The way it reads to me is that Google wanted to find a reason to fire these people and found the data thing to be a convenient and plausible excuse.
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To me it reads like:
"Hey, I guess we didn't think we needed to make it explicit that you shouldn't stalk, leak about, or facilitate harassment of your colleagues because they're working on projects with which you have personal objections. Let's now be clear that's not OK; these people just got fired for it and now we're going to make bright lines around that type of conduct to be clearer about the company we are."
"Stalking", "leaking", and "harassing" are all very loaded and subjective terms, and I don't trust any party who wants to lean on them as a substitute for facts.
Setting up alerts around a co-worker's calendar that you're not actually meeting with is definitely stalking. Would you want someone doing that to you?
"Setting up alerts" is an overstatement, all you do is press "add calemdar" to view it and then it also sets up alerts automatically. I've done this a lot since I want to see what people are working on etc and adding their calendars is the easiest way to view a calendar, and I don't see why anyone doing it to me would be a problem. Maybe I just misunderstood the UI though, but I'd be very upset if I was fired just because calendar UI confused me... It is kinda like people looking at each others code commits to see how their work or what they work on. It is a part of having an open company culture.
I wouldn't put anything in my organization's calendar that I wasn't okay being broadcast to the entire organization. Certainly not my medical appointments or other sensitive personal things. Otherwise, who cares if somebody wants an alert that I have a meeting? That's why the feature exists.
> Otherwise, who cares if somebody wants an alert that I have a meeting?
I would care if the person doing this then leaked my meeting information and tried to use my meetings for political gain.
Are there details for what exactly was leaked? I don't mean to imply that you're wrong if you can't produce a list, and I agree that leaking another person's meeting information to the public is a plausibly fireable offense. I just can't find confirmation that that's what happened in this case, and the clearest details I can find seem to talk about 'leaks' and 'calendar access' as separate incidents.
Bloomberg article for example: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-12/one-googl...
"A Google spokeswoman said the company is investigating the employees who were placed on leave. One of them had searched for and shared confidential documents outside the scope of their job, while the other tracked the individual calendars of staff working in the community platforms, human resources, and communications teams, she said. The tracking had made the staff in those departments feel unsafe, the spokeswoman said."
Feel free to substitute whatever terms feel appropriate. Google management reports some of the targets of the activity "felt scared or unsafe, and requested to work from another location".
Please. Nobody is unsafe at their cushy office job because somebody looked at their calendar. Those words are cheapened every time they are wielded as political weapons.