then it just shows up as "busy".

Traster 7y ago

I think this is probably just a deliberate and horrendous mis-representation. I don't know how Google's internal systems work and would love someone who works there to comment further. However, in the public Google calendar I can set up alerts for all the meetings someone else has (useful for secretaries etc.). And so if you just sign up for those alerts you're going to get: > received emails detailing the work and whereabouts of those employees, including personal matters such as 1:1s, medical appointments and family activities — all without those employees’ knowledge or consent. Except that that is how Google has designed its calendar system. If you put your medical appointments into your calendar without marking them private then yes, they're going to be public. So basically, Google seems to have managed to take a feature in its own Calendar App, and the default behaviour of meetings on Google and dressed it up like stalking.

jtolmar 7y ago
Yes, Google uses Google Calendar internally. Signing up for email alerts about somebody else's calendar is definitely weird. But the information you'd get is the same as someone would get if they checked your calendar manually, which is an expected and normal part of Google's culture.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  No, it is more like checking it manually every single day. ...which is would be akin to following someone in public and filming them. Technically, it's all in public, but it is no less likely to make people feel stalked and unsafe. The underlying part here is that these employees were using the notion of "unions" to organize _politically_. ...and their willingness to act against fellow employees and leak company documents demonstrates just how dirty they would have become had they been allowed to continue. Personally, I don't think they cared at all about worker rights beyond their desire to advocate their politics.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    They have only announced circumstantial evidence that the so-called "stalking" was related to the leak. Remember, the so-called stalking was looking at information that the owner chose to share with the company and didn't mark the "private" flag on (which is available as a default to apply to all meetings).

qazpot 7y ago

Exactly, this looks like the preparation for the witch hunt of the affected people.

googleisevil6 7y ago

I leave my room open and then say- people were watching me not just doing my work but also taking shower and sleeping - that's disingenuous. The calendar doesn't distinguish between medical work or a meeting with union Busters. Google is deliberately muddying waters. Slimy

docdeek 7y ago
>> Screenshots of some of their calendars, including their names and details, subsequently made their way outside the company. To extend your analogy, the screenshots would be someone taking photos of you in the shower or sleeping, and distributing them. While they might not have been able to avoid glacing in your open door, they could certainly have avoided taking a photo of the room and sending it to someone else.

DoctorNick 7y ago

Don't be a sucker. This is very standard union-busting behavior: demonize the organizers and make it seem like their organizing behavior is egregious.

koheripbal 7y ago
Google isn't some dangerous smelting factory of low paid workers. These people were using the notion of unions to further their desire to push their POLITICS. They didnt care about safety or pay. They wanted to force the company to stop working with the US government on various contracts.
- neuronic 7y ago
  Safety and pay aren't the only benchmarks which employers should be required to comply with to a certain minimum degree.
  - antpol 7y ago
    Google has one of the best workspace conditions out there though
- claudeganon 7y ago
  Yeah, why would Googlers ever be concerned about their safety or pay? It’s not like the company ever fixed wages or paid out millions to an exec accused of sexually assaulting an employee. Oh wait...
  - thu2111 7y ago
    Wage fixing was crap, mostly driven by Steve Jobs and stopped when it was discovered/Jobs died. Unionization was not required to solve that, just enforcing existing laws. Isn't it even the opposite - unions are at heart wage fixing cartels, but which claim to be doing it for the benefits of "the workers" against "management". An artificial and essentially Marxist distinction, especially at a place like Google where so many employees have aspects of management responsibility e.g. any tech lead, and where individual contributors are frequently paid more than their managers. As for Andy Rubin, you seem to have assumed that accusation is the same as guilt. But Rubin was being accused by a former girlfriend he dumped: hardly a neutral party. You never heard his side of the story, but I'll give you a hint: he denied it. A senior exec being accused of some sort of sexual misbehaviour happens every day, women know these accusations are frequently treated as true-by-default without anyone caring about the details and use it. Just look at the FBI's own stats on false rape claims as proven by DNA tests. False accusations by women against men with regards to sex crimes is way more common than for any other kind of crime, like an order of magnitude more common. You can't make any assumptions Google or Rubin did anything wrong here, none of us have enough information. But finally, the complainants weren't limiting themselves to wage fixing that for many predated their employment, or Andy Rubin's bedroom habits. They're moaning about enforcement of immigration laws. They know they can't convince the general public to vote for totally open borders because it's an extreme policy that would create massive problems, as is abolition of the Department of Defence. So they've decided to try and get what they want by pressuring firms that act as component suppliers. Organising to make democratically chosen policies unimplementable is not what union protections were meant to be about.

bluesign 7y ago

I couldn't read the article because of paywall. But from the part you quoted. It seems like this can be a plausibly scenario: - Someone (possibly a group of people) is trying to organize a time for maximum attendance for some meeting or protest. - They are checking peoples "public for internal" calendars, maybe sharing between themselves. - "Screenshots of some of their calendars, including their names and details, __subsequently__ made their way outside the company." This means they are not leaking the screenshots to outside from my understanding. As google has access to all data, reason why this calendar screenshots shared etc, and never mentioned here, making me suspect google is at fault here.

ptah 7y ago

why were they able to subscribe to those calendars in the first place? google's privacy even in company sucks it seems

lordlimecat 7y ago

I'd tend to trust the evil corporations take much more than the individual, because google is subject to much more scrutiny and much more liability. Lying and retaliating by big companies tends to be rare because it can affect the bottom line much, much more than a bit of internal dissent. Additionally they're publicly traded so statements on the matter that could be construed as market-relevant must not be false or the SEC starts to take a hard look.

oblio 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Controversy_and_phase-out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Controversy_and... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_politics#Lobby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_politics#Lobby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion#Rowland%E2%80%93Molina_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion#Rowland%E2%80%... You were saying? The market rarely self regulates, unfortunately. (Ha ha ha, this got flagged :-) )
dangerface 7y ago
> google is subject to much more scrutiny and much more liability. Not really if they do something wrong they will get a fine of tens of millions but thats a tiny percentage of their profit, its an operating cost not a punishment. > Lying and retaliating by big companies tends to be rare because it can affect the bottom line much, much more than a bit of internal dissent. Not really again because they have so much money if anything affects their bottom line they create a pr campaign to change public opinion, its super effective even for something thats very easy to prove is dangerous like smoking.
- lordlimecat 7y ago
  >Not really if they do something wrong they will get a fine of tens of millions but thats a tiny percentage of their profit, its an operating cost not a punishment. And lying gains them a benefit in excess of tens of millions? It's all too easy as a large company to use non-specific (and SEC-approved) language to dismiss the claims: "At Google we have a non-retaliation policy and take all such concerns seriously. We are investigating these claims and will cooperate...." When instead they go out of their way to provide a specific response and claim to have evidence to back it up-- publicly and to the media-- it is thus very credible; they have much to lose if they are lying and very little to gain. On the flip side, the terminated users have zero incentive not to lie if it benefits them; there are no laws against doing so, and there is much to gain in terms of reputation and potential settlements. Lets keep in mind as well that SEC sanctions can be much more significant than simply a fine. Musk made a tweet and was forced to step down. You think Google's going to take action that could piss off both labor boards AND the SEC AND any courts that end up handling potential litigation?

debt 7y ago

Pretty remarkable that all 4 of them engaged in the exact same alleged snooping activity, were all union organizers and were all fired. In a company with thousands of employees, what are the odds.

sodosopa 7y ago

A public calendar is public. No different than how my Outlook calendar is setup organizationally. If you want items to be private, mark them as private. Otherwise if someone setup a blanket alert in my calendar, they’ll get alerted for what I want made public.

docdeek 7y ago
I suspect the difference here is that Google alleges thar screenshots of the calendar were taken and distributed outside the company. Viewing a shared calendar that happens to include private events that haven’t been marked private is one thing, but sharing screenshots of the same seems to be something different.

throwaway_tech 7y ago

>When the affected Googlers discovered this, many reported that they felt scared or unsafe Gee I wonder if there is any self-reflection that they work for a company whose primary purpose is to gather this information about everyone...yet when its their information in the hands of employees working for their own company they feel "scared or unsafe".

chooseaname 7y ago

This sounds incredibly creepy without actually knowing how Google's internal mail system works. I will say, this is one reason I never put personal information on work calendars, etc. I block off time, but I don't use a descriptive reason because my manager knows what I'll be doing during that time.

kyrra 7y ago
It's very close to normal GSuite Gmail and calendar. https://gsuite.google.com/ https://gsuite.google.com/ Anything you can do with that is how our internal Gmail and calendar works. With lots of use of Groups. https://groups.google.com/ https://groups.google.com/

34679 7y ago

If only I could fire Google for the same thing.

jliptzin 7y ago

That calendar system doesn't force the owner of the calendar to confirm whenever someone subscribes to their schedule?

yikes536576 7y ago

This is scary that you can be punished for using a system, not hacking but just using it. I don't want to give too much details but my company allow you to subscribe to people's PTO calendar. By default, you can see your teammates but you can search other people and add their calendar to your dashboard. To me it seemed like a logical thing to do to add all those people who I interact with to my dashboard. Also I added some of my friends and some higher ups. Just to help me with planning my vacations and sure a bit of curiosity. Now I wonder if my company can use this against me.

shshhdhs 7y ago
> This is scary that you can be punished for using a system, not hacking but just using it. This is a revisionist explanation. > Screenshots of some of their calendars, including their names and details, subsequently made their way outside the company. They disclosed other people's internal calendars publicly. That's a clear violation of employer policy and not intended employer use.

nswest23 7y ago

google is trying to distract from the fact that they are firing people for trying to organize and it's working.