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Comment by parasubvert | Hacker News Reader

This is nothing new: corporations have scanned instant messages, emails and even recorded phone calls for decades, and will fire you based on that evidence for violations of corporate policy. And will sue you or call the cops if they detect potential crimes.

I’m kind of surprised so many people are shocked by this. I know of one company where dozens of people were fired because their email was scanned for external job interviews and the CIO had a report, which he used to prematurely cut staff when he needed to save budget.

The only difference now is that the tech is smarter and cheaper so that you don’t need to pay as many people to spy on their coworkers.

Your defence against this is to find a job where you’re too valuable for them to do anything. As with any jurisdiction where there is at will employment.

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> The only difference now is that the tech is smarter and cheaper so that you don’t need to pay as many people to spy on their coworkers.

Your comment implies this isn't potentially an enormous difference. The difference is between having to pay people to spy on their coworkers, and having computers that do it passively, invisibly, continuously, in real time?

… And completely predictable and inevitable for 50 years, and written about endlessly since the mid 20th century. Short of a butlerian jihad level event, the only way to fight back is better countermeasures and better value.

The law won’t help (they want more surveillance). Democracy won’t help (most people want more surveillance on their neighbors). Exploit the system.

> I’m kind of surprised so many people are shocked by this. I know of one company where dozens of people were fired because their email was scanned for external job interviews and the CIO had a report, which he used to prematurely cut staff when he needed to save budget.

On a related note, if you were a Microsoft employee, how comfortable would you be talking with recruiters on LinkedIn?

I’d have no problems with it. If they were going to fire me over that, it’s their loss. And it’s not generally in Microsoft’s culture these days to be that petty.

My worry in that position wouldn't be getting fired, it would be getting the conversation (or, if it's got that far, the offer) spiked because someone in HR thinks they can either keep me in my current role by scaring off anyone I might talk to, or share my salary information so they can low-ball me, thereby stopping me from getting a pay bump.

Was Microsoft employee. Did not worry one bit about talking to a recruiter on LinkedIn. Your immediate management is unable to see or even get that data. You would have to trip an alarm elsewhere, trigger a major investigation, get legal sign-off and then maybe Microsoft would ask LinkedIn to pull that data. Even though MS owns LinkedIn, they are treated as a separate business entity. LinkedIn has its own security team etc.

Even MS's own recruiters will use LinkedIn to contact current MS employees for internal positions.

Tech is a double sided coin. Things like this have the power to be abused, even easily at times, but that doesn't mean they always will be.

I don't think you need to work at Microsoft to be nervous about that. I've had recruiters offer to sell me information on who here is communicating with them on LinkedIn, without even being in a management or hiring position myself.

Why do people persist in using work emails for personal things like job interviews?

Wait until you hear someone yelling at the helpdesk because their Ashley Madison email was caught by a corporate spam filter..

I remember during the Ashley Madison leaks there were so many work emails. I wouldn’t even use work email for buying a movie ticket much less organizing dates and affairs.

Some people are weird like that. There’s also old people who only have work emails. Lots of different people in the world.

Arguably if you're having an affair it's something to keep from your private email but your work email may not be as visible to a spouse ...

I guess that’s the reasoning, but sending it to work seems pretty dumb compared to creating a separate, cheater account.

Although sending it to work is probably the most secure from a spouse.

I think it's just another unfortunate manifestation of the phenomenon that Big Tech loves to exploit --- that people seem to care very little about privacy in general, or perhaps have been guided gently in the direction of doing so by those who stand to profit the most strongly from it.

In your specific example, there could be a slightly more positive reason --- proof that you do actually have a job at where you claim to be working.

> that people seem to care very little about privacy in general, or perhaps have been guided gently in the direction of doing so by those who stand to profit the most strongly from it.

It's not just that they don't care: it's like they see some privacy-invasive thing and automatically use it because it's privacy invasive

Like whenever people not only use chrome, but are logged into their google account 24/7 while using chrome (I'm sorry if the reader does this...). I get it if there's some niche feature that requires it, but most of the people I know who do this aren't doing it for that reason (or any reason at all I guess)

The chrome thing is annoying as hell, as Google automatically logs you into Chrome if you log into basically any Google property.

The difference here is that "find a new job" might be accomplished by LinkedIn...which is also owned by Microsoft.

So Microsoft's cloud ecosystem generally owns your work email, and the site you use to find a job.

Honestly: I don't care what they say (because it'll be "we datamined LinkedIn, but don't worry we did it with only the public APIs and just bypassed rate limiting so technically...to add data to our "employee leaving" filter...) - Microsoft and LinkedIn, specifically, need to be forcibly broken up with this sort of control over the full employee lifecycle.

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