The fact that screenshots of those calendars were later found outside the company, helps to demonstrate intent here.

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.

At some point those behaviors cross the line into stalking. I don't know where exactly law enforcement and prosecutors draw that line, but I'd prefer to get them involved sooner rather than later.

Not really.

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.

> PI trying to determine marriage issues, health issues for insurance reasons, etc

From my perspective, either of those have ill intent towards me.

Sure - but maybe you have ill intent towards others (filing dubious claims, an affair without spousal approval, etc.) and this is to see it happen. It is no different than police doing a stakeout - it is just a private citizen than a public defender.

You can look at it as decreased insurance rates.

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.

> Pushing blame on the employee being tracked is ridiculous.

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.

From the article: > an individual subscribed to the calendars of a wide range of employees outside of their work group.

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.

How plausible is it that they were following people outside their group for union reasons, e.g. to call them for a union meeting, rather than anything more nefarious?

That is ok usage, but in the discussed case we already know that people followed were later doxed not called to discuss unions. Big difference

Also, we know that the people being tracked complained that they felt unsafe.

While they were being tracked or only once the case was being built and the tracking was revealed?

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.

I agree that in this case, the person subscribed to calendars for an arguably shady purpose, or at least a not work-related purpose. But I find it rich that Google created the feature, and then tried to describe it in a creepy way, especially with how Google approaches privacy for their users (roughly, data the user hands to Google is fair game).

The issue here is not about the feature or existing possibility here. The issue is about people being followed and then they were doxed. This is creating a hostile workplace. Google makes investigation, gives out warnings, bad behavior continues, result is inevitable

Unionizing and protest organizing is just a background noise at this point

I manage my work calendar with an eye towards effective collaboration. Sometimes people have a legitimate need to know what I'm doing, to understand e.g. whether I can respond to chat messages or whether I will accept an emergency interruption. I don't and shouldn't have to plan against hostile actors trying to stalk me.

You may be obligated to by Law, trade secrets or just plain professionalism. As employee one need to both protect oneself and company.

Which is also the case of pretty much any other enterprise calendaring system, like office 365, or heck, even <shudder> lotus notes...

I tend to agree, and it's also worth pointing out that calendars in O365 work similarly.

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.