Google employees have accused their employer of creating a surveillance tool disguised as a calendar extension designed to monitor gatherings of more than 100 people, a signal that those employees may be planning protests or discussing union organizing. Google parent company Alphabet “categorically” denies the accusation.
The accusation, outlined in a memo obtained by Bloomberg News, claims severe unethical conduct from high-ranking Google employees, who they say allegedly ordered a team to develop an Chrome browser extension that would be installed on all employee machines and used primarily to monitor internal employee activity. Employees are claiming the tool reports anyone who creates a calendar invite and sends it to more than 100 others, alleging that it is an attempt to crackdown on organizing and employee activism.
The company that earns its money by finding new ways to extract actionable data from us to sell ads more effectively is employing that same kind of technology to prevent its employees from unionising and demanding better working conditions?
I’m so surprised.
Creepy? Yeah. Unethical? For employees. Not so much. Maybe if they are dishonest about it, but there isn’t (and generally shoudln’t be) any expectation of privacy at work.
I’m sure google employees are horrified to find the same techniques they use on everyone else on themselves.
I’ll try to at least appear sympathetic, if they’re not too shrill.
Except when it comes to legally protected things like union activity…
I’m not sure what the laws actually are (or which location’s laws it’d be). For example, I’d assume there’s at least one country where union activity on your own time is legally protected but union activity on the company’s time (while you’re being paid to do your job instead) is not.
You assume only US legal rules. In other countries, esp. in the EU, this kind of thing might even be simply illegal.
If it’s signed in addition to the contract you have with the company, there’s not much you can do about it (except take on other challenges)..
And here I thought Google was the place to work for. With this news, I’d personally shy away. It has nothing to do with any thoughts of causing harm to an company. But as an American, I believe in it’s core of mock privacy. As such, I’m on the employee’s side on this. I believe any publicly traded company and government will fight privacy and anti spying on the public at large.
Given that you believe an accusation without supporting evidence I wonder – do you also believe the world is ruled by reptiloids?
No, but I did watch the Herculoids back in the day.
All this shows for certain is that Google employees don’t trust Google. And why should they? They already know that nobody should trust Google. As for the surveillance tool, how did Google develop this without using employees? And given all Google products are effectively surveillance apps, why would Google need an additional tool to know what anybody is up to. All they need to do is to mine the data they have already and breach some user agreements. Far more covert than an actual installed app.. Furthermore, why would clever Google employees use Google products to act against Google. They would use Apple products.. The tool allegation is a conspiracy theory so needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
“Furthermore, why would clever Google employees use Google products to act against Google. They would use Apple products.. The tool allegation is a conspiracy theory so needs to be taken with a grain of salt.”
What? At work you use whatever tools your company demands you to use. Most office workers have locked-down desktops with centralized management. Already the quoted part of the article suggests that the employees are required to use Chrome web browser and that there is a proprietary plugin being installed on every machine.
Whilst the software development division probably has more freedom in their choice of machiney, regular peasants do not.
Since it is implied that this browser extension is used to circument the law — Google apparently has no right to simply scan through their employees’ email and calendars — the plugin could obviously be illegal too.
sj87,
In the US, employees have no legal expectation of privacy on company machines. Who knows if there could be instances of contradictory laws/statutes, but generally employers can see everything done by employee on company accounts.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/email-monitoring-can-employer-read-30088.html
I don’t put faith in google or any company to behave ethically. However in this case, short of additional evidence of malicious intent, their official explanation sounds plausible: limiting mass invitations could actually have been motivated by problems, which the plug-in was designed to address.
Google doesn’t need a plugin to access employee’s corporate accounts, but I imagine they could get in legal trouble for monitoring personal google accounts even though they obviously have access to those too. I don’t know the specifics of the mandatory plugin, it might theoretically be concerning if it monitors employee personal accounts in addition to the corporate ones. Although I don’t have enough facts to know whether this is the case or not.