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.

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.

It's really neither. It's the part where information on someone else's calendar was disseminated to an external third party.

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.

Ah, I follow. "Outside the company" could mean "cold storage."

Yup! I assume that at this point general counsel is involved in everything Google says publicly; it's then worth nitpicking at the exact details of what has or has not been admitted, because legal folk definitely have!

There are 2 points here 1. The visibility of the activity. I have no experience with google calendar at this level but the normal from my perspective would be that only free/busy information is by default available. If the company wants every info to be available then it might be that the employees were not adequately informed about this in order either to not enter private info in their calendar or mark them explicitly as private

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

I'm using Google calendar at work, and I guess the version Google uses internally is not that different.

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.

A normal Outlook setup is that you can see people's availability in their calendars but you can only see the details for your immediate team or if people have specifically enabled it.

There is no reason to have your full calendar visible by all by default.

In a work context, which is what G Suite is meant for, there's no reason not to have it public.

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.

why would you need to see the meeting topic? All you should be able to see is availability.

Because in Google's conceptualization, organization is horizontal and extremely employee-driven.

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.

So someone can just up and invite themselves to a meeting I set up and did not invite them to?

Sounds like an entirely toxic environment.

Not really. The principle in play is "We're all adults; don't be a dick."

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.

Because that’s the domain-wide setting that Google configured for all of its employees accounts.

There is no reason to show the title to all by default. Only 'free', 'busy', 'away', etc is enough, which is standard in Outlook.

"Hey Steve, I noticed you're meeting with Bob and Janet tomorrow on foo. I'm working on foo-sec and could use more details on foo; mind if I sit in?"

Google's corporate culture is to make it as easy as possible to have that happen.

I think the GP is referring to personal calendars, not work calendars.

I'd blame the user. Speculation: when you add an event you can choose whether you add it to the work or to the personal calendar and those people chose to add it to the work calendar, which is public so others in Google can see when that person is busy, which in turn is useful to schedule meetings, etc

> Back in the day while I was at Google, you could look at anyone else's calendar

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

> 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.

>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"

Things like these auto sort themselves out - if the meeting is ""Weekly HR thing that HR spams everyone with but nobody attends and doesn't matter anyway", then nobody that has actual work to do attends, and they don't accept the meeting into their calendars. Its not like somebody would count attendance on those.

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)

> 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.

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.

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".