Google Accused of Creating Spy Tool to Squelch Worker Dissent | Hacker News Reader

Google Accused of Creating Spy Tool to Squelch Worker Dissent

bloomberg.com

55 pointsjbegley16 comments

>A representative for Alphabet Inc.’s Google said, “These claims about the operation and purpose of this extension are categorically false. This is a pop-up reminder that asks people to be mindful before auto-adding a meeting to the calendars of large numbers of employees.”

This sounds a lot more plausible than Google creating a chrome extension to access data they already own. This article is nonsense.

Bloomberg has been making lots of dumb tech articles lately...

This one, "the big hack" fiasco, and another one like 2 weeks ago I can't remember the title of...

I find it hard to believe that Google would build a custom Chrome extension for this - they already own Google Calendar and all of the data in employee’s calendars.

Google owns Calendar... but Calendar is written by their employees, the very people they're trying to control. Using a separate browser extension means a small team can manage this code and it isn't affected by larger teams' access to the project.

So why bother with an extension then?

As you point out, they own Calendar, they could just add it there.

As the spokesperson says in the article, they might genuinely want to nag people who create excessive meeting invites. Perhaps someone thought there was no need to bake this into the Calendar application.

I feel like the lesson here is really, "if you're organizing a big group to hurt some other party, do it where they're not watching". Want to hold a meeting to talk about how you and 300 other people are unhappy with working conditions at Google? Why are you organizing it in Google Calendar in the first place? Why are you doing it on your work computer?

Some workplaces are really open and support their employees. I know cynics will say that can't be trusted, but as someone who has worked for FAANG companies, I did see a lot of employees venting anything and everything without fear of management.

>Some workplaces are really open and support their employees.

Which is why they colluded to suppress wages.

Sure, but venting and taking collective action in ways that will almost certainly hurt the company's bottom line are kind of different things.

Because it's a protected right to discuss working conditions with your coworkers, and you might not have their personal email.

Nevertheless I agree-- I expect there would be better outcomes for these dissenters if they did the legwork to meet more clandestinely.

The allegation here is pretty weak. They just report large meetings, which can have many purposes.

http://archive.is/ZbJnx

You can’t have a union organization relying on employer resources.

As a general mitigation for Google spying attempts, I'd encourage Google employees to switch to Firefox.

Also, why is this flagged?

Just use means of communicating outside of the Corp network already.

Personal email list, slack, discord, blind, etc.

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