Labour rights: Google fires fifth employee

The internal activism at Google is only growing it seems as the company has fired another employee for sending browser pop-ups about the labour rights at the company.

She becomes the fifth staffer fired for being involved in internal activism, reports The Verge.

Spiers was tasked with sending web browser notifications as pop-ups within the company.

"I created a little notification, only a few lines of code, that pops up in the corner of the browser whenever my coworkers visited the union busters' website or the community guidelines policy. The notification said: 'Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities,'" she wrote in a post on Medium.

Privacy watchdogs have launched an investigation into a hack of health records, which a laboratory said Tuesday may have compromised data on up to 15 million Canadians or nearly half the population.

LifeLabs, which does blood work and other tests across Canada, said in a letter to customers that their names, contact information, health card numbers and lab test results were exposed in a cyber attack on its computers in early November.

Most of those affected are in Ontario or British Columbia.

The company also said it paid an undisclosed sum to the hackers to retrieve the data, and has retained cyber security experts to isolate and secure its affected computers, as well as determine the scope of the breach.

"We want to emphasise that at this time, our cyber security firms have advised that the risk to our customers in connection with this cyber attack is low," the company said in a statement.