Margaret Mitchell fired from Google

Re:Margaret Mitchell fired from Google by bryanrasmussen on Saturday February 20, 2021 @03:10AM (#26202508)

I mean multiple external parties could mean two parties and technically not be a lie. It could also be multiple external services that she has an account at and still not technically be a lie. I guess someone could not be specifying more clearly how nefarious the goings on because of legal reasons, but it could also be that they're not specifying more clearly because then everyone would make the pffft noise and point and laugh.

I guess I just don't trust unclear language that emanate from within big corporations somewhere.

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Re:Margaret Mitchell fired from Google by ALittleLight on Saturday February 20, 2021 @03:16AM (#26202536)

I think it's the "external" part of the phrase that's a problem, not the "multiple". She could've sent it to one external party and that still may have been a fire-able offense.

(Of course, this depends on what she was sending, if it was really protected information, and who she was sending it to. If she was sending evidence of criminal wrongdoing on the part of Google to her lawyer or a government official, then I don't know).

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Re:Margaret Mitchell fired from Google by Aeolun on Saturday February 20, 2021 @08:47AM (#26204051)

An external party could be her own email account at a different service.

Probably because she was worried that something exactly like this would happen.

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Re:Margaret Mitchell fired from Google by 1123581321 on Saturday February 20, 2021 @06:35PM (#26209162)

I don't have Google experience, but you can be summarily fired for forwarding to a personal address at many companies with a security or compliance policy. You would have known this in advance, whether through training, a manual, or warnings inside the email client.

I remember an all hands where someone forwarded a relatively innocuous email to her Yahoo, once, and we all received a big reminder.

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Re:Margaret Mitchell fired from Google by dan-robertson on Sunday February 21, 2021 @07:41PM (#26219035)

It’s true that companies don’t like that. It’s also true that common advice to people experiencing some kind of workplace harassment or abuse or bullying is to follow up to verbal conversations in writing, and to keep your own copies of those documents in case the company decides to accidentally delete them before they get a subpoena or whatever.

So a question is then whether it’s morally sufficient for someone to be fired for this sort of behaviour. It feels to me like the reason for the firing was not really at all related to breaking the written policies in the company handbook and a lot more related to breaking the unwritten policies about stirring up trouble and dissent.

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Re:Margaret Mitchell fired from Google by katbyte on Saturday February 20, 2021 @06:18PM (#26209008)

that's still a breach of policy and of questionable legality? your company email inbox is the companies not your own.

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Re:Margaret Mitchell fired from Google by dbbk on Saturday February 20, 2021 @04:54AM (#26203000)

Sending it to two parties is still just as bad as sending it to 200 parties...

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Re:Margaret Mitchell fired from Google by bryanrasmussen on Saturday February 20, 2021 @06:13AM (#26203322)

no, sending it to the wrong 2 parties is still just as bad as sending it to more than 3 wrong parties, but if you send to 200 external parties there is more of a chance that you are sending something to the wrong party.

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Re:Margaret Mitchell fired from Google by jariel on Saturday February 20, 2021 @02:54PM (#26207235)

Yes, you could make the argument that this information is not definitively damning ... at the same time it looks pretty bad on her, and it seems likely that Google was doing something because someone was doing bad things.

Also worth noting is that from a PR perspective, the press doesn't seem to be interested in anything other than making Google look bad, which strengthens my view that they are narrative creators more than anything.

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