If I was Tim Cook I would immediately shutdown slack and mandate everyone go back to using email. It’s always a tiny minority of activists organizing on slack who are causing a lot of the unrest in tech companies.
This is a common talking point to marginalize political activity in any situation: 'It's just a tiny minority agitating', etc. In every situation, a tiny minority appeals to the majority and sometimes it convinces them. (If a majority of Americans ever protested something, that would be over 160 million people in the streets. Just think of the logistics of food, water, and waste ... cellular data bandwidth ... Twitter, Facebook and Instagram load ...)
That's how change happens; we try to persuade each other. People who are more involved, motivated, skilled, available, etc. do more of the work. If there was an environmental problem in SF Bay, the people who have the knowledge and expertise about the issue, and the communication skills, would inform and try to persuade everyone else. I'm not going to investigate it myself.
When I’ve run into this sort of thing, telltale signs of bullshit activism emerges from sales and marketing people not hitting the metrics, people at risk of being pushed out for performance issues, or people getting passed over.
As to whether or not their grievances are warranted, try asking any of your colleagues who used to work at Apple, and decide for yourself.
A lot of them are more social than anything else. Likeability supplants pure efficiency, and people hire friends, or people they want to spend time with.
* Just curious, how do you enforce against, for example, a Facebook group? Would you have to totally block Facebook?
* With word of mouth an activist Slack workspace can take off on personal devices over cellular data, if the conditions are right. Is the idea of internal enforcement just to make it less convenient to participate?
* Why don’t activists use Blind to organize? Is Blind hostile to activists? How active is Blind at moderating content on behalf of companies (eg. taking down or burying activist content)?
With insider threat, the idea isn’t to force the behavior into concealed channels, but instead into “cleartext” channels where the data exfil, or I guess in this case subversive employee behavior, can be watched/snapshotted. Once that’s done, it goes over to HR/legal. So it’s not so much make it inconvenient to participate, but to make it easy to catch that participation is occurring, with some safeguards around what that participation is - chatter is ok, but have safeguard for Apple intellectual property landing in that activist slack.
So with FB and Blind, a company has two ways to ID that’s occurring, take evidence,nand then over to HR /Legal it goes.
If it occurs on work computers, one is device management tools like Forcepoint that allow an insider threat team to see your real time action. They see the employee going to this Slack/Blind, insider threat team starts taking artifacts, and that’s evidence. Other device mgmt tools aren’t as invasive, but achieve similar ends. All in all, regardless of the forum, the behavior can get caught, and it’s shipped to HR.
If all of the activism occurs off work computers, I’d bet the behavior gets caught by two ways. One, 3rd party vendors who scan social media/GitHub for company branding existing outside of company channels (so on FB “Apple Activist Group” would fire). Two, and more likely, is the activists suck at OPSEC because Bob or Susan from marketing who join the group but computers are Google-machines to them talk about it on work devices or the water cooler/Slack.
Gotta remember a place like Apple has insider threat programs dealing with industrial/corporate espionage. A bunch of pissed off activist employees trying to sneak around aren’t the same challenge. If Apple did have an employee activist group with ironclad OPSEC, Apple prob has big problems and those employees need to balance how important the cause is and why can’t they just talk about it to mgmt vs how that would look from the outside to a company/law enforcement.
I definitely assume work provided devices are logged and I've been told work provided cell phones are logged, but I don't know if that extends to personal devices. Of course best case would be to try and find out if there is a way to use an external token generator to keep work off a personal device.
This part is interesting, future feature, wonder how they detect that on a personal device: “ Jailbreak detection If a user installs SecureAuth Authenticate on a jailbroken or rooted phone, SecureAuth will detect the occurrence and will not allow the user to set up a SecureAuth account. (Coming Soon)”
Ultimately, read your AUP and BYOD policy and see what you did/did not sign away wrt monitoring on personal devices. Quite likely you can raise an HR stink if this app had more than just basic telemetry and they mandate it to be on a personal device.
Honestly, that realization is part of why I started commenting on message boards rather than lurking. The vast majority of people read but don't even bother to up/down vote. You have a lot of outsized influence if you choose to comment, even if it doesn't seem like your comments get much attention.
He made the wrong, worst people at the company feel "empowered" and now there's no stopping them.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-h...
The reality is some people are rightly fired, others wrongly. In this case, that person was rightly fired. Writing such inflammatory bollocks would have got you fired 10 or 20 years ago too. They burned bridges with most of the people they would be expected to work with, so it’s absurd to demand that they be protected from the consequences of their actions. This goes well beyond being fired for claiming that, say, racism against white people is possible.
And now you, who never read the book but copy-pasta a few quoted sentences, want to destroy this man.
To go back after the fact and fire someone because of this was wrong. (That's why Apple settled for a lot of money, and Mr. Garcia can no longer talk about it.)
I didn't hear about Apple settling for a lot of money. How much was it?
> Anyway: Chaos Monkeys contains scenes from Antonio’s private relationships. Characteristically, they’re painted as comedies, where his personal life is depicted as an unpredictable third party over which he has little control — only occasionally, it seems, does it even listen to his suggestions. He meets a woman via Match.com whom he calls British Trader, “an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels.”
He’s enthralled, but everything about her is a surprise that keeps him off balance, from the fact that her “strapping and strutting” South African ex-boyfriend docks a boat next to his not long after their first date, or that she sleeps on “a cheap foam mattress about the width of an extra-jumbo-sized menstrual pad” above a floor covered from detritus from a recent renovation. She did such work herself because, Antonio explains, “she made Bob Vila of This Old House look like a fucking pussy.” Even this side of her life has him tiptoeing. “Postcoitally it was all I could do to balance myself on the edge of the pad and off the drywall dust,” he noted.
At one point, as a means of comparing the broad-shouldered British DIY expert favorably to other women he’d known, he wrote this:
Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.
Out of context, you could, I guess, read this as bloviating from a would-be macho man beating his chest about how modern “entitlement feminism” would be unmasked as a fraud in a Mad Max scenario. In context, he’s obviously not much of a shotgun-wielder himself and is actually explaining why he fell for a strong woman, as the next passage reveals:
British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work—be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone’s back—required doing.
Again, this is not a passage about women working in tech. It’s a throwaway line in a comedic recount of a romance that juxtaposes the woman he loves with the inadequate set of all others, a literary convention as old as writing itself. The only way to turn this into a commentary on the ability of women to work in Silicon Valley is if you do what Twitter naturally does and did, i.e. isolate the quote and surround it with mounds of James Damore references. More on this in a moment.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-the-hypocrites-at-apple-who... ----------
The NY Times mentioned this episode in this article, which is why I mentioned my belief that it's what started these internal troubles for Tim Cook and Apple.
> The complaints seem to be making an impact. When Apple this year hired Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook manager, more than 2,000 employees signed a protest letter to management because of what they called “overtly racist and sexist remarks” in a book he had written, based in part on his time at Facebook. Within days, Apple fired him. Mr. García Martínez declined to comment on the specifics of his case.
https://www.engadget.com/apple-faces-us-labor-board-investig...