How can one even be able and allowed to do this? It smacks of gross incompetence on Google's part.
Just don't put your personal activities in your work calendar, I guess? Whenever I had a personal appointment (e.g. doctor), I'd just book a block of "Busy" or "Gabriel OOO" in my work calendar.
I would associate that with an email account that wasn't the work account, a printed page that was taken off-premises, a non-work cloud-hosted storage service, or to a computer that wasn't a work computer. It does not say that the place the information was sent to was any third party.
It could turn out that the information was sent to a third party, but that has not (yet) been claimed.
2. The fact that this kind of information made it outside of the company. I believe this is the consequence of making such info available to all and in a company with so many thousand employees like it or not there are some bad apples that will take advantage of everything
You can decide whether everyone can see the details or whether they just see "busy" everywhere.
I think it's good to see the title, for example if I have a meeting about the feature Foobar and a coworker sees that, he might want to reach out to say he's got some insight about it.
There is no reason to have your full calendar visible by all by default.
Also, "public" here means only the time & title, not detailed description, participants, attachments etc. You can easily set individual events to private, or default everything to private if you wish.
Google's corporate culture is to make it as easy as possible to have that happen.
It's ultimately the individual employee that knows whether or not a meeting is relevant to them. And they can only know that if they have information on the meeting.
Sounds like an entirely toxic environment.
Proper etiquette would be to ping the meeting organizer and ask if they mind if you sit in. If they don't, no problem. If they do, you work something out relevant to the reason you wanted to sit in. But one can't even start that conversation without knowledge of relevant meeting topics.
The fact I know what meetings my coworkers are having doesn't imply I should be crashing them any more than the fact I can see when my coworkers are at their desks implies I should be continuously bothering them.
Maybe that is why google screws up its data security outside too. Such things shouldnt be allowed in the first place.
Outlook is great comparing to this.
Yeah, the policy should be "employees are not allowed to stalk other employees". Sounds like that's what the policy actually was; I don't see any incompetency.
If you need to schedule around someone’s times, all you need to know is if they’re busy or free. At my office this is what is displayed if you look at others’ calendars, but not details unless you’ve been invited yourself.
> No sharing — Calendars aren't shared unless users share their own calendars. Note: If you choose No sharing, your mobile app users can't use the Find a time feature. > Only free/busy information (hide event details)—Only free/busy information displays. >Share all information — All information is public unless users change their own settings. Users can also make individual events private.
Then you can manually override these settings as a user.
My teammates calendar topics are visible to me so that I can notice if they're getting pulled into meetings on topics that I should be meeting with them also. My boss's calendar topics are visible to me so that I'm empowered to ballpark the relevance of my project in context of other things my boss is managing (and so I can notice if my boss is working on something that should be relevant to my project that nobody has noticed is relevant yet).
At our 80k multinational mega corp, we don't see each other's calendars, and we do those meetings with staff around whole globe. No real issues with this.
All this looks very much like google trying to paint leavers in as bad light as possible. This vengeful approach is very unprofessional and casts bad light on google and individual managers involved.
But is there a compelling reason not to have it? Can you think of any circumstances where having access to someone's event details would make scheduling and communication with them easier? I agree with your second point, of course, and while I have never worked at google I'm pretty confident nobody would bat an eye if you just blocked the equivalent time slot with "personal".
But this person didn't do that, and they were open about some of their personal information on their calendar. Probably because they didn't expect one of their coworkers to be a stalker. I guess that was naivety on their part, but this is victim blaming.
If I urgently need to meet with someone today and I see they've blocked off the whole afternoon for a 4-hour meeting, it could make a big difference if the 4-hour meeting in question is "Critical presentation to the CEO" or "Weekly HR thing that HR spams everyone with but nobody attends and doesn't matter anyway"
Unless they are your subordinate, so that you are empowered to judge and direct their priorities, it doesn't. Nothing prevents you from sending them a message (or meeting request) acknowledging that you know they have som thing scheduled but you have an urgent need (and explaining the need) and allowing them to make a decision, or Maki g a similar request of their superior if organizationally appropriate. Your urgent need doesn't transform you into their boss.
Critical stuff shouldn't get a reaction like "gee, he has something in his calendar, well we just skip this 10 mil deal because disturbing him is a no-no and he would be mean to us". Critical stuff is critical, take people out of their meetings, life is about priorities.
But I understand the appeal to control freaks out there, everything is plain and visible (or not, depends how you set it up)