Cowboy Who?

The chamber voted 136-5 on Tuesday to give initial approval to a bill that seeks to end the practice of changing clocks twice a year. But that doesn’t mean the measure has an easy path to reality.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Can I prohibit employees from bringing partners on work trips?

My team recently wrapped up a big project that included flying to another city for a week of meetings. One of my newer staff mentioned that they were going to bring their partner on the trip but their partner would pay their own way and do their own thing. It was less of an ask and more of them telling me. It raised a red flag for me but my original impression was that … well, I can’t really say no if this person is just making use of the hotel room and there’s no added expense to our organization.

Post-trip, their teammates reported that they were distracted during the week and the guest also ended up joining business meals even though I explicitly stated it as an example of something they could not do. In my industry, it is not welcome to have random people just join these types of meals. I was not there so I didn’t observe firsthand but several staff members have met with me privately to complain.

I will speak with the employee about the meals but all of this has got me wondering … Can I, as a manager, prohibit employees from bringing partners on work trips? I’m usually pretty hands off about what grown adults do in their free time on work trips but this one thing has become a distraction for our entire team and I don’t want any repeats of it on our next trip.

I think the issue is less that they brought a partner (something people occasionally do) and more that they were distracted during the week and brought the partner to business meals inappropriately. If they hadn’t done those two things, it wouldn’t have been inherently problematic for the partner to have stayed in the hotel room (assuming they were doing their own thing during the day and your employee wasn’t skipping work stuff to hurry back to join them).

You can have a blanket “no partners on work trips” policy — or simply a “we prefer people not bring partners because we’ve found it distracting” response if anyone asks to do it — but I’d rather see you just make it clear what the expectations are on work trips and address it if there are specific problems, because plenty of people do handle this appropriately. Ideally when an employee first mentions bringing their partner, you would just make sure they understood the time commitments on the trip and that the partner would need to do their own thing during business meals … which you did. Normally that would be enough; the fact that it wasn’t is concerning, and you’ll need to have a pretty serious conversation about why they simply ignored that. (I’m also curious  whether the reason it seemed like a red flag to you in the first place was because you were already picking up on something that made you worry — which was then validated by what ended up happening.)

All that said, I do think it’s reasonable to ask this particular employee not to bring the partner again, since it caused problems on this trip.

2. My employee is being ostracized by her former friend group

I was just promoted to a management position a few months ago so all this is relatively new to me.

It’s no secret that employees form friendship groups at work, nothing you can do about it. Lately, though, one person who used to be included in a “work friends” group is being shunned/ostracized. I don’t believe they are actively harassing her, they’re just cold to her. She’s made a few small work mistakes, nothing that can’t be corrected/ forgiven, but her coworkers are no longer friendly to her (more chilly than openly rude). They have stopped inviting her to after-work drinks, and removed her from their “work” group chat. Both are things I can’t really do anything about because it’s outside of work but, obviously, the effects are permeating the workplace.

She’s come to me to let me know, and has also stated that she sometimes goes home crying and has considered quitting. I’m not sure I can, or want to, discipline the other employees just because they are no longer friendly, but I feel that it’s my responsibility to stick up for her even if she isn’t a perfect, model employee. I’d love for all of my employees to be best friends but that’s not how life goes. Any advice?

It really depends on exactly what “chilly” looks like. If they’re just not inviting her to drinks or chatting socially, that’s not something you can intervene on; people get to choose who they socialize with. But if they’re being rude or unpleasant to her or making a show of freezing her out, that’s not acceptable at work, and  you can and should intervene. They need to treat everyone they work with reasonably pleasantly.

I do wonder why “a few small work mistakes” would cause this response! People don’t usually get ostracized for work mistakes unless there’s more to it. Did the employee’s mistakes cause a lot of additional work for her coworkers? Did she try to blame someone else? Was there an ongoing pattern that they got fed up with? It’s worth looking into what’s at the root of the reaction, because there might be more going on that you need to address (either with her or with them).

3. Can my company tell me to remove a land acknowledgement from my email signature?

My ~65-person company does not have any policies regarding email signatures. I have had a land acknowledgement in my signature for the last two years. My CEO recently asked me to remove it from my signature, stating “he doesn’t want to be in the business of policing what is and is not allowed in email signatures, and doesn’t want statements to be made there, so he wants them to be strictly about work.”

Is this something he can ask with no clear policy violations?

Here is what I had in my email signature: “Writing to you from the stolen, occupied, and ancestral lands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute), and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ peoples. The company is headquartered on land ceded by the Treaty of Fort Laramie 1851.”

I run the company’s five-person DEI committee, which I started with the approval of the CEO when I noticed a growing trend of racial issues within the company (e.g., mistaking Asian coworkers for each other, calling Covid the Chinese flu in company communications, laying off mostly workers of color in a company that is 90+% white, and more).

When I first started the DEI committee and added the land acknowledgement to my email signature, the previous HR manager and legal counsel for the company were in favor and allowed me to have it. But she left recently, and my CEO is making this request, so I’m not sure if I’m able to push back.

Your employer does have the right to standardize email signatures and ask you not to make personal additions to them. (You can probably understand where he’s coming from if you consider the wide range of personal additions your company might end up having to field if they allow them.)

You can present an argument to him for reconsidering, of course, but legally he’s on solid ground in telling you no.

4. Will going down to part-time hurt me next time I’m job-searching?

I’ve been considering switching from full-time to part-time work at my company. I’ve been dealing with a lot of professional and personal stress the past few years, and now that a lot of the professional stress has been resolved, I’d like to move down to 36 or 32 hours a week to help with some of the burnout I’ve been feeling. I don’t have any concerns about making this change with my current company; they are very supportive of part-time work, including my department head who works part-time herself.

The thing I am concerned about is whether this will reflect poorly on me if I decide to switch jobs in the future. If I am working part-time and apply to full-time jobs, will I be taken less seriously? Do I even have to let them know I’m working part-time if I plan to work full-time for a new company? Another piece of background info is that I’m a woman that works in tech, which is a field that already tends to take women less seriously, and while my currently company is very supportive, I’m guessing that’s more the exception than the norm.

You don’t need to proactively disclose that a job is part-time. You shouldn’t misrepresent it if it comes up, of course, but it probably won’t even come up (and the difference between full-time and 36 hours is fairly de minimis anyway).

5. Should I leave a parting gift for my office when I resign?

I’m departing my first office job on good terms after 10 years. I have great respect and admiration for everyone on my team of about 20 people (we were a very traditional, old-fashioned office that pivoted to a fully remote team during the pandemic, so we’ve been through a lot together!). Would it be appropriate to leave a parting gift for the office, and if so, what would that be? (We already have a coffee maker, toaster oven, microwave, etc.)

Parting gifts aren’t traditional when someone leaves a job — if anything, offices are more likely to give the departing employee a gift than the other way around! If you happen to think of something absolutely perfect (like they all loved the obscure brand of coffee you brought in for yourself and so you leave them a huge bag of it), that’s a lovely gesture … but otherwise there’s no need!

PALO ALTO, CA—Warning of the potentially explicit applications of a tool that has become widely available to the public, tech experts reported feeling unsettled Tuesday by a felt-tip marker’s ability to draw two big breast-like circles with dots in the center of them. “This technology allows almost anyone to…

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JERSEY CITY, NJ—Urging employees to refrain from touching any of the items that had been neatly arranged in the wicker basket, local company Green Innovation clarified to employees Wednesday that the feminine hygiene products located in the office bathroom were purely decorative. “Please note that all pads and tampons…

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SAN FRANCISCO—Saying this was by far the best option given their financial situation, San Francisco real estate agent Harry Evans reportedly showed a couple earning a sub-six-figure salary Wednesday around the neighborhood’s best tent city. “So we obviously have a lovely view here of the park, great flap to this…

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LAKE CITY, FL ― A 10th-grade student has been taken into custody after she asked a friend to borrow “una bolígrafo” despite having been clearly taught that pens are male and should only be referenced using the articles “un,” “el,” “unos,” or “los.” “I don’t care what liberals have to say: there are exactly two […]

The post Florida student arrested after accidentally using wrong gender articles in Spanish class appeared first on The Beaverton.

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This led to a remarkably nice discussion in patreon yesterday.

Today's News:

6 days!!

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has declared the bracted twistflower, native to the Edwards Plateau, a threatened species, a month after putting another Texas plant on the endangered list.

Sweltering heat has killed inmates, driven away prison workers and cost taxpayers millions in lawsuits. The House budget would provide air conditioning for 46 prisons, but it’s unclear if the Senate will sign on.

Texas lawmakers are poised to create a new multibillion-dollar endowment to boost emerging research universities in national rankings. But faculty members say banning diversity offices and tenure would stymie those efforts.

Mad Magazine's ageless wise guy delighted millions of readers with the sneaky fun of the Fold-In and the snark of "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions." Al Jaffee had retired at age 99.

(Image credit: Stephen Morton/AP)

A huge sinkhole that seemed stable for 15 years suddenly began expanding about a week ago, growing by several acres and leaving nearby residents terrified that it will take them and their homes.

(Image credit: Bluebonnet News)

If you check a radar this morning you can see showers offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. These are associated with a low pressure system in the Gulf. If this were a few months later in the year we would be tracking this closely, but in April? Not so much of a concern. However, a few of these showers may migrate onshore into coastal counties today and Wednesday. We’re also tracking the as-yet uncertain possibility of storms on Saturday in association with a passing cold front.

Tuesday

Mostly the Gulf low will send us a drier northerly flow, as our region lies on its western edge. For today, that means a mostly cloudy morning with some clearing skies later this afternoon. Highs will reach about 75 degrees, with light northerly winds. With dewpoints in the 50s, humidity levels will be reasonably low for mid-April. As mentioned above, areas near the coast may see a passing shower due to the Gulf low. Overnight low temperatures will drop into the upper 50s.

Wednesday

This day should be rather similar to Tuesday, with highs in the mid-70s, and another chance at a passing shower for coastal areas. Lows on Wednesday night will again drop into the upper 50s.

Thursday and Friday

As the low pulls away, we’ll start to see a more southerly flow. If you’ve lived in Houston for any time period at all, you’ll well know that means warmer and more humid air. Highs will reach about 80 degrees on Thursday, and into the low- to mid-80s on Friday under partly to mostly sunny skies. By Friday night lows will only drop to around 70 degrees.

Saturday

The weekend will start out warm, with partly sunny skies and highs climbing into the mid- to upper-80s for much of the area. Far inland parts of the region may not get that warm, depending on the timing of a cold front. But wait, there’s uncertainty beyond the timing. While the atmosphere looks to be rather unstable, an important factor for storms, there may not be enough shear to really get strong thunderstorms going. We probably won’t know what is going to happen for another day or two, until we get into the realm of higher resolution models. Until then, you need to at least account for the possibility of showers, thunderstorms, and possibly severe weather on Saturday afternoon and evening in Houston. It is by no means a slam dunk, but it is certainly a possibility.

Sunday

The second half of the weekend looks drier, cooler and calmer, with highs in the vicinity of 80 degrees and mostly sunny skies. Overnight lows should drop into the mid-50s, or thereabouts. So, pretty darn nice.

Next week

The cooler air will stick around for a couple of days before we start to warm up next week. There are hints in the models about more rain in the Tuesday and Wednesday time frame next week. But at this point, who knows? Not this forecaster.

Famous Brands
Meat Cookbook
Brand Name Publishing
1985

I don’t know how many more of these tasty recipes I can manage. They are everywhere on our site. The problem with hanging on to old cookbooks in a regular collection is that the photography or illustrations aren’t really helping the recipes.

Cookbooks and recipes go in and out of fashion. Vintage cookbooks are definitely an interesting collectable, but modern library collections really need to see if these items meet the library mission. If you have space and budget, you can hang onto a few of your oldies but goodies or maybe make a display. Pass your retro collections off to good homes.

Mary

The post Meat for Dinner (Again!) first appeared on Awful Library Books.

The post Meat for Dinner (Again!) appeared first on Awful Library Books.

While there’s little information available about the mysterious medical process of terminating a pregnancy, The Onion asked men, the primary experts in everything, to explain how an abortion works.

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#gaming #GameGrumps #shorts

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My coworker asks questions that are none of her business

I have a coworker who frequently asks me questions that aren’t a big deal but aren’t any of her business either. We’re on the same team, have equal responsibilities, and report to the same manager, but I get the sense from the questions she’s trying to position herself as higher up than me. Most recent example: I sent out an email informing the team of a change to my hours and she chatted me to ask, “Did [Boss] approve your schedule change?” I’ve started to reply “Why do you ask?” to these requests but almost always get a “just checking” or similar non-response.

It feels aggressive to answer such a simple question with, like, “Unless it affects you, I’d prefer to keep conversations about my schedule between me and Boss” when I could easily say “Yup, Boss approved” but it’s starting to really grate on me when she does this, especially since it happens multiple times a day. Is there a polite way to say, “Actually it’s not your responsibility to worry about that!” or should I just deal with my annoyance and answer her questions?

“Why do you ask?” is a good response — and when she responds with “just checking,” you can reply with, “I’ve got it covered.” Or skip the “why do you ask?” and go straight to “I’ve got it covered” or “Oh, I don’t need any help with that” or “I’m handling that with Boss” or anything else that declines to offer up info she’s not entitled to.

At some point it might also make sense to address the pattern by saying something like, “You’ve been asking me a lot of questions lately that I only expect from Boss — things like X and Y. Those aren’t things I’d normally report to a peer on, so I wondered why you’ve been asking.” And then if she says she’s “just checking,” you could say, “Yes, but why are you checking on those things when we are peers?”

2. My team is mocking a coworker’s virginity

A few months ago, one of my coworkers somehow found a video of another coworker (Bill) giving a religious testimonial for his church. In the video he speaks about why he is saving himself for marriage and why the church is against premarital sex. Bill never brings up his church or religion at work and I didn’t even know he was religious.

My coworkers have been relentlessly mocking Bill over the video. No one has done it directly in front of him that I know of but it’s prevalent enough that he is aware of the mocking and laughter going on. He hasn’t said anything but I can tell he is crushed. He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body, but ever since this started he is not his usual happy-go-lucky self. I tell people to stop if they do it in front of me, but then I get told it’s just some fun or to lighten up. Is there anything I can do to get people to stop? I feel awful about this.

Are your coworkers children? This is ridiculous — mean-spirited, immature, and generally horrible. Bill’s sexual choices are none of their business.

It also qualifies as religious harassment, which your employer has a legal obligation to put a stop to. So the most effective step would be to report to your company that your coworkers are creating a hostile workplace toward Bill because of his religious beliefs. You have the standing to do that yourself since you’re being exposed to it as well; the complaint doesn’t need to come from Bill. (Although even if you weren’t being exposed to it and just heard about it secondhand, you’d still have standing to report it, simply as someone who doesn’t want religious harassment occurring in your workplace and who assumes your company would want to be aware, since they’ll have legal liability if they don’t intervene.)

Your coworkers suck.

3. Can I apply for another job in the company a few weeks after being hired?

I started a new position last month at a large organization. I took the position as a foot in the door, as it’s extremely difficult to get an offer as an external candidate. I know this position isn’t long-term for me. This week, the organization posted *the perfect* position for me. If it weren’t for my integrity, the sick feeling in my stomach that I’m letting someone down, and my fear of establishing a reputation as a job-hopper, I’d apply in a heartbeat. There is a culture in this organization for gaining education and experience and moving into other positions, though. How inappropriate is it to inquire, apply, and/or accept a different position when you’ve only been with the organization for a few weeks?

This is the problem with taking a job just to get your foot in the door: you really need to stay in it for a while before you can try to move out of it. Not necessarily years, but in most cases an absolute minimum of six months (and in a lot organizations, closer to a year). Applying for a different job a few weeks after starting is highly likely to alarm your manager — they’ll have cut loose their other candidates and invested time and energy in training you, and you’ll come across as oblivious to that, as well as not particularly interested in staying. (To be clear, there’s always a risk someone could leave for a different job soon after starting — but by applying internally, you’re signaling that you think the company wouldn’t care and they generally will.)

Some organizations have formal policies about how long you need to be in a job before you can apply for a different position there, but either way it’s likely to go over really poorly with your manager.

There are some exceptions to this, like if your skills happen to perfectly meet a need they have and which they won’t be able to easily meet otherwise — in other words, if there would be a significant benefit to them, not just to you — but that’s the exception to the rule.

4. What’s with candidates not bringing anything to take notes on?

I’ve been interviewing new grad and intern candidates for my team for the past several years. During the height of the pandemic we transitioned to virtual interviews and it worked well. As we’ve returned to in-person interviews, I’ve seen more and more early career candidates than before the pandemic show up with nothing but the clothes on their back and a smile.

Nothing to write on or with, no copies of their resume. I am someone who hasn’t touched a piece of paper in years (I take all my notes electronically on a laptop or tablet) and so it’s not the pen/paper aspect that’s so weird to me, it’s the empty-handedness.

To be clear, it’s only happened a handful of times, it’s not a deal-breaker, and I don’t want to generalize about a generation that is a) younger and still learning professional norms and b) significantly impacted as a whole by the pandemic in professional growth opportunities and availability of mentorship.

I was reflecting on why it bothered me so much and I realized that so long as they bring something, I don’t really notice or care if they take their own notes. I always have a PDF of their resume and so I don’t even need them to bring that. I wonder if I’m overreacting or adhering to professional norms for tradition’s sake, which is not how I want to operate. Is there a good, logical reason for this expectation that I’m not thinking of? Should I care about this at all?

If so, is it appropriate to give that feedback to candidates that we end up passing on for other reasons? Obviously if we end up hiring them, we teach them to be ready to take notes in all meetings as it’s an expectation in our firm/industry.

It’s mostly inexperience — but I see some experienced candidates do this too, not just younger ones, so it’s not entirely inexperience. (For the older ones, I suspect it’s just that no one has ever told them to do it differently. Not everyone is exposed to the same job-search advice, and if you haven’t been on the interviewer side of the table and haven’t delved much into interviewing advice, you wouldn’t necessarily think of it. Yes, at some point in your career you’d think you’d pick up this kind of preparation for any business meeting, but clearly some people don’t.) I think you’re probably reading more into it than is really there.

I wouldn’t include it as feedback to candidates you reject; if you do, it’s going to make people think it was part of your reason for rejecting them, even though you’d intend it as a separate tip.

5. Using complete sentences on a resume

I recently completely rewrote my CV. I showed it to a few people and they are divided. I write mine in complete sentences, so the word “I” appears a lot (as the CV is indeed about me). For example: “I led a cross-functional project to identify, cluster, and describe visitors to Lucious Llamas Ltd. The resulting campaign delivered a 41% reduction in cost per llama groomed.”

My daughter (who works in HR in Australia — I live in the UK) HATES the use of the pronoun, and thinks it should read “led a cross-functional project…” but I can’t bear that — it feels like an incomplete sentence to me.

I realize that styles will differ between countries. I also realize that it is unlikely someone would read that CV and think “how dare she use ‘I’ throughout — I shall discard this resume at once.” But still, I’m curious to know what your feelings are.

I can’t speak to UK or Australian resume conventions at all — for all I know you print them on purple paper in 16 point font and everyone loves it — but in the U.S., your daughter’s advice is the correct way. And by “correct,” I just mean the standard convention.

HOUSTON—Scolding her class for jumping to their feet prematurely, local teacher Jana Stoebel reportedly stated, “The sound of gunfire doesn’t dismiss you, I do,” on Tuesday, forcing the students to sit back down. “Did I say you could get back up?” said the stern 4th-grade instructor, who told her class there would be…

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An Australian man has been charged after allegedly stealing a platypus from the wild, taking it on a train, and then showing it off at a shopping center. What do you think?

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New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

“Cool? Or Just Clunky? The Fight Over Dashboard Touch Screens,” says a headline today in the New York Times.
Without mentioning it, the Times report tells of the aftermath of technology that was honored thirty years ago with an Ig Nobel Prize. The Times explains:

do-it-all touch screens, the nerve centers of many new cars, have sparked a backlash because of their size, as well as the clunky interfaces that may take eyes off the road…. For those leery of astral projections blocking their view of I-95, Mr. Langer said that drivers could choose any display level. A “mixed reality slider” can limit traditional information, such as a speedometer, to a thin strip of lower windshield, where today’s head-up displays s already operate. Drivers more at ease with digital projections can fill more of the windshield glass with content….

Schiffman’s Ig Nobel Prize

The 1993 Ig Nobel Prize for Visionary Technology was awarded jointly to Jay Schiffman of Farmington Hills, Michigan, crack inventor of AutoVision, an image projection device that makes it possible to drive a car and watch television at the same time, and to the Michigan state legislature, for making it legal to do so.

Schiffman’s work is documented in US patent #5061996A. (The technical drawing you see, above, is from that patent.)

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Tennessee Republicans expelled two Black freshman lawmakers for their participation in a gun control protest yet declined to remove a third Democratic lawmaker, who is white and who participated in the same demonstration on the state House floor last week. What do you think?

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EDMONTON, AB- The Alberta provincial government has restated its commitment to providing protection and support for the provinces’ most marginalized and under-supported population sectors: firearms. “With our proposed legislation, we will now have the power to stop Ottawa from imposing laws that unfairly persecute the gun community.” Alberta Justice Minister Tyler Shandro told the press. […]

The post Alberta government passes legislation to protect vulnerable gun population appeared first on The Beaverton.

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Slightly worried the wallstreetbets people will not understand this is a joke. Or, rather, will understand that it's a joke and therefore employ it as a financial plan.

Today's News:

ONE WEEK

Ever since Tesla first made the news, I had thought it would be a great car to own. The last few years have really disabused me of that notion, given the serious questions raised about the integrity of the company’s CEO. But even so, I’m pretty shocked by this latest Reuters report detailing how Tesla employees regularly would not only view images from Tesla’s built in cameras, but also make jokes and memes out of them and share them around the office.

This is the kind of behavior you’d expect in an late 90s dot com bubble era startup before it got serious, but Tesla is big enough and prominent enough that it is seriously troubling to learn it does not have basic controls to prevent this sort of privacy invasion:

But between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.

Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.

Also shared: crashes and road-rage incidents. One crash video in 2021 showed a Tesla driving at high speed in a residential area hitting a child riding a bike, according to another ex-employee. The child flew in one direction, the bike in another. The video spread around a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, via private one-on-one chats, “like wildfire,” the ex-employee said.

Other images were more mundane, such as pictures of dogs and funny road signs that employees made into memes by embellishing them with amusing captions or commentary, before posting them in private group chats. While some postings were only shared between two employees, others could be seen by scores of them, according to several ex-employees.

Serious, professional companies put in place controls and security systems to prevent this sort of thing, because if they don’t, everyone knows what will happen — which is exactly what appears to have happened in the Elon Musk-led company.

I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise at all that a company run by a guy with the maturity of a insecure 15-year-old would not really give two shits about people’s privacy and make jokes and pass around private videos. Of course, fair play: it looks like the Tesla employees also spied on Elon Musk’s own garage.

The boss’s lax attitude towards anyone else’s rights or concerns seems to have trickled down to his employees:

Two ex-employees said they weren’t bothered by the sharing of images, saying that customers had given their consent or that people long ago had given up any reasonable expectation of keeping personal data private.

Indeed, the Reuters report seems to suggest that the boss’s obsession with memes and stupid, sophomoric jokes was encouraged among the young people at the office:

Tesla staffed its San Mateo office with mostly young workers, in their 20s and early 30s, who brought with them a culture that prized entertaining memes and viral online content. Former staffers described a free-wheeling atmosphere in chat rooms with workers exchanging jokes about images they viewed while labeling.

According to several ex-employees, some labelers shared screenshots, sometimes marked up using Adobe Photoshop, in private group chats on Mattermost, Tesla’s internal messaging system. There they would attract responses from other workers and managers. Participants would also add their own marked-up images, jokes or emojis to keep the conversation going. Some of the emojis were custom-created to reference office inside jokes, several ex-employees said.

One former labeler described sharing images as a way to “break the monotony.” Another described how the sharing won admiration from peers.

“If you saw something cool that would get a reaction, you post it, right, and then later, on break, people would come up to you and say, ‘Oh, I saw what you posted. That was funny,’” said this former labeler. “People who got promoted to lead positions shared a lot of these funny items and gained notoriety for being funny.”

Literally: the privacy of Tesla owners is a joke to Tesla employees. Thankfully, at least some people who worked there had a conscience.

“It was a breach of privacy, to be honest. And I always joked that I would never buy a Tesla after seeing how they treated some of these people,” said one former employee.

Another said: “I’m bothered by it because the people who buy the car, I don’t think they know that their privacy is, like, not respected … We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids.”

One former employee saw nothing wrong with sharing images, but described a function that allowed data labelers to view the location of recordings on Google Maps as a “massive invasion of privacy.”

Later on in the story, we get at least a few more Tesla employees with a conscience:

In interviews, two former employees said in their normal work duties they were sometimes asked to view images of customers in and around their homes, including inside garages.

“I sometimes wondered if these people know that we’re seeing that,” said one.

“I saw some scandalous stuff sometimes, you know, like I did see scenes of intimacy but not nudity,” said another. “And there was just definitely a lot of stuff that like, I wouldn’t want anybody to see about my life.”

As an example, this person recalled seeing “embarrassing objects,” such as “certain pieces of laundry, certain sexual wellness items … and just private scenes of life that we really were privy to because the car was charging.”

And, clearly, someone who saw all this reported it to the Reuters journalists.

This does raise questions about whether or not this use of the images and videos violates various regulations around data protection and privacy. While the US doesn’t have a federal privacy law, there are some state privacy laws in effect that this might violate, and the FTC usually doesn’t take kindly to the idea that data is used for purposes that the consumer did not realize they were consenting too. And it seems like the head of the FTC is already none too pleased with Elon Musk.

But, of course, there may be more serious problems in the EU where this would likely raise some big GDPR concerns. While I have many issues with the GDPR, at the very least this seems like exactly what that law is supposed to prevent.

Incredibly, the article ends by noting top performing data labelers could win the use of a Tesla for a day or two (it’s not like Tesla paid its data labelers enough to afford its cars themselves), but some of those who won felt uncomfortable claiming the prize, as they worried about invasions of their own privacy.

I often think that many of the privacy concerns people discuss regarding the internet are totally overblown. People don’t mind sharing certain data in exchange for something valuable, but the key elements for dealing with privacy is that users should (1) understand the trade-offs involved, with knowledge of what data they’re giving up and what concrete benefit they’re getting in exchange, and (2) they should have some control and visibility into that data to make sure that the trade-offs remain aligned.

I can’t see how Tesla employees making memes of the images and videos they took inside people’s garages of occasionally intimate and private situations, even when the car is off, meets any of those criteria.