Google isn’t just spying on you. They’re spying on themselves.
Employees at the tech company are accusing leadership of developing an internal surveillance tool, possibly to monitor any attempts to organize protests or organize around worker rights, according to a report by Bloomberg.
The tool was allegedly installed on all workers’ computers and would report employees who scheduled a calendar event with more than 10 rooms or 100 employees.
The company disputes this claim. “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,” a Google rep said in a statement, while also adding the the browser extension didn’t collect identifiable information and went through a privacy, security and legal reviews process.
But the workers may be right to be paranoid. This new “tool” comes only a month after Google contractors in Pittsburgh voted to join the United Steelworkers Union.
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