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Business Ethics.
TheJudoMadonna
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What is to follow is a true story, a story that happened to me personally.
I'd be very interested to see how this community feels about it. Personal abuse is fine, and maybe even encouraged.
I recently worked for an outsourcing company (Company A) doing phone support for a national company (Company
. You called, I answered, and said I was the aforementioned company (B), except that the outsourcing company (A) actually signed my paychecks.
When I say national, I mean it. You see their commercials on TV, often.
The job was miserable, mostly people upset because of their errors, which i then had to find nice ways of saying "i'm sorry you're a dumbass", or our errors, which i then had to apologize for.
I found solace by the public company forums, which i registered for at my house, under an anonymous handle, with no ties to anything i did with the company.
Initially, i did for the catharsis of telling people they were dumbasses without the tact or candor I did at work.
But then, with my insider knowledge, i found out about several company policies that were...shady, at best.
Now, I'm a realist. I understand the company needs to make money, and I realize that sometimes the best business practice is to shit on the consumer.
But these policies, in my heart of hearts, I felt were >wrong<.
So, when people were to raise the issue on the public forums, I aired the companies' policy, verbatim. Transparency.
I was suspended from work, pending investigation. During said investigation, I was read off the posts that I made, assuming anonymous. I denied all of them.
Then i was terminated.
I'm assuming they traced my IP and matched it to the address in my personnel file.
I violated company policy, yes. I get that.
But i'm left with a bitter taste in my mouth.
Thoughts, feelings, abuse are welcome :-D
I'd be very interested to see how this community feels about it. Personal abuse is fine, and maybe even encouraged.
I recently worked for an outsourcing company (Company A) doing phone support for a national company (Company
. You called, I answered, and said I was the aforementioned company (B), except that the outsourcing company (A) actually signed my paychecks.When I say national, I mean it. You see their commercials on TV, often.
The job was miserable, mostly people upset because of their errors, which i then had to find nice ways of saying "i'm sorry you're a dumbass", or our errors, which i then had to apologize for.
I found solace by the public company forums, which i registered for at my house, under an anonymous handle, with no ties to anything i did with the company.
Initially, i did for the catharsis of telling people they were dumbasses without the tact or candor I did at work.
But then, with my insider knowledge, i found out about several company policies that were...shady, at best.
Now, I'm a realist. I understand the company needs to make money, and I realize that sometimes the best business practice is to shit on the consumer.
But these policies, in my heart of hearts, I felt were >wrong<.
So, when people were to raise the issue on the public forums, I aired the companies' policy, verbatim. Transparency.
I was suspended from work, pending investigation. During said investigation, I was read off the posts that I made, assuming anonymous. I denied all of them.
Then i was terminated.
I'm assuming they traced my IP and matched it to the address in my personnel file.
I violated company policy, yes. I get that.
But i'm left with a bitter taste in my mouth.
Thoughts, feelings, abuse are welcome :-D
TheJudoMadonna on
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Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying the company's policies were right, or that they shouldn't be changed, or they weren't morally reprehensible, I'm simply saying that taking company policies that weren't public and posting them publicly was, properly, a firing offense, whether under the guise of anonymity or not.
The proper way to change policies you don't like or agree with is through the company. You don't need to agree with them, but you're employed with the implicit understanding that you will follow them.
Not that you did anything (morally) wrong, but other than having shitty policies I wouldn't say the company did anything wrong either.
If you didn't sign a non-disclosure agreement, maybe you can write a "Insider information on X Corp. by a former employee!" article on Consumerist, they seem to like those.
Sorry.
I don't think your company was wrong when they fired you, not do I think you were necessarily doing something wrong either.
To expand the discussion, I would like to direct it towards "tracking a user down by IP and assigning it to an employee".
In this case, yes, i'm guilty as all get-out.
But, I have a wireless connection, and the lease in my girlfriend's name
Surely it's possible it could have been someone else?
Legislation in the digital age, and all that?
I don't want sympathy, I'm just trying to promote discussion. I just watched the PATV where Robert was hammering on that girl for her blog. It seemed tangental, if not relevant.
I wish whistleblower protection would be increased but then there is the "disgruntled" employee who feels justified releasing company secrets. I'm afraid you fall under "disgruntled" employee, no matter the justification.
I don't think that makes you a bad person or anything at all. There is however, a contract as an employee that you must honor.
Well, in the story as described, it doesn't sound like you've done anything wrong. Unless there are details that I am not seeing, that sounds like an admirable action on your part.
However, it is also understandable that you were fired. Unfortunate, but understandable. I'm not sure that I would want to continue to work for a company that was so unethical that I felt like I needed to alert its customers, especially if I was already miserable beforehand. I don't see why they should have to continue to work with you.
I totally support and admire whistleblowers, but getting fired over whistleblowing is a very predictable outcome... and unfortunately often the least-bad of all possible reactions.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
You gotta be more paranoid when you're trying to take down the MAN, man.
If you sent the info to a state regulating agency or the states attorney general or something you could claim true whistle-blower statues and may have had legal protections.
If you had used a second account avatar, created on a computer that could not be traced to you, like a library (who would not give such info to a private company willingly) or a cyber cafe payed in cash, you could have disclosed the information by uploading it to a file sharing site and distributing the link to several people on both the company boards and related boards not belonging to the company.
IP addresses can be easily traced, even to wireless. Wireless adapters are not invulnerable legal firewalls.
Also asking about the policies internally would be a good idea as well, it is possible the policies people claim are the official one are not, but now they fired you just to cover their asses. Instead of being seen as an honest employee concerned about company policy and corruption, you were seen as untrustworthy.
It sucks that you were fired but I can't really see the company doing anything else in the situation.
I really appreciate all of your comments though. Insightful, to say the least.
EDIT: now i'll rant a bit. the thing that really racks me off is that, it's a national company, with extensive problems. every day, i had a page that listed the problems, and said "if anyone calls, say "yeah, were working on it, sorry about that". But they still had the manpower to IP trace someone who called them jerks on the internet.
There might be some regulator that monitors these sort of things - I'm pretty sure 'questionable business practices' can cover things that are technically illegal and might cause them to lose membership or accreditation in various institutions they are part of. Particularly since you say they are a global one.
Might still be the option to change things if you really want to, especially if they are international - even if it is only just getting someone to look into things.
IP tracking isn't illegal in this instance, and they are shielded from any civil actions on your part, technically it is as has been stated before in this thread, if an employee violates the conditions for which they were hired they are liable for termination. This includes corporate secrets and practices. I applaud you for attempting transparency of shady company actions, but legally they're still in the clear.
You can't just trace a public IP to a physical address. That information is only available to your ISP. Maybe they divulged it, but unlikely.
It's far more likely that they used information already at their disposal.
That said, DA and Void Slayer are right. Learning some basic maneuvers to cover your tracks is a good skill to have in general (though for understandable reasons we can't really talk about it here).
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
In which PATV is Mr Khoo hammering a young lady?
In all honesty, she doesn't get hammered. I actually started a thread about it but nobody's posting in it.
It's here: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/pa-the-series/218/
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
edit: that said, I've never come to this site from a work computer; that's a line I don't cross.
That was more or less what I was thinking. I suppose because possibly legally protected information was being disclosed by someone who would have been violating a contract with the intent of hurting their business using an account created with false information, Dell or Converges or whoever could have subpoenaed the information from the ISP, but that would require lawyers getting involved(which either the Outsourcing company or their client would probably have on staff).
It still strikes me as weird that they'd have used the IP to identify anything other than which branch of which outsourcing company TheJudoMadonna worked for.
I didn't see him say anything about going to the forums from a work computer.
I was giving him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't.
If he did... yeah, that's checkmate right there. It's a safe bet to assume that every single little thing you do on your work computer is being logged somewhere.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
There are lots of policies that, say, cell phone companies have about enforcement of contracts that treat their customers in pretty much completely shitty ways, and they'll do their best not to ever tell those customers about them, but they're also spelled out in the contract if you dig deep enough into a sales rep.
yeah, and they felt, in their heart of corporate hearts, that they wanted to fire you
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Which is what pretty much every company ever does, and isn't exactly a shock.
I mean, if you, as an employee of Company are using Company's resources to badmouth Company in a very public way... I mean, duh. I'da fired you, too.
Company X gave you money to do job Y. You then used the knowledge gained from job Y to harm company X using company X's resources. Company X has since informed you that they will no longer give you money.
Is that about right?
This. Win.
It sounds to me like OP hated his job, and if OP wasn't fired s/he would've quit. I consider this a good outcome.
BTW, I just got laid off from my job, a job I actually liked. But they gave me money, and decided they didn't want to continue giving me money. So sucks to be me, I have to move on. You have an even easier choice because you hated that place.
But more likely, the policy was just a little bit misleading. And as for IP tracing: forums log it, your home access to VPNs or any log in style access portal (email, a web UI, whatever) logs it. Most IT folks don't keep lists of every site you've ever visited, it's a huge waste of space. They may keep a list of every time you trigger the "this site has been blocked by our web filter for reason X", but that depends on the software they're using for it. This doesn't mean "surf away!" because they DO tend to log it if anyone complains about your productivity. And would decidedly log outgoing traffic all over the place if someone was suspected of leaking information.
But I'm finding it hard to drum up sympathy for what's effectively "people kept getting told by support that X feature was broken for reason Y, so I posted some of the code that showed it was totally our fault"
There are some ethically grey areas, usually involved in communication over exactly what broke/went wrong (my favorite are datacenter explanations when their power or network failover didn't work, they usually dance around 800 things that had nothing to do with the actual problem), and while I appreciate honesty from companies I do business with, I'm not going to haul out ethics investigations any time comcast tells me the network in my area isn't having any problems when it's blatantly obvious that it is.
What the OP did was ethically correct and laudable.
Firing him is if nothing else tainted by association with the original unethical policies in question.
And finally the real lesson is that we need far more stringent legal consumer protections and far more capable whistle-blower protections.
1) Company legally--or even morally--had the authority to fire employee
-and-
2) Employee did something wrong
But they obviously are not.
Though really if labor rights weren't so shit they might be.
Even in a perfect world, it's possible that different people with different sets of evidence will, through no fault, come to opposing conclusions.
But I agree that our labor rights are pretty shit.
My point is more that remembering all the tenure discussion recently the idea that an employer might have to show some actual fault on your part to just fire you is some kind of strange foreign concept to some people.
When I'd tell them they were opening up their business to five or six figure fines and could end up closing their doors because of some of their merchant account violations I would be reprimanded and warned about my job's safety.
I never ratted them out but I'm absolutely certain that through their dogmatic intellectual in-curiosity (they flat out told me they refused to ever learn anything new and that if I ever had to explain anything to them I was instantly "always wrong," and if I don't just "Get things done" or "Make it work" it's always my fault.) they committed enough crimes through I could easily send both of the owners of the U.S. office to prison for a VERY long time or at the very least see them sued for a dollar figure high enough their grandchildren would be paying it off.
Suffice to say I am so happy I got out of that job, because I'm sure if they ever did get caught I'd get the blame because I actually took the time to read and warn them they were doing illegal things and then did not immediately leave the company. Or they might try to blame me with it all if I reported them anyway.
The moral of the story?: Look at Bradley Manning, do you believe that much that what you're doing is right that you're ready to suffer like they're making him suffer right now behind closed doors? If not, you'd better make damn sure you're untouchable before you blow any whistles.
allow me to be a little more clear.
I outsourced for a national cell phone carrier. They are the ones that initiated the investigation, they are the ones that demanded that my company fire me. Whatever it takes to please the client.
I never accessed work email, VPN or the like from home. The only thing i did from home was access the external (public) forums, which i registered for with a junk email addy i created specifically for the purpose. Not in anyway tied, phonetically, thematically, or otherwise to any other email i use at work or home. I also never accessed the external forums from work in any way. (we had our own backend forums, similar, but different. I had a separate log on for these, which i never used at home) I also never posted from work in a thread i posted in at home.
When i got the job, i agreed not to divulge information. I violated this policy, i understand my termination.
I merely wanted to promote a discussion around the lengths and means by which they used to determine it was me, and the priority with which they gave it. Again, the client, not my company.
Also, venting again: when you have a problem with someone reading "the rules", maybe the problem is with the rules, and not the person reading them?
The policies that I had a problem with, again, were not illegal, merely things that made it possible and easy for customers to unknowingly incur drastically increased charges and/or loss/reduction of service, and prevented any recourse for the consumer to prevent,undo, monitor, or verify them.
'cause around these parts, it's the kind of thing the Consumerombudsman would not be amused by.
They were justified in firing you, because you revealed secrets. But hey if they can't touch you legally, go publish what you know everywhere you can! They've already fired you
These things are rampant in sweden as well. It's nothing illegal, just obtuse policies and careful wording.
Not saying more on this issue around here though for obvious reasons :P.
And on the topic, if you actually verbatim copy pasted something that wasn't meant for the public eye then obviously they will make sure you can't do it again. My understanding of these things is fairly limited, but by reading the responses so far it isn't all that hard finding someones identity from an IP.
This is probably off topic though I guess
Why can't you just tell us the policy specifics?
It isn't like you can get fired twice. And you might save us some dough.
Hell, if you feel like it is that wrong alert the media. I'm sure bloggers and news organizations would love to hear about it.
but they're listening to every word I say