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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty important to get this story straight: She moved files when she wasn't supposed to. This seems like a pretty standard firing. People are already claiming on twitter that Google is assaulting ethical AI, and I just don't see it.

Google did not immediately comment on those claims. Its statement said of Mitchell: “We confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees.”

Yeah, uh, don't do this.

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Not just exfiltration but sharing outside the organization, as per news articles about it.

There's no story here, this is an obvious outcome.

Edit: to add that the more interesting question is whether they should sue her. If they don't, that may be the contextually-appropriate version of letting her off the hook easy (to live up to their culture or for morale or for optics or whatever reason).

>She moved files when she wasn't supposed to

If that's true, that's not very ethical is it?

You always have to be careful with people who do bad things for "good" reasons (ie the difference between Sci-Hub and reselling pirated papers for a profit).

You want a gulf of difference between the punishment for nefarious activity and the punishment for well-intended-but-unlawful activity.

She is an authority on Ethics, being listed on the ICLR conference as part of the Ethics Review Committee:

> Margaret Mitchell, Google Research and Machine Intelligence

But I do think they can miss her, since there are already 8 people responsible for Ethics and Diversity, with 11 responsible for the actual organization of the conference.

Maybe they can update https://iclr.cc/ to reflect the fact that she is not representing Google anymore?

> She is an authority on Ethics

This is so pretentious. Ethics is a branch of philosophy and even religion with deep debates raging from 4000 years ago and no end in sight. Hundreds of specialists have been going at it in multi-decades efforts and yet any of their opinions must not carry more weight than the average citizen's. Mitchell has a BS in Linguistics an MS in computational linguistics and a PhD in CS. Her fist paper about something even tangentially related to ethics is from 2015.

Philosophers have already identified the problem. There is no universal standard of morality or ethics.

The core of ethics derives from evolution. Societies with certain sets of cooperative and competitive values destroy, dominate, and expand. Mutations are constantly happening and some of those ethics can lead to the self-destruction of a culture, while some make a culture even more dominant. Some are neutral and just background noise and have no substantial impact on the society.

In the grand scheme of things the only thing that matters for morals and ethics is whether the culture that embodies those ethics can survive against pressure from other cultures.

Some ethics have been selected into the genome as they provide superior fitness of individuals.

The idea that we should pursue equal outcomes is a mutation. In general it has been shown to destroy a culture (socialism) when competing with more capitalistic cultures. The victim type culture is likely to be much weaker than one where people constantly compete to rise to the pinnacle of power and wealth.

Ultimately power and wealth drive innovation; and innovation, especially of weapons, drives domination. There are other types of domination, such as media, food, language, etc.

Good luck trying to find a consensus in philosophy, specially in such a contentious field like ethics. There isnt, for myriad of reasons, from the banal (PhD theses, and tenure decisions depend on "new approaches"), to the historical(there are several 'schools' in ethics, with their subdivisions), to the sociological (society in general does not grant to professional philosophers the monopoly on deciding what is wrong or right)

Pretty debatable. Is the law equivalent to morality? If not then I can't see how corporate law is either, since corporations aren't even democracies.

Were Snowden's leaks ethical?

It's pretty common for rule-breaking and law-breaking to be ethical when rules, laws, and norms are unethical.

> She moved files when she wasn't supposed to.

According to Google.

Remember, an entity that has a reason and a justification to do what it wants will manufacture whatever evidence it needs to do that.

And, it's not a court of law. At best, it's "allegedly moved files when they weren't supposed to".

If she did not do that, I am sure she could sue Google for libel.

If she didn't do it and they don't have good reason to believe she did, then she could and should easily win a large lawsuit against them, since they have publicly accused her of illegal activity. That is a hugely more risky move than just saying that someone underperformed or was let go for other reasons, and knowing how heavily pre-lawyered everything that Google does is, I highly doubt they would publicize something like that without having evidence to back it up.

Maybe I'm wrong, but afaik she has yet to deny doing exactly what they've claimed. My guess is that in her mind she was doing something totally reasonable by trying to dig up old emails that she remembered that she thought would help her friend's case against Google, and feels that even if that's against the letter of her agreements with the company it should be morally okay. Which is fine as a moral argument, but you're still gonna get fired.

"Maybe I'm wrong, but afaik she has yet to deny doing exactly what they've claimed."

That seems like the natural thing to do if you feel like you may already be in the process of being fired. I assume a lawyer would advise you to be quiet about it, right?

Probably, but she has been pretty far from quiet on the topic.

Any lawyer would tell her not to say anything about Google's allegations. Especially before she was fired.

> If she didn't do it and they don't have good reason to believe she did, then she could and should easily win a large lawsuit against them, since they have publicly accused her of illegal activity.

Despite the popular refrain of “truth is an absolute defense” in the context of defamation law, in US law falsity is an element of the tort, which means that the plaintiff bears the burden of making a prima facie case that the accusation was false by at least some evidence, the defendant doesn't bear the initial burden of showing that it is true or reasonably believed.

Also, there is a very good chance, since Mitchell was publicly involved in the controversy over Google's firing of Timnit Gebru before Google made the accusation, that Mitchell would be found to be a public figure within the context of Google's alleged defamation, which would heighten the requirement from falsity plus harm to proving actual malice.

Also, if Google is lying, they almost certainly also spent over a month building a constructed evidence trail and doctoring records to support the lie between the very public lockout and the actual firing.

So, no, winning a defamation case wouldn't be easy, wouldn't be quick, and wouldn't fail to be extremely expensive in litigation costs.

Plus, every step Google takes on this is just resulting in more of the remaining people in the affected area of the company going public with problems, and it’s not like Mitchell seems to be hurting for alternative employment so as likely the only value of winning the lawsuit would be a PR poke in Google's eye that they are getting on their own anyway...why bother?

The rule number 1 in letting people go: never go on record why you did that. There's a good reason for that - you're opening yourself up for lawsuits. Google violated that rule in a big way by making such a public and damaging statement. You bet they can back it up.

Or they believe the PR win from spinning the story early is worth more than what they'll pay out from the lawsuits.

> And, it's not a court of law. At best, it's "allegedly moved files when they weren't supposed to".

Are you operating under the assumption that nothing should ever be stated as a fact unless determined by a court of law? Because that's not how I think of things.

(I do agree that Google is a biased actor here. If I hear that Margaret Mitchell disputes moving files in contravention of company policy I will give her the benefit of the doubt. But my default assumption will be that everyone is telling the truth about basic facts.)

> According to Google.

You do understand that if Google is lying, they'd be get sued for libel and potentially millions of dollars in settlement and even more in PR damage.

Also, she seemed like a toxic AF person

Wonder if there will be some big leak or bus throwing article from the exfiltrated data the reporting references.

It's pretty important to get it straight: what files did she move and why? So far it appears she did NOT do an Anthony Levandowski and steal IP. In particular Google has said zero about the actual dollar value of those files, or cited any damages from the movement of the files. It appears much more likely she was talking to a lawyer, which is a perfectly legal thing to do, and probably pretty wise given Google's maximally adversarial approach to this whole mess.

Yes you should always respect your employer's property. In tech, that's almost always IP stuff: code, diagrams, plans, etc. But don't let an employer defame a former employee with an intentionally "concise" story.

It doesn't matter what files she moved and why. What matters is they were internal Google documents and exfiltrating sensitive contents that you don't own is a fireable offence in any corporation. She should have known better.

Just so everyone knows, in CA your assertions are false. CA courts have ruled that if a company protects documents or email systems then they earn the status of a trade secret. Theft of trade secrets is a felony criminal offence in CA. Do I think the CA AG is going to charge her? Unlikely. But there’s no need to demonstrate damages here like in a civil suit.

Illegally exfiltrating documents to your lawyer is also, illegal. Such documents would not be admissible in court and should be obtained through the usual lawful channels of legal discovery.

In short, don’t do this. It’s theft.

Just so everybody knows, sexual coercion is a criminal offense and yet Google certainly didn’t pursue Andy Rubin for that, actually they gave him a $90m severance.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18023364/google-andy-rub...

In short, don’t abuse coworkers sexually. It’s a crime.

An employer has a vested interest in letting you go can always find a reason that can be summarized as some violation of corporate policy.

Right now I'm writing this during the work day on my work computer.

I forwarded a work email to my own personal email once because my work email client wasn't syncing on my phone.

Could these be used against me if my employer cared enough? Undoubtedly.

OP is preemptively judging Mitchell 1 hour after she announced she was let go. We have no concept if there claims are legitimate and will not survive a wrongful dismissal lawsuit.

Google doesn't care. Paying Mitchell X Million dollars would be just a cost of doing business. In the meantime, an "uppity" provocateur is out of the building and not fighting for change.

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