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Comment by mikejb | Hacker News Reader

The (1) case is a bit inaccurate/misleading. From what I can gather from the article:

- Gebru tweeted the name of the employee [1]

- Axios then reached out to Google, who then made the following statement:

> Our security systems automatically lock an employee’s corporate account when they detect that the account is at risk of compromise due to credential problems or when an automated rule involving the handling of sensitive data has been triggered. In this instance, yesterday our systems detected that an account had exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external accounts. We explained this to the employee earlier today.

Context matters.

[1] https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1351698317550432256

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> The (1) case is a bit inaccurate/misleading.

No, its not.

> Gebru tweeted the name of the employee

Sure, more to the point Gebru tweeted that Mitchell’s corporate email appeared to be nonfunctional, sure.

> Axios then reached out to Google

That seems likely to be the sequence of events, sure.

Usually and ethically, a company that was in exactly the circumstances Google described would have:

(1) Declined comment, or

(2) Confirmed the email was nonfunctional and declined further comment, or

(3) Explicitly declined comment on personnel matters (especially if the framing of the question from Axios raised the issue of it being a disciplinary action of some kind; raising a personnel issue when it wasn’t part of the framing of the question would itself be somewhat unusual.)

> Context matters.

As an abstract truism, sure; while the narrative you describe is exactly what seems like the most likely scenario to me, I didn’t describe it because that fact was already considered in the description of scenario #1. Google’s behavior is (even assuming that they are being completely honest) grossly unethical in the context described.

The only way I can read your argument is if I were in the spirit of "the big guy is always wrong".

If you're accused of a SECOND action taken against an ethicist, and AGAIN it's not because of anything you did that was bad, then yes your hand is actually being forced to say more than "no comment".

It's absolutely incredible how much Google has not spoken out to defend itself against the lies upon lies upon inconsistencies that Timnit has thrown out. And now another case pops up?

> The only way I can read your argument is if I were in the spirit of "the big guy is always wrong".

How about “the guy burning the person they are currently in a business relationship with without getting all the facts is wrong”. Or “a wrong by party A against party B does not justify a wrong by B against C.”

> It's absolutely incredible how much Google has not spoken out to defend itself against the lies upon lies upon inconsistencies that Timnit has thrown out. And now another case pops up?

Er, nothing in Google’s story, even taken as gospel truth, indicates that either Gebru’s fact claims in this case were lies or that her speculations were unreasonable or inconsitent in her position given the observable facts. So, your characterization seems...misplaced, at best, even if your characterization of her past actions was accurate. (And in the cases where Google has presented contrary stories to Gebru on other points, Google’s own stories have been outright self-contradictory whereas Gebru’s were at least internally consistent, so I can either trust Gebru or neither.)

> How about “the guy burning the person they are currently in a business relationship with without getting all the facts is wrong”. Or “a wrong by party A against party B does not justify a wrong by B against C.”

I don't even know what you think are the actions people have been taking, to make you interpret things in a way to make you say that.

> Er, nothing in Google’s story, even taken as gospel truth, indicates that either Gebru’s fact claims in this case were lies or that her speculations were unreasonable or inconsitent in her position given the observable facts.

It's very damning that she chose to call out Jeff Dean as being the person who fired her.

Her manager was not a man. Her manager's manager (who actually delivered the news) is not a man. The CEO is not white. She chose probably the ONLY person in her entire reporting chain who happens to be a white man (and in engineering circles famous), and she points to him and says "He! He did this!".

And that's just a start.

Face it, you don't even have to read Google's official account, much less believe it, without seeing that her story absolutely does not add up.

Even the headline does not match the content in any article about her.

Just to get this straight:

The researcher who tweeted out the name of an employee who's email has been blocked, and throwing out theories about crackdowns and firings - that's all good.

Explaining the email account has been blocked due to mass-leaking documents - that's beyond excusable?

Sure. When facts contradict your opinion, you shouldn't hate the facts.

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