The three former engineers are suing their former employer, saying they were unfairly fired.
The lawsuit was filed on Monday in the Santa Clara County Superior Court, and claims that the software engineers followed a contractual obligation to hold the company accountable for its "Don't be evil" slogan.
The lawsuit said that each of the people had their employment terminated by the company for adhering to the directive "Don't be evil". "All of thePlaintiffs fulfilled their contractual duty to advise the company on ways in which it was doing evil."
The call out concerned the intent of the company to do business with border and immigration officials. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were the subject of ethical concerns at the time, with the U.S. government holding over 69,000 children in custody over the course of the year.
According to the lawsuit, Rivers, Waldman, and Duke each signed an employment contract which included a code of conduct from the internet company. This Code was read in part.
"'Don't be evil' is about following the law, acting honorably and treating each other with respect." The code of conduct is one of the ways we try to be good. It's built around the idea that we should be measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct when we do our work at the company.
Customs and Immigration Enforcement's actions are clearly considered to be "evil." Waldman and Duke launched an internal petition in August of this year, asking for assurances from Google that it wouldn't work with them. The information that was added to the petition was discovered by Rivers, who discovered that a free trial of a cloud platform had been offered to CBP.
All of the information included in the petition was already accessible by all of the employees at the company, according to the lawsuit. The internal investigation failed to find fault and they were not reprimanded.
The three engineers were let go for "clear and repeated violations of our data security policies" according to an internal memo from the Securities and Investigations Team. This included searches for information outside their job scope.
The website reached out to the internet giant for comment.
The tech giant retaliated against Rivers and another staffer, who were suspended, by having 200 of its employees rally outside of its San Francisco office. Rivers was placed on administrative leave after she was interviewed about her access to documents regarding the company's relationship with the Customs and Border Protection.
The company's Code of Conduct was quietly removed from the website in the summer of 2018). This makes sense in some ways. The tech giant has had some headaches because of the aspirational phrase, which can be extremely subjective.
On the other hand, it's really bad.
