> 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.
Google designed their calendar this way to support work. It doesn’t sound like these people were using resources for work purposes. That’s almost certainly a violation of the work rules. Pushing blame on the employee being tracked is ridiculous.
Companies are not democracies, and unless you are an executive with a contract or are in a collective bargaining agreement, you serve at the pleasure of your management. If you’re irritating your management for reasons and want to stick around, you need to work in the rules.
Also, it might be legal for me to follow a person around in public and film them, but doing that is still incredibly creepy and indicative of mal intent.
Different groups may follow you. PI trying to determine marriage issues, health issues for insurance reasons, etc
If you are famous or have something to add to the news cycle reporters or people trying to sell your picture may follow you around.
Most people post where they have been publically to create their personal brand that they share with others.
These have no mal intent. The overused word creepy is subjective.. and doesn't make it wrong. I know someone who feels creepy going outside at night. We shouldn't morally make a judgement for everyone based on someone's feelings. I don't think going outside is creepy.
From my perspective, either of those have ill intent towards me.
If insurance companies could not investigate your insurance would cost 10 times as much.
The marriage investigation is a mixed bag. If you are running a drug running operation I should get the kids and you need some proof to make that claim.
I’ve never worked at Google, so while I can’t say for certain, I doubt the calendar has a “notify me about the juicy bits” checkbox. It’s certainly useful for me to know when my manager will be in the office or in some meeting, and if my manager marks the meeting “private,” I can know that he won’t be available at a particular time even if I don’t know what he’ll be busy doing.
If he finds it creepy that I know when he’ll be at the dentist, or be in a 1:1 with his boss, he needs to make sure the appointment is marked as private; I can’t do anything about it.
So, yes, I believe in this case, it makes sense to blame the people being tracked for publicity posting information that they didn’t want others to know.
Following your manager's calendar makes sense. Doing the same for people outside of your group is suspicious imo, unless you're working with that team/person.
Who are these people? Managers? Would the union organisers have been tracking calendars to find times the managers are not walking the aisles so the unionists could talk to the staff about unionising?
In such a circumstance I imagine I as a hypothetical manager being coerced into a union-busting exercise could arrange to feel threatened by this calendar-monitoring behaviour.
As for the copies outside the office: we want to bring the union lawyers and membership folks around to talk about joining the union, here’s the manager’s schedule for the next week.
Believe nothing of what you read and only half of what you see.
It is every aggrieved party’s interest to claim they thought the world was going to end, because the only negotiating direction is away from that extreme.
Unionizing and protest organizing is just a background noise at this point
We have them configured to be public by default because it makes it much easier to book meetings, particularly when you need to find a slot that works for several people.
With that being said it does assume that you have the common-sense to make appointments that should be private, private. I tend to do this for any personal matters, along with any meetings that involve discussing sensitive work-related matters.
(I also use private appointments to ensure I get a lunch break if a day is looking particularly full of meetings. If I don't eat something at lunchtime I tend to be bad-tempered in the afternoon, which doesn't really help anyone.)
Worth pointing out that we've clearly communicated that calendars are public by default, which hopefully helps people to know they need to make appointments explicitly private if that's what they want.
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.
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.
Why were they using company resources for personal meetings?
Probably because it represents time that are unavailable for work and, in many cases, because their are people at work (including their boss) entitled to know the reason, and who probably established that as the workflow for sharing the information.
So that coworkers don't schedule you for meetings during your doctor appointments.
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).
Somewhere along the line, people started scheduling me for events in conflict with other events. Why? My online visible calender was free and clear into eternity so obviously I have nothing going on at 2pm. Explaining not being able to be in three places at once got old fast.
So now I have an eye toward using the calendar "defensively". Here's when I usually come in, here's when I usually clock out, here's when I usually take lunch, here's that weekly meeting I have to attend for someone else's giggles, here's when I'm helping Jimmy with this thing, here's when Samantha is helping me with the other thing. You want a meeting? Now the calendar begins a negotiation.
I may or may not like it, but the tipping point has come and gone for me.
The fact that you can do it doesn't mean it is proper for you to do it other than as reasonable for legitimate job duties.
There is no system in place physically preventing me from doing lots of illegitimate things in my workplace, but that doesn't mean that if I do them I get a free pass merely because it was possible to do them.
A window on your friend’s house can be used to peek in to see if they’re home when you’ve popped by to visit.
It can also be used to stare into all day to monitor what someone you don’t know is doing.
What the terminated employees are accused of doing is a lot more like the second example.
Nobody signed up for their coworkers monitoring your calendar and then you find you beign doxed externally. Company investigated, gave out warnings, and yet the hostile behavior continued and here is the result
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.
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.
Not true, the reason they where trying to organise a union was because they did not feel safe with their employer spying on them [1].
Ironicly they where fired because other employees did not feel safe being spied on. So google obviously recognising that spying on employees is a legitimate safety concern.
https://www.hldataprotection.com/2017/08/articles/internatio...
GDPR also applies to the employer and employee. You can’t log without consent, and „we might monitor stuff“ in your contract won’t hold up in court in Europe if you start invasively logging.
My contract with a German company, specifically had clauses saying that anything on their systems is something that can inspect and/or look at.
We aren't talking a small company here, but one with multiple large sites; which means multiple large workers councils ( basically a union for a specific company location ).
Remember hiring in Germany has to be approved by a Worker's Council and the company has to pay for the council to receive independent legal advice as well.
From the GDPR training I did for working as a software engineer in DE, this is all OK as long as its legitimately required for compliance, explicitly disclosed to the full requirements of BDSG/GDPR and not used for anything other than the stated reasons.
This is a huge contrast to the US where it would likely be completely legal to look at this kind of monitoring and then fire someone under at-will employment law for reading too much news.ycombinator.
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Anything you can do with that is how our internal Gmail and calendar works. With lots of use of Groups.
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.
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.
2. The fact that this kind of information made it outside of the company. I believe this is the consequence of making such info available to all and in a company with so many thousand employees like it or not there are some bad apples that will take advantage of everything
You can decide whether everyone can see the details or whether they just see "busy" everywhere.
I think it's good to see the title, for example if I have a meeting about the feature Foobar and a coworker sees that, he might want to reach out to say he's got some insight about it.
There is no reason to have your full calendar visible by all by default.
Also, "public" here means only the time & title, not detailed description, participants, attachments etc. You can easily set individual events to private, or default everything to private if you wish.
It's ultimately the individual employee that knows whether or not a meeting is relevant to them. And they can only know that if they have information on the meeting.
Sounds like an entirely toxic environment.
Proper etiquette would be to ping the meeting organizer and ask if they mind if you sit in. If they don't, no problem. If they do, you work something out relevant to the reason you wanted to sit in. But one can't even start that conversation without knowledge of relevant meeting topics.
The fact I know what meetings my coworkers are having doesn't imply I should be crashing them any more than the fact I can see when my coworkers are at their desks implies I should be continuously bothering them.
Google's corporate culture is to make it as easy as possible to have that happen.
Maybe that is why google screws up its data security outside too. Such things shouldnt be allowed in the first place.
Outlook is great comparing to this.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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"
Critical stuff shouldn't get a reaction like "gee, he has something in his calendar, well we just skip this 10 mil deal because disturbing him is a no-no and he would be mean to us". Critical stuff is critical, take people out of their meetings, life is about priorities.
But I understand the appeal to control freaks out there, everything is plain and visible (or not, depends how you set it up)
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.
The calendar doesn't distinguish between medical work or a meeting with union Busters. Google is deliberately muddying waters. Slimy
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.
- 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.
In a company with thousands of employees, what are the odds.
Yikes - this seems to go beyond labor organizing within the company.