I agree it's shady, but I suspect it's there so that they don't have to specifically negotiate to add it when a special-case deal is agreed to. (They may say they don't negotiate, but there are exceptions at any company.)
They can't seriously expect their standard form agreement to stay NDA-confidential when they've had 6 to 8 figures of people sign versions of it, regardless of what the agreement requires. If there has ever been litigation over Google's legalese - even a dispute over whether forced arbitration applies - the copy in the court record is probably either public or unsealable upon request to the court.
(I'm a former Google employee, didn't have any role related to employee contract language, not a lawyer, certainly not speaking for them.)
Yep. Basically the same logic as companies with competitive salaries trying to keep wage info quiet, even in the age of Glassdoor. It's not that there's something to hide about the standard version, and it's not that the terms or even text will stay private. But it adds a hurdle to people comparing notes on exactly what they signed, and when somebody does get a special exemption, it stops them putting up a point-by-point guide for everyone else.
> They may say they don't negotiate, but there are exceptions at any company.
Presumably Google is big enough to have standards and make case-by-case decisions, but it's sort of horrifying how many smaller companies approach contracts as an exercise in seeing what they can get away with. Employment-prohibiting noncompetes and personal-time invention assignment clauses get casually tossed in, then pulled back out after no greater negotiation than bothering to ask.
It's not hard to see why contracts are under NDA when so many companies pretend their ridiculous terms are a standard form that everyone else signed.
So to make it harder for labor to organize, basically.
It's not as directly defensive as salary hiding, which can obviously help conceal everything from wage collusion to Ledbetter v. Goodyear style inequities. But it still stops labor from sharing information and helping to share in concessions.
I didn't include it above, but a related part is that layering on NDAs makes it harder for non-employees to get involved. If you post your whole contract online, a random employment lawyer might happen by and go "hey, you're getting screwed, 3.A.ii is non-standard and probably illegal". But if you restrict it to employee viewing and low-specificity discussions, you're less likely to have lawyers or activists get involved unprompted.
Even more worrisome.
There where agreements about what sort of offence justified monitoring at work it had to be a serious offence for example.
I don't think I've ever logged in to my Corp account from any non Corp device other than my phone, which uses a work profile for exactly that reason.
+1. Google gives you a corp phone and computer (even multiple ones, if needed); why the heck you'd want to use your personal devices? Plus using a personal device is strongly discouraged.
Also, all the companies I've worked before had similar clauses, and would always push iOS or Android certificates into your phone, so they can remote wipe the device when you leave company.
Seems fairly standard thing to me: no company would want their confidential information lying around in a bunch of personal devices. Calling it "Personal surveillance" seems ridiculous.
Now, some of the nooglers sitting near me seem to think they're entitled to one, so maybe the messaging has changed. but I just looked it up and the language is: "Full-time Googlers with a business need are eligible for one Google-paid mobile phone and SIM"
Many Googlers I know have Corp set up on their personal phone.
If you ever have had an on-call shift, or had to log in remotely to perform some work function? If so, then you qualify. You probably also qualify for them to pay for your home internet.
> Many Googlers I know have Corp set up on their personal phone.
That's stupid. Seems like a good way to get all of your data wiped off of your personal phone.
What is the company cost of the average engineer at google? It must be like...at least $300k or $400k/yr. They will pay another $600/yr for a phone and service for you if they think it will improve your productivity.
They do hand out corp laptops like candy, which is great, but if you need to test software you're developing on a specific configuration, you basically have no choice but to use personal hardware. So let's say you're developing graphics code for Chrome, and there's a bug that only reproduces on a specific GPU - and you've got one at home. By doing that on your home PC have you now technically tainted it as a work machine even if you never checked out corp code onto it?
I guess alternately you just get your boss to expense a GPU and a PC and get all that set up and you can actually repro the bug like 4 weeks later once the purchases go through. Maybe corp purchasing is faster now than it used to be.
If you brought your own GPU in to do debugging for work, and you end up frying it(lets say from the bug), would you expect google to reimburse you for it?
With any company that I've experienced, there is pretty much never a need to use personal stuff for work reasons.