Google workers criticize new tool
The company says the feature will lessen spam; employees fear it will monitor them.
Google employees are accusing the company’s leadership of developing an internal surveillance tool that they believe will be used to monitor workers’ attempts to organize protests and discuss labor rights.
This month, employees said they discovered that a team within the company was creating the new tool for the custom Google Chrome browser installed on all workers’ computers and used to search internal systems. The concerns were outlined in a memo written by a Google employee and reviewed by Bloomberg News and by three Google employees who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk to the press.
The tool would automatically report staffers who create a calendar event with more than 10 rooms or 100 participants, according to the employee memo. The most likely explanation, the memo alleged, “is that this is an attempt of leadership to immediately learn about any workers organization attempts.”
A representative for Alphabet Inc.’s Google said, “These claims about the operation and purpose of this extension are categorically false. This is a pop-up reminder that asks people to be mindful before auto-adding a meeting to the calendars of large numbers of employees.”
The extension was prompted by an increase in spam around calendars and events, according to Google. It doesn’t collect personally identifiable information, nor does it stop the use of calendars but rather it adds a speed bump when employees are reaching out to a large group, the company said.
The conflicting views of the tool underscore growing tension between Google’s leadership and rank-and-file employees. On Monday, several dozen workers at Google’s office in Zurich held an event about workers’ rights and unionization despite their managers’ attempts to cancel it, and last month, contract workers for Google in Pittsburgh voted to join the United Steelworkers union.
In the last 18 months or so, employees have protested the company leadership’s handling of sexual harassment complaints and launched internal campaigns against some Google projects, including a censored search engine in China and a contract with the Pentagon to analyze drone footage.
The employee memo suggests that the new Chrome extension is intended to help Google employees apply newly unveiled “community guidelines,” which discourage employees from debating politics — a shift away from Google’s famously open culture. A Google spokeswoman said in August that the company was also building a tool for employees to flag problematic internal posts and creating a team of moderators to monitor conversations on company chat boards.
It’s not known whether that tool is the same as the Chrome extension related to employee calendars and meetings. Google didn’t immediately respond to a question seeking to clarify.
The Chrome tool is expected to be rolled out in late October, according to the employee’s memo, which was posted on an internal message board this week, according to one of the employees.
Two other Google staffers in California said the tool was added to their work computers this week. And another employee said the issue was the most requested topic to discuss at the weekly all-staff meetings, typically held on Thursdays.
Gallagher writes for Bloomberg.