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Comment by throwaway667555 | Hacker News Reader

The person redlined a contract instead of spending +$2000/yr (out of a likely $250,000+ salary) on a second personal phone. Such short-sidedness is a bad trait in an employee.

Second, their protest is laudable. But their decision was consciously: "the legal department of this $xxx billion company (that spends $xx million maintaining this employment contract template) will bend to my will, or I will {quit OR relent}". If they'd quit? Job well done. If they'd relent? Then why try? You're screaming into a void, and if you didn't recognize this prior to redlining, you have a bad trait for an employee.

All scenarios point to a competent red-liner achieving their desired outcome -- an ethical win in whatever case. Only an incompetent/shortsighted/kneejerk/low-critical-thinking red-liner would achieve an undesired outcome, because they didn't consider the game before playing.

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This is just name calling and blaming the victim, which is almost every employee of every tech job in the world, while celebrating the power of the employer. Insisting that a contract be negotiable when it comes to complete and total spying on you, in the context of an article where the employer is illegally spying on you, is not the trait of a bad employee

Kathryn Spiers did a man-in-the-middle attack on company property, like how some ISPs used to insert their own popups into HTML crossing their wires. Google tracked Spiers down and fired her for it, 100% justified. Separately, Google's hiring of a union-busting firm is fair game for disagreement, absolutely.

Also, I don't consider an employer having total visibility into its devices to be a power-trip. The onus is on the employee to keep their personal stuff out if they don't want it getting swept up. Of all companies, even Google couldn't design machine learning or quarantining sufficient to wall off personal data from company data inside someone's phone during their forensic prevention and investigation. So the legal department sure isn't going to promise they can unbake the cake that is your voluntarily mixed-use device.

> Also, I don't consider an employer having total visibility into its devices to be a power-trip.

That's fair, and I agree with that (as long as it's company-owned hardware and not personal hardware under a BYOD program). But I personally do not want to (and currently do not) work for a company that trusts me so little that it needs to spy on every activity I do on the hardware they give me to do my job.

I get that some people are fine with that, and that's ok, but I'm not, and I don't think I'm alone in this.

Honestly, that is the sort of solution I would expect the legal department to suggest as a counter-offer, with Google paying the difference. Having the legal department review contract changes is something I would expect to be standard for them, not a deal breaker. It is the reason for having the legal department there in the first place.

Google already will pay for you to have a separate corporate phone (the hardware and the data plan).

Not universally.

They will pay for a phone if they expect you to use it for company purposes. If they don't then feel free to never use your phone for your job.

I’m sure they would. Bulk enterprise plans are on the order of $8-$10/month. That’s not even a rounding error compared to an employees compensation.

Some details of an offer & acceptance of employment are trivial and not worth spoiling good will.

Me: "Hey manager, can I make an expense report for this work phone?" No matter the response, I'm ok with it, because I make Google money, and that's policy. I should work towards becoming management if I want that to change. But I probably have better things to do than such a trivial disagreement.

I wish corporations were less psychopathic, too, but this is not the hill I'd die on. Or, I'd be damn sure ready to die if I redlined as a "nice to meet you" first act.

I think I'd agree that it is a weird spoiling of goodwill, but would put this one entirely as Google's fault. Requesting a minor change to a contract the first time you see it is the expected behavior, not an outlier. That's the entire point of contracts, in order to come to a meeting of the minds. This is the equivalent of haggling at a flea market, and being thrown out as a result.

It's more like trying to haggle over the price of some bananas at Safeway.

maybe if bananas cost six figures people would negotiate over them.

I'd agree if this redline didn't require several departments to sign off costing $x million. Internal developers, internal security ops, legal, and C-suite coordinating these departments.

Also Google is very special in that their employees are extremely sophisticated and curious, so they need ~complete~ control of any electronics that access their networks.

So if your first paragraph is correct, what are we to make of the HR person saying "But that isn't how we use it, we would never access your personal data."? Were they lying? Or was there a real internal rule about "never" accessing personal data? A rule that was in disagreement with the $x million worth of coordinations of legal documentation?

And if your second paragraph is correct, then "Google HR lies to you on your first day as policy - if you ask certain questions" seems to be the only logical conclusion.

Perfectly determining company data from personal data on a personal device is impossible. "We would never access your personal data" means "we would never access your personal data deliberately, only accidentally in the course of an investigation of your work-related activities". Obviously no company is ever going to sign an agreement promising to do something impossible like perfectly avoid inspecting any personal data during a device audit. The person from the story might as well have been asking for the moon.

If they make verbal assurances that they'll do nothing bad, perhaps they'd be willing to write them down on the contract.

The upstream comment says that not only did they refuse to back up their verbal assurance that "they'll do nothing bad" with anything in writing, they withdrew the job offer over it.

It's been some time since "Do no evil" meant anything there...

> I'd agree if this redline didn't require several departments to sign off costing $x million.

Straw man. If a small change like this costs a company any more than a thousand bucks, they are Doing it Wrong.

You might argue that $1k is also a lot to expect, but consider that the company has likely already spent north of $25k (and sometimes a lot more than that) on the recruiting process that brought them this new employee. If they're going to throw that away to avoid an internal approval process that costs another thousand, that sounds like a bad financial decision to me.

Just fill your personal device with dick pics.

They'll stop looking pretty quick.

Only partially joking.

It's the equivalent of haggling of the flea market, and being told to give back the goods you are holding because there is no agreement on the price.

Alternative analogy. The haggling at the flea market already occurred (compensation negotiation), and the price was agreed upon. As you are picking up the goods, the seller shouts at you that he also gets to rifle through your phone, no take-backs, and you definitely agreed to it because you're picking up the goods.

One party here is altering the verbal agreement, and expecting the other party to accept without additional negotiation.

> I wish corporations were less psychopathic, too, but this is not the hill I'd die on. Or, I'd be damn sure ready to die if I redlined as a "nice to meet you" first act.

And what does Google (and most companies) do as a "nice to meet you" first act? Present you with adhesion contracts that you must sign with barely enough time to go over them. Nice.

I'm not a privacy nut, but I am concerned about a company owning my ideas when I'm working on personal projects.

I'm careful about that.

Would that be a deal breaker even at a dream job, yes.

I admire that and wish more employees looked after their interests, too, so that the commons weren't so poisoned with corporation-morality rather than humanity-morality.

Practically speaking, I think giving The Guardian or some pro-union think tank/lobbyist a copy of internal corporate policies would move the needle a lot more than a personal stand, but the personal stand is admirable nonetheless. Currently my financial freedom supersedes that level of moral freedom and agency.

Tech Solidarity collected those years ago. I think he came to the conclusion that you can't get anyone in tech to organize for anything so it didn't really matter.

Although it does seem like Googlers organize for their own comfort; they don't seem to bother doing it for their users though.

Sounds like google is doing something bad if they need to enforce this.

The power inbalance you speak of is why unions are probably needed.

You were a special snowflake in the 90s/early 2000s now you are a cog.

A cog being paid $160k or more

> The person redlined a contract instead of spending +$2000/yr (out of a likely $250,000+ salary) on a second personal phone. Such short-sidedness is a bad trait in an employee.

This isn't a solution, but a covert work-around.

Upon re-reading, I too wonder if Google means they'll rootkit any employee phone that comes onto company property. I hope they only rootkit phones with proprietary data on them.

Also, super important context: Of all the companies in the world, which ones would have employees, say, designing a rootkit to exfiltrate trade secrets, or for fun, or...? Google, certainly. So I get Google's position, as long as you're allowed a personal phone free of corporate intrusions.

You have to root the phone to login to your corporate Google account. If you don't want to login to your corporate account you don't have to root the phone. If your manager wants you to have a phone with corp access then he will get you a corporate phone to do it. However many would rather root their phone than have a separate phone for their private life so Google provides that option. If that starts being a legal problem for Google I'm pretty sure they will stop rooting phones and just require people to get corp phones instead.

> designing a rootkit to exfiltrate trade secrets, or for fun

Exfiltrating data is comically trivial, it wouldn't be any fun...

Problem is that if two anti Google activists joins the same team they could leak a huge amount of user data before stopped. Pretty sure a lot of people would find that "fun", and pretty sure their punishment would be very mild compared to for example Snowden even though their crime would be bigger.

Agreed, this is not a factory job for a few dollars here and there.

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