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Comment by brobdingnagian | Hacker News Reader

Release the spreadsheet.

Why? It's an internal company matter. Why is it our business to see who makes what?

It's also a personal matter. While it's illegal to prevent an employee from sharing his or her own salary, I believe it's also illegal to share someone else's salary without their consent.

Could you point out which laws you think might make it a crime? I'm genuinely curious.

If I tell a peer some sensitive information, and they share it...isn't that on me for choosing the wrong person to trust with that information?

That was the reason Google gave for firing Randy Wigginton for leaking the 2010 company-wide raise in the wake of the collapse of the wage cartel [1]. "You can share your own salary, but you can't share other peoples'." It's possible that this was mistaken and this was just Google covering its ass when getting rid of a troublesome employee, but that's where the information came from.

[1] http://gawker.com/5696695/google-fired-an-apple-legend-for-l...

Are you suggesting that someone posting their own salary on a spreadsheet, one which they know is being broadly distributed within the company, might somehow not have consented to having it shared further?

Absolutely. There's a huge difference between sharing your salary within an organization that you're part of and sharing it with the whole world.

I upvoted parent, not because I agree with him, but I deeply disagree with your attitude.

I think even internal criticism of companies should be considered free speech and protected as such. That doesn't mean that it should be released to the public, but employees should have the freedom to release the information if they decide so, just like whistleblowers.

> Why is it our business to see who makes what?

Of course it is your business (if you are an employee). Employee wages are determined by supply and demand, therefore, they depend on other's people wages. That aside though, any exposition of the way other employers treat other employees in similar position (such as discrimination) also should be your business, because it may affect behavior of your employer as well.

These are the reasons why we have free speech, to prevent people doing wrong things in secrecy, as to avoid collective moral correction to take place.

> I think even internal criticism of companies should be considered free speech and protected as such.

I think you misunderstand what free speech is: it simply means the government can't arbitrarily prevent you from saying whatever you think (well, most of it anyway, you can still go to jail for saying certain things).

We're talking about corporations and individuals here, no free speech laws apply. It's perfectly legal for a company to restrict what its employees can talk about publicly (within certain boundaries, e.g. whistle blowers, ...).

Yes, certainly. But not American companies; not companies that purport to have American values. The principle of free speech was incorporated into our constitution, not because the idea started and ended there, but to push an American ideal into Government unequivocally. The ideal exists outside the constitution.

A private company can suppress free speech; it can perform searches and seizures on its grounds; it can profile and discriminate and have pay inequality. But it cannot claim any moral high ground. To say "at least we don't violate the letter of the constitution" is a shamefully low bar.

> A private company can suppress free speech; it can perform searches and seizures on its grounds; it can profile and discriminate and have pay inequality. But it cannot claim any moral high ground.

I don't think any company has ever tried to make such a silly claim. If they fire someone, it will usually be because that employee broke the terms of their employment contract which nobody forced them to sign in the first place.

Right. Employee agreements that suppress free speech are kind of the subject of this thread.

That's the whole point: employee agreements do not suppress free speech. It's legal nonsense to claim that they do.

If you define free speech as 'that part of the American value that is embodied in a Constitutional amendment' and take it no further. Be fair.

> I think you misunderstand what free speech is

I think I understand it better than you. I am arguing about moral principles here, not law. That's a different level of discussion (you cannot meaningfully discuss legality if you don't recognize the moral principle from which you are starting).

And I think that free speech (that could be roughly called "right to criticize in public", because if the speech is not being critical, then no one cares) should apply to corporations and individuals too as subjects. The reason is I don't really care if I am getting screwed by government or not.

The idea of "government" that should be subject to free speech but not other institutions leads to contradictions, because what is government doesn't have a good definition. For example, if the institutions is government owned, then you can criticize it. If not, then you can't, even if it would be exact same institution. Or you can consider the opposite case, where the government is effectively owned by foreign multinational company. What then?

I therefore reject the notion that the ownership structure should determine what can be criticized. I believe everything that is unfair, or inefficient, should be possible subject of criticism, even in public, from anybody. Because that's how you actually improve institutions, governmental or not.

> I think I understand it better than you.

I'll challenge that, especially when a few sentences later, you say:

> you cannot meaningfully discuss legality if you don't recognize the moral principle from which you are starting

There is absolutely no connection between laws and morality. Zero.

Laws tend to be derived from attempts at improving the general happiness and survivability of the society but the fact that laws and morality tend to overlap is a coincidence, especially when morality is such a vague notion that nobody can agree on.

Beyond that, it is absolutely possible to meaningfully discuss legality without ever mentioning morality.

Laws tend to be derived from attempts at improving the general happiness and survivability of the society but the fact that laws and morality tend to overlap is a coincidence

What defines "happiness" and welfare is itself heavily rooted on morality, so that statement is self-contradictory. Hell, the idea in itself that "happiness" is something to strive for is a moral concept.

And while nobody can agree exactly on the morality of every single action, people do have broad agreements about moral principles: it's what defines most religions.

> What defines "happiness" and welfare is itself heavily rooted on morality, so that statement is self-contradictory. Hell, the idea in itself that "happiness" is something to strive for is a moral concept. And while nobody can agree exactly on the morality of every single action, people do have broad agreements about moral principles: it's what defines most religions.

Not all, it's the exact opposite. Religions are the worst guides for morality.

Happiness is much easier to derive broad consensus about, simple things like health is preferable to sickness, alive is preferable to dead, safety is preferable to harm, etc...

This is simple consequential ethics, which has guided society for millennia. Societies that follow these simple principles thrive, those that don't wither out and die. And you don't need any knowledge about morality to achieve it.

Whether religions uphold good or bad moral codes is inconsequent to my point, which is that they demonstrate the existence of broad agreements about morality between millions of people.

This is simple consequential ethics, which has guided society for millennia. Societies that follow these simple principles thrive, those that don't wither out and die.

Those principles you're talking about are exactly the principles that asgard1024 mentioned; and that "societies that follow [them] thrive" is exactly why legality is rooted in morality - be it consequential ethics or not.

And you don't need any knowledge about morality to achieve it.

How can you have "broad consensus" without knowing what you're consenting? I think you're trying to separate "consequential ethics" from "morality", but that makes no sense, because as a normative ethical theory, "consequential ethics" is morality.

> "consequential ethics" is morality.

Which morality?

I think allowing homosexuals to marry is beneficial to society but I'm pretty sure that a huge majority of religious people disagree with that because they choose to follow the teaching of a book instead of following consequential ethics.

Yes, there are different moral codes. So?

I know this is the logic the Twitter police use to chase people from jobs, but its certainly not true.

Mill argued free speech should be protected in all cases for two great reasons. The first being that one never really knows if something is right or wrong. Many scientific have turned out correct that were disallowed initially. Secondly, even if a view is wrong it acts as a foil to the correct view. People learn a greater appreciation for the truth by seeing the bad examples. This acts as natural selection for ideas.

Especially if they sign NDAs, which I am sure every Google employee signs

If a NDA or any contract clashes with the law its null and void - you cant sell you self into slavery or sign away statutory rights for example.

You are conflating issues and assuming too much. I'm not a Google employee; just a member of the general public.

> I deeply disagree with your attitude.

The attitude that a company's payroll data is a company's privileged information, and the general public has no right to it?

> > Why is it our business to see who makes what?

> Of course it is your business (if you are an employee)...

But I am not an employee. Your strawman argument is irrelevant.

> These are the reasons why we have free speech, to prevent people doing wrong things in secrecy, as to avoid collective moral correction to take place.

"Free speech" does not apply here, since it's a company's private information, and this information has no moral component to it (except for internal employees; and we're talking about the general public here), so even the whistleblower exemption doesn't apply here.

> The attitude that a company's payroll data is a company's privileged information, and the general public has no right to it?

Let me phrase it differently. I think people should have the right to count their money in public. So you should be able to say, publicly, "I am getting this amount of money from this guy".

So while you see this as an infringement of "rights of company to have private information", I see it as infringement of "individual rights to count money publicly". We have different valuations of these rights and that's why we disagree.

> But I am not an employee. Your strawman argument is irrelevant.

I think it comes down on whether or not you believe that you benefit from other people having information you already have or not.

> "Free speech" does not apply here, since it's a company's private information

Yeah, according to laws. The big question is if such arrangement is beneficial for the public. I don't think so, and we apparently disagree here.

> I think people should have the right to count their money in public.

But people should not have the right to count someone else's money in public, which is what you were implying. An employee may have the right to share; but I don't have the right to that information. It is asymmetric.

> But people should not have the right to count someone else's money in public, which is what you were implying.

I actually wasn't; if you reread my comments, I advocated that the people should be able to share information about their own salary with anybody without fear. (Although you should be free to criticize other things publicly without fear as well, and that includes compensation of others.)

Why is it not our business?

How did you come to the mindset that we shouldn't know how labor is valued?

Google is a private company. What right do I, an outsider, have to peek into its books?

Here you are, on this site, hiding behind a pseudonym and not even revealing where you work, let alone how much you make. And you expect Google to give you everyone's salary?

No. That would be disrespecting fellow Googlers who provided their salary under a specific set of expectations, which did not include public release.

I love how HN mostly thinks it is a moral imperative to release literally every piece of data in the hands of the government, but when it comes to leaking corporate data it's disrespectful, irresponsible, etc.

There may both be some cognitive dissonance and a difference between open government data (funded with tax money) and closed company data (funded with revenues).

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