If your employer required this, would you comply?
[Edited from Would Google and Facebook employees comply]
[Edited from Would Google and Facebook employees comply]
'However, Samfiru added, an employer can let an employee go "for pretty much any reason" as long as any severance that is owed is paid out.'
Over here, if an employer imposes unreasonable conditions on an employee, that employee refuses, and the employer fires them because of that, then that's unfair dismissal, and the employee can take the employer to an employment tribunal. The main problem at the tribunal would be proving that the refusal to accept the conditions was the reason for dismissal. When I read that "her refusal to download the app was mentioned in her letter of termination", over here the employee would have the employer over a barrel.
It even goes further here. If an employer imposes unreasonable conditions, and the employee resigns because of them, that's constructive dismissal, and the employee can take the employer to the tribunal just like if the employer fired the employee.
If it was the only way to feed my family and house them in a safe section of town, then probably yes.
If I was in a less desperate situation, then probably no.
If you connect your Android phone to your corporate Google account, you will be required to install the corp monitoring software suite, which (among other things) includes both location tracking and nuke-from-orbit features. The company does encourage you to configure your phone properly to keep your private info in a separate non-corp account to minimize undesired data leakage, since the corp side of things is assumed to be observable for security and corporate policy reasons (I can't remember right now if the nuke-from-orbit would wipe the private side of the phone's install also).
You can choose not to do this, though it will probably limit your career prospects in the long run (especially if you're SRE and need a convenient notification solution for when you're on-call). Although, honestly, if one doesn't trust Google's handling of private information, one should probably re-think one's employment relationship with them.
Anecdotally from my own observation, plenty of employees comply because they trust Google's handling of everyone's private info, including their own (and that's even given the understanding that Google's access to one's "private" info when one is working as an employee on corporate tasks can be more open... They won't snoop your personal Gmail account, but they absolutely reserve the right to investigate your corporate one, for example).
If a company wants me to be on-call or do any kind of mobile work, they can give me a phone. I let this slide at one job because it was a unicorn where I actually loved the job, but from then I've been able to get corporate phones and it's been key.
... but if you're SRE oncall, you'll probably have that phone on you (or at least within hearing distance) at all times when you're on shift. I'd assumed the relevant issue was having a tracking device on your person your employer can access, not whether the employer was footing the bill for the tracking device they encourage you to have on your person.
Again anecdotally: most employees I know just set it up on their personal device. It's more convenient than carrying two devices around when one knows one'll be carrying a smartphone anyway.
You don't have precious, irretrievable data on that device anyway, because it's a phone (as in, "There's nothing Google's gonna do to your phone that wouldn't happen to it if you dropped it in a toilet, probably don't keep the only copy of your baby's first words on something that fragile").
So, a separate device would save your from that part, at least.
My understanding is that on personally-owned Android devices, a work profile cannot specifically track location by itself. A force-installed app on the work profile could, but you can turn off location tracking on the work profile easily[1].
> The company does encourage you to configure your phone properly to keep your private info in a separate non-corp account to minimize undesired data leakage, since the corp side of things is assumed to be observable for security and corporate policy reasons (I can't remember right now if the nuke-from-orbit would wipe the private side of the phone's install also).
On personally-owned Android devices, a remote wipe only wipes the work profile. It doesn't touch the personal profile side[2].
Googler, opinions my own.
1. https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/7029265?hl=en...
2. https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/7502354?hl=en...
I didn't really have a problem with it, I feel that this sort of non-intrusive tracking is perfectly acceptable when you're on the clock.
I would do this if the company provided the hardware and I only had to use the device to do work things during work hours. (As other pointed out Google does in fact provide hardware to employees needing this capability.)
Mandating use on personal hardware is a different story.
This seems very unlikely considering that Google and Facebook are consistently among some of the best companies in the world to work for. There is a big difference between being an employee at those companies and being a user of their products.