Ikea France on trial for snooping on staff and customers | Hacker News Reader

Ikea France on trial for snooping on staff and customers

bbc.com

104 pointstchalla20 comments

> The allegations first came to light in 2012 after an Ikea insider leaked emails between the company and a security company to the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné.

Such matters seem to usually come to light, not because the authorities investigated and uncovered, but because an insider talked.

A similar situation is with most performance enhancement scandals in professional sports. Lance Armstrong was not caught due to testing; he was caught because one of his men talked. As far as I know, the same drugs he used still do not show up on tests, so others are probably still using them.

For those who understand French: I assume this is the primary source:

https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/dossier/notre-dossie...

This is the equivalent google translate link:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

Mediapart is not Le Canard enchaîné.[1] Though Le Canard enchaîné is not available for free online. Their reporting also tanked Fillon's chances during the last French presidential election.

One can think of Le Canard enchaîné as the French version of Private Eye.

The original Mediapart story also references Le Canard enchaîné.[2]

[1] https://www.lecanardenchaine.fr/ [2] https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/290212/des-salaries-...

I found a lot of secondary sources mentioning both Canard and Mediapart as original sources. And Canard is not available, so I took what I could get.

I got the impression the story started at Canard, but was expanded upon by research from mediapart.

Example in English, plenty more in French if you google for them: https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2021/03/22/ikea-france-g...

The proposed fine ($4.5 million) seems absolutely tiny.

So is jail time to a corporation that isn't a physical entity, since the corporation is being sued not the individuals.

From the article (the first few paragraphs in fact)

>Ikea France will be tried as a corporate entity alongside several of its former executives.[...] The 15 people in the dock include top executives such as former CEO Stefan Vanoverbeke, and former store managers. Four police officers are also on trial for handing over confidential information.

This suggests to me that those people may be facing jail time.

> those people may be facing jail time.

Not to be the devil's advocate or anything, but it's extremely unlikely that they'll end up in jail. I would be thrilled to be wrong.

Highly unlikely indeed but not impossible in France.

Yes, one of the things that stood out to me is that the physical men responsible on a human level are also named in the suit.

Very often I find that it is cloaked behind a corporation.

Even worse is when it be cloaked behind governments. — there was a scandal in the Netherlands when it was found that “the government” had systemically suppressed a whistle-blower, down to bribing psychiatrists to give him false diagnoses of mental disorders to keep him silent: — the end result was that he was offered several millions of euros in compensation from the government, but none of the actual flesh and blood men responsible for these decisions were ever personally sanctioned criminally, so, the tax payer was the one who ended up paying the price for it all and the political careers of those personally responsible went on.

Organizational accountability is not quite as effective as a deterrent as human accountability, one would assume.

Why would such friendly non-profit charity snoop on anyone? Where would we buy cardboard furtnitures without them?

"The emails suggested that the firm was seeking access to records about its staff and customers from a police database holding millions of names and the personal information of criminals, victims and even witnesses."

Wait... is this about protecting criminals?

I don't think you have to be a criminal to be in some sort of police database. And even if it did mean that, it should make no difference as to how their privacy is treated. If anything, a police database should have higher bars to third party access on privacy grounds than almost any other kind of database. The only thing that should be public are court records.

Furthermore, I firmly believe court records should not be public en masse but rather only individually. It should not be trivial to just check a name and see if they've been convicted of something. Sentence served should mean you don't have lingering repercussions.

There's a balance there - the court records need to be public so that the justice system can be held accountable by the public in some way, and records need to be available to inform precedent for future decisions. That needs to be weighed against what you mentioned, the impact of the availability of those records on the people they are about.

Surprisingly, criminals also have rights. Unsurprisingly, not only criminals are in such databases.

It's rather surprising that you focused so much on criminals that you missed the next two nouns: victims and witnesses.

Unlike the US, Europe doesn’t make a habit of punishing criminals for the rest of their lives, and forcing them into further criminality.

As a general rule, if you’ve served your time, then you’ve repaid your debt to society and should no longer be punished.

Having employers apply extra-judicial punishment to those how have already been sentenced and and served their time is kinda barbaric, and totally defeats the point of having a justice system.

> As a general rule, if you’ve served your time, then you’ve repaid your debt to society and should no longer be punished.

If you served your time, you spent the amount of time in prison that the judge decided you should spend in prison. That's it. There is no repayment. There does not have to be any reparation, remorse or consistency to the punishment.

> Having employers apply extra-judicial punishment to those how have already been sentenced and and served their time is kinda barbaric

You probably don't want the pedophile repeat offender to work at your daughters kindergarten. He has no right to be there and he is unsuitable. Not getting a job is not punishment.

> If you served your time, you spent the amount of time in prison that the judge decided you should spend in prison.

Erm yeah, they’ve been judged by the judicial system that as a society we’ve agreed gets to decide that repayment to society looks like. Don’t like it, change the laws, you presumably live in a democracy.

> You probably don't want the pedophile repeat offender to work at your daughters kindergarten. He has no right to be there and he is unsuitable. Not getting a job is not punishment.

Again, there are already legal constructs that handle this, and are managed by the judicial system. Bound by the laws created by democratically elected leaders.

Also what does kinder-garden have to do with IKEA? If you’re leaving your kids at IKEA as a substitute for kinder-garden, then I’ve got news for you.

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