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Comment by Traster | Hacker News Reader

I think this is probably just a deliberate and horrendous mis-representation. I don't know how Google's internal systems work and would love someone who works there to comment further. However, in the public Google calendar I can set up alerts for all the meetings someone else has (useful for secretaries etc.). And so if you just sign up for those alerts you're going to get:

> received emails detailing the work and whereabouts of those employees, including personal matters such as 1:1s, medical appointments and family activities — all without those employees’ knowledge or consent.

Except that that is how Google has designed its calendar system. If you put your medical appointments into your calendar without marking them private then yes, they're going to be public.

So basically, Google seems to have managed to take a feature in its own Calendar App, and the default behaviour of meetings on Google and dressed it up like stalking.

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The privilege to take an action is not a justification of the action.

Google designed their calendar this way to support work. It doesn’t sound like these people were using resources for work purposes. That’s almost certainly a violation of the work rules. Pushing blame on the employee being tracked is ridiculous.

Companies are not democracies, and unless you are an executive with a contract or are in a collective bargaining agreement, you serve at the pleasure of your management. If you’re irritating your management for reasons and want to stick around, you need to work in the rules.

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.

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

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.

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.

Yes, Google uses Google Calendar internally.

Signing up for email alerts about somebody else's calendar is definitely weird. But the information you'd get is the same as someone would get if they checked your calendar manually, which is an expected and normal part of Google's culture.

No, it is more like checking it manually every single day. ...which is would be akin to following someone in public and filming them. Technically, it's all in public, but it is no less likely to make people feel stalked and unsafe.

The underlying part here is that these employees were using the notion of "unions" to organize _politically_.

...and their willingness to act against fellow employees and leak company documents demonstrates just how dirty they would have become had they been allowed to continue.

Personally, I don't think they cared at all about worker rights beyond their desire to advocate their politics.

They have only announced circumstantial evidence that the so-called "stalking" was related to the leak.

Remember, the so-called stalking was looking at information that the owner chose to share with the company and didn't mark the "private" flag on (which is available as a default to apply to all meetings).

Checking an employee’s public internal calendar every day, the bastards. /s

Why were they using company resources for personal meetings?

If I have a doctor's appointment in the middle of the day, I might add it to my personal calendar with full details, but I still need to add an entry to my work calendar to show I'll be out of the office, possibly with a generic title like "Medical Appt".

I wouldn't do that personally. It would say "Busy" and nothing else - that is all the company needs to know.

> Why were they using company resources for personal meetings?

Probably because it represents time that are unavailable for work and, in many cases, because their are people at work (including their boss) entitled to know the reason, and who probably established that as the workflow for sharing the information.

Yeah, and that's why you put full details in your personal calendar and into the work one "Doctor's appointment" or something without expanding on that any further.

> Why were they using company resources for personal meetings?

So that coworkers don't schedule you for meetings during your doctor appointments.

Add blockers on your calendar for that time.

It’s normal in a lot of companies. I typically have my bosses and my team lead’s calendar up throughout the day. Helps to fill in the gaps and get a feel for questions I’ll ask later

A time ago I used to not put anything onto my work calender because "it didn't matter" and "no one cared". Meeting at 2pm? That's a postit note and that was good enough for me.

Somewhere along the line, people started scheduling me for events in conflict with other events. Why? My online visible calender was free and clear into eternity so obviously I have nothing going on at 2pm. Explaining not being able to be in three places at once got old fast.

So now I have an eye toward using the calendar "defensively". Here's when I usually come in, here's when I usually clock out, here's when I usually take lunch, here's that weekly meeting I have to attend for someone else's giggles, here's when I'm helping Jimmy with this thing, here's when Samantha is helping me with the other thing. You want a meeting? Now the calendar begins a negotiation.

I may or may not like it, but the tipping point has come and gone for me.

If you are periodically checking coworkers manually and then said coworkers got doxed externally you would be in the same troubles with the company for creating hostile workplace

> However, in the public Google calendar I can set up alerts for all the meetings someone else has (useful for secretaries etc.).

The fact that you can do it doesn't mean it is proper for you to do it other than as reasonable for legitimate job duties.

There is no system in place physically preventing me from doing lots of illegitimate things in my workplace, but that doesn't mean that if I do them I get a free pass merely because it was possible to do them.

So basically, Google seems to have managed to take a feature in its own Calendar App, and the default behaviour of meetings on Google and dressed it up like stalking.

A window on your friend’s house can be used to peek in to see if they’re home when you’ve popped by to visit.

It can also be used to stare into all day to monitor what someone you don’t know is doing.

What the terminated employees are accused of doing is a lot more like the second example.

Windows don't have privacy switches (blinds don't count, for obvious reason), and co-workers aren't "someone you don't know", and calendars are business planes not personal activities or personal bodies.

Also, in this example, Google would be the company paying users to set up cameras fixated on their windows, watching 24/7, for purposes of serving more relevant flyers in their mailboxes.

Yes, and users voluntarily agree for said “big brother watching you” dystopia to get free mailbox, maps app and free photos backups

Nobody signed up for their coworkers monitoring your calendar and then you find you beign doxed externally. Company investigated, gave out warnings, and yet the hostile behavior continued and here is the result

if it's useful for secretaries it doesn't mean that it should be used by someone else who doesn't need that information. This behaviour is dodgy and I wouldn't want to work with a colleague who does this.

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