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Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges

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Re: Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges

#51

Post by VikingCoder »

ditonal wrote: post #40

One thing that happens in SV is: * Employer says "hey, we have all these convenient corporate app, wouldn't it be nice to be able to check work messages and work docs on your mobile? Just install our app to "corp-ify" your phone" * Employer now views your mobile device as containing sensitive company IP and therefore they have the right to snoop on anything on your phone. If you install corp on your phone, Google vie…

When it's convenient to add a corp profile to a personal phone, buy a new personal phone exclusively for that, don't put your own profile on it at all.

Use Swappa or similar. Used phones are not that expensive. And you can just Hotspot from your personal phone, you don't need data for it.

YMMV, but that worked well for me.

Re: Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges

#52

Post by [deleted] »

tsdlts wrote: post #44
sumeno wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities" is not a personal political opinion, it is the law.

So if she instead put "Nobody has the right to enter this country illegally" it would be fine because she's just restating the law?

[deleted]

Re: Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges

#53

Post by pmiller2 »

skybrian wrote: post #19
sumeno wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities" is not a personal political opinion, it is the law.

If you want to play that game, you could spam people with the text of all sorts of interesting laws. It's still an abuse of authority. But I wonder if anyone would be have been fired if it were an April fools prank?

Where's the evidence of "spamming?" Is Google "spamming" its employees on a regular basis with their "approved" messages?

Re: Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges

#54

Post by JeremyBanks »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #17
Pfhreak wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you are being downvoted. You've (correctly) pointed out that the parent comment has constructed a strawman to punch at, rather than the actual events. Arguments of the form, "Person did X. Imagine if they had done Y! (Where Y is some obviously unethical thing.)" are fallacious and they lead the discussion to useless dead ends. The point is that the person did do X, and NOT Y.

vorpalhex is stating action X was wrong in the first place, and describing a situation Y as an example to show why action X is wrong. I have policies at my workplace that disallow something because it's impractical to judge every single situation and then have to deal with the gray area.

That's a fair perspective, but that's not applicable here. The punishment isn't because of how much she violated the policies, it's to send a message.

At Google, someone once disruptively modified the root permissions for the entire company-wide monorepo to show off that the permissions scheme was fallible. They were left off with a verbal warning, even though on paper they massively abused their position, and could have made the point without actually doing it.

The engineer in the OP took a much smaller action, that was closer to the scope of her actual duties, but was punished more severely.

Re: Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges

#55

Post by VikingCoder »

jimbob45 wrote: post #12
macspoofing wrote: post #6

>Spiers was fired after she created a pop-up for Google employees visiting the IRI Consultants website. “Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities,” the notification read I remember that case. Yeah - she deserved to be fired. She used an internal security tool to push her personal political views. How could that not be a fire-able offense?

Fuck what she used the tool for. At my job (and most jobs, I would think), if you check in any superfluous code, you’re going to be seen as a bad coder. Regressions are real and are highly embarrassing to both the company and you.

This was an internal tool. How will a regression in that be "highly embarrassing ... to the company"?

Re: Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges

#56

Post by manfredo »

sumeno wrote: post #8
macspoofing wrote: post #6

>Spiers was fired after she created a pop-up for Google employees visiting the IRI Consultants website. “Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities,” the notification read I remember that case. Yeah - she deserved to be fired. She used an internal security tool to push her personal political views. How could that not be a fire-able offense?

"Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities" is not a personal political opinion, it is the law.

Yes, you have a right to participate in unionization and politics. But you don't have a right to alter company software to spread your political message. There's a big difference between holding a "Vote X" sign on a street corner on your own time, and using your position as a developer to put up "Vote X" signs on your company's website.

Re: Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges

#57

Post by reaperducer »

ditonal wrote: post #40

One thing that happens in SV is: * Employer says "hey, we have all these convenient corporate app, wouldn't it be nice to be able to check work messages and work docs on your mobile? Just install our app to "corp-ify" your phone" * Employer now views your mobile device as containing sensitive company IP and therefore they have the right to snoop on anything on your phone. If you install corp on your phone, Google vie…

At my company, in order to get access to the corporate email and such on your phone, they require you to install their app on the phone.

Then you're required to sign a document acknowledging that when you leave the company they will remotely wipe your phone, including all of your personal apps, documents, photos, etc.

Mixing personal and work hardware is never a good idea.

Re: Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges

#58

Post by saghm »

giantg2 wrote: post #24
sumeno wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My recollection is that the extension was for notifying employees of relevant policies and laws regarding websites they were viewing. So no, it was not an unrelated extension.

Isn't the extension actually about the laws or policies related to using the site in question? Not necessarily about laws pertaining to things that happen outside of the use of the site, such as unionizing.

IIRC, the website the notice was added to was specifically a the site of law firm that Google had contracted with regards to the ongoing concerns of unionization. It seems like there's a fair argument to be made that it was related to the site, although there are arguments against that as well.

Re: Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges

#59

Post by fishywang »

ditonal wrote: post #40

One thing that happens in SV is: * Employer says "hey, we have all these convenient corporate app, wouldn't it be nice to be able to check work messages and work docs on your mobile? Just install our app to "corp-ify" your phone" * Employer now views your mobile device as containing sensitive company IP and therefore they have the right to snoop on anything on your phone. If you install corp on your phone, Google vie…

On Android, the work profile is supposed to solve that problem: you only add your corp account and install corp apps in work profile, and it's (at least supposed to be) isolated from your personal, default profile on your phone. This is even explicitly stated in work profile enabling flow.

The spy activities described in the article is not about actual personal activities on the phone. One is looking at other's corp calendar, which can only be done inside corp profile (you need your corp account to be able to look at other's calendar); The other is making changes on the corp proxy type of thing, which obviously also can only be done with corp account.

Re: Google illegally spied on workers before firing them, US labor board alleges

#60

Post by zeckalpha »

remus wrote: post #29
sumeno wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities" is not a personal political opinion, it is the law.

I think the point here is "...used internal security tools...", Not the particulars of the message she was pushing.

Security is a broad topic and can include avoiding legal liabilities.
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