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Comment by voxic11 | Hacker News Reader

Because company makes these resources available specifically for employee's personal use? And if you read the article Amazon specifically says that they are only monitoring for anonymized feedback so if they don't want employees using them to organize then they are not being very clear with that communication.

Also the article notes that Amazon is not only monitoring the internal listservers but also their employee's social media accounts including infiltrating private social media groups that employees created.

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> Because company makes these resources available specifically for employee's personal use

Really? Is that an Amazon thing? Because my company's equipment is clearly not primarily intended for my personal use, as stated in a few company documents.

Company documents can say whatever they want, but labor law wins.

For sure, can you point me to the labor law stating that company issued equipment is primarily for the personal use of the employee? I couldn't find anything at the federal level.

My info was out of date but pre-Dec 2019 (Caesars Union Suit), electronic communication channels were treated like break rooms- if they aren’t already restricted to only work chat, and you could shoot the shit, then they can’t block or specifically spy (or appear to spy) on protected union activity. Post that ruling, I don’t really understand where the line is. Apparently if there is no other way to communicate outside of work with your co-workers, then they have to let you do it. Maybe you could argue that’s the case during coronavirus unless you can easily get everyone’s personal emails. Shrug

I see. Yeah it's typically the kind of thing where the line is pretty blurry.

Except maybe by word of mouth spread the existence of external forums for communication that don’t involve leveraging company paid resources and some kind of entitlement to use said resources for non-company purposes. Using external resources and word of mouth may not be the most convenient result but it’s realistically fair.

So entitlement to things paid for by others, that you have a “right” to for your own purposes. Got it.

It seems like you’re painting with a broad brush. Does the company literally allow those resources to be used for personal use without restriction? Or are there in fact terms of use associated with those resources? Can you use them to advertise for your personal business? Can you post a singles ad? Or are there terms of use that specify what kind of communication is acceptable and maybe terms that allow the company to monitor the communications over that medium? Without knowing the actual terms of the use of those resources and just saying “well, personal use” you’re just speaking in very broad terms.

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