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HP CEO's Browsing History Used Against Him
theodp writes "Anything you browse can and will be used against you. An investigation of ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd's surfing history reportedly convinced the HP Board that Hurd had had a personal relationship with sexual harassment accuser Jodie Fisher, even if not sexual. Just the latest example of how HP 'work[s] together to create a culture of inclusion built on trust, respect and dignity for all.' The WSJ reported a person close to the investigation said Hurd had looked at clips from racy films featuring Ms. Fisher, a former actress, while someone 'familiar with Mr. Hurd's thinking' said he merely did a Google search of 10 minutes or so. One wonders how many more 'personal relationships' with Ms. Fisher the browser histories of HP's 304,000 worldwide employees might reveal. BTW, nice to see that Hurd has made it to HP's ex-CEO-Hall-of-Fame page."
bangedup.com
cracked.com
www.yzzerdd.com
naughtyceoassistants.com
google search: how to sexually harrass someone and not get caught
Living With a Nerd
Next time be really nice to IT
Or request your own internet connection, not going through proxies or anything
But better still, don't be a moron and look at anything NSFW (at least not intentionally) while at work
Funny story, my last company's proxy would prevent us from apt-get upgrade. Why? libsexy /o\
how long until
Anyone remember their previous board spying scandal? Must be a REAL fun place to work.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
HP died with Lew Platt. Carly Fiorina was a trainwreck. The HP Way is gone and done, and has been since the first layoffs just prior to 9/11.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
sexual harassment is pretty serious. one would think we should be more sympathetic to jodie fisher, not hurd. oh right, his browsing history was used against him. therefore, we should be sympathetic to him (rolls eyes)
Pardon me if I'm sympathetic to neither since I know neither party nor do I know the exact circumstances. A woman making a sexual harassment claim should neither immediately receive sympathy nor suspicion. Likewise claims of spying or overstepping the bounds of what might be considered reasonable surveillance is not something anyone should automatically have a knee-jerk reaction to. The bias you are seeing is because you are on a geek message board not a feminist message board.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
sexual harassment is pretty serious
The last time I worked for a big corporation, we were given a guide to avoiding sexual harassment. Already, this should suggest to you that "sexual harassment" covers more than you think it does -- after all, we were given a guide to avoiding it, not just told to show respect to our coworkers. The guide indicated that pinning up a swimsuit calendar in your cubicle is considered sexual harassment. So is look at sexy (not necessarily nude or pornographic) pictures on your computer, since a female coworker might see the display and get offended.
Sorry, but ever since then, I have been suspicious of "sexual harassment" claims, particularly when details are scant and the claims come out of a corporation. If one her first day at HP, her first encounter with Mr. Hurd was him grabbing her butt in the copy room and asking her to get naked, then fine, it is sexual harassment. Without details indicating that, though, I would not jump to conclusions.
Palm trees and 8
While the summary is full of sympathy for Hurd, implying that he was the wronged party in this situation (boggles the mind...), I have absolutely no sympathy for him. Ignoring the fact that he got a rather sizable golden handshake which would enable most people to retire in luxury, he was stupid. When you're in a management position, especially a senior management position (such as the CEO...), you have an obligation to not cross personal boundaries. Members of senior management should know better. It's inappropriate and it's the sort of thing that leads to trouble. Shockingly, it lead to trouble.
No sympathy. I have no clue if he was a good CEO or not, but he was a stupid one, that's for certain.
This article summarizes it well but I'd have to quote more than "fair use" allows:
http://gawker.com/5609386/heres-the-real-reason-hp-ceo-mark-hurd-was-fired
tl;dr Hurd was a goofus and tried to get intimate with a subordinate but backed off when it went nowhere, and probably did nothing illegal or immoral to Jodie Fischer or HP; the board just wanted to avoid publicity.
Futurist Traditionalism
sexual harassment is pretty serious. one would think we should be more sympathetic to jodie fisher, not hurd
I agree, sexual harassment is a very serious problem and should not be taken lightly. But could you present the evidence of sexual harassment? Larry Ellison said of it '"The H.P. board admits that it fully investigated the sexual harassment claims against Mark and found them to be utterly false." Furthermore the reason Hurd was fired appeared to be "numerous instances where [Hurd's love interest, Jodie Fisher] received compensation and/or expense reimbursement where there was not a legitimate business purpose, as well as numerous instances where inaccurate expense reports were submitted by Mark or on his behalf that intended to or had the effect of concealing Mark's personal relationship with the contractor." If that's true, misuse of company funds is also serious but not on the level of sexual harassment.
oh right, his browsing history was used against him. therefore, we should be sympathetic to him (rolls eyes)
My concern here -- and what I think the general readership thinks -- is that Hurd did some questionable things or possibly made some enemies and so they tried to dig up anything they could on them. When the sexual harassment charges didn't stick well enough, they used a company policy that everyone is guilty of: using company resources and time to google silly things or read tabloids or do things unrelated to work. "Racy" means "Mildly risque, exciting." So he visited some mildly risque sites?
Basically this looks to be a scenario where Hurd upset someone and they simply looked through his browsing history in order to find a reason to terminate him. Are they constantly searching through browsing histories of all 304,000 employees to find which employment they should terminate? No, they are not. You speak so highly of ethics regarding sexual harassment but what about the ethics of terminating the employment of just one person when he is no more guilty than thousands of other employees -- which you also have the means and option to investigate.
My work here is dung.
But, he wasn't.
The investigation found he did not commit sexual harassment, but did find he violated the company's business conduct code. That is why he was asked to resign and he resigned because the board intimated that he could resign or he could be removed.
Maybe you should try reading the actual stories about this subject. Then, you wouldn't say things that are patently and provably false.
There's plenty of confusion about the basic definition of sexual harrassment. I've been a POSH (Prevention of Sexual Harrassment) trainer at my employer and I can tell you from hard experience - most people have no idea.
In broad strokes, then, here's what you need to know.
Most people think in terms of a "reasonable person" criteria. That's a relic of the past. When sexual harrassment first got major corp attention, the people in charge tended to apply common sense. They'd ask "Would a reasonable person consider this case to be sexual harrassment?" This seemed like a good approach and it did cover the basics. No reasonable person would disagree that "Sleep with me if you want this promotion" is harrassment.
The "reasonable person" standard, however, did not address the very wide middle ground. Are dirty jokes harrassing? If not occasionally, then how often? How many per day should be allowed? Should you be held responsible for being unintentially overheard? The "reasonable person" criteria failed to address all these at first blush.
Now, in my organization, we expected people to speak up for themselves. If someone felt harrassed and said "That makes me uncomfortable", then the person doing the harrassing action no longer had an excuse. Even if the harrasser felt that a "reasonble person" would not be harrassed by the situation, the harrasser now knew that their criteria was misused in re the person who made the complaint.
In practice, this meant that anyone could get away with anything (except the obvious aforementioned "sex for a job" situation I previously mentioned) until they were put on warning. Since it was up to the victim to issue the warning and since the victims frequently felt they were rendered powerless by the situation, warnings weren't issued. Bad manners continued to be displayed. Major harrassment incidents stopped but more subtle things that really do impact the bottom line (things like "a pervasive atmosphere of harrassment" or however you want to phrase it) continued unabated.
The "reasonable person" criteria had to be abandoned.
The new criteria is pretty simple. The victim defines the crime. If someone says something is sexual harrassment, it is.
The current situation, where *anything* is sexual harrassment if someone wants to feel they're being harrassed, results in lots of counter-intuitive weirdness. It seems crazy that if I stick up a calendar from a local sports team that has a picture of the cheerleaders on it, it's harrassment. That harrassment may not be in full flower but you better believe I'm going to be told to take it down before some super-sensitive idiot sees it and gets their feelings hurt.
As stupid as this seems, it actually works out better in practice. By "over-specifying" the defintion of sexual harrassment, the oppressive environments that were able to continue to exist under the "reasonable person" criteria are resolved. Yes, us old white men feel a bit put upon because we can't make dirty blonde jokes. But the upside is that the whole place works better and everyone can better contribute up to their potential.
Bottom line for people who don't work in big-corp type environments: the definition of "sexual harrassment" is much broader than seems reasonable. For practical reasons, learned the hard way over decades, the situation must be this way.
I don't like it. It offends my sense of justice. But I've seen it done both ways and in practice, the unreasonable, nanny-state version of sexual harrassment remediation just works better for everyone involved.
If one her first day at HP, her first encounter with Mr. Hurd was him grabbing her butt in the copy room and asking her to get naked, then fine, it is sexual harassment.
Nah, he waited until the second day. That's what his buddy Larry E. told him to do.
If you were working at a company and you found out that someone you worked with had been in some adult movies, wouldn't you be curious enough to google them and check it out? I sure as hell would.
I can't speak about the rest of the case, but evidence of harassment or a personal relationship this is not.
How does your morals matter?
How is someone looking at NSFW content worse than someone reading /. ? Does it somehow mean that the person is working even less because it's also amoral to you? ./ is not so bad because to many of us it can be work related at least a little. But my argument still stands. Either you are allowed to browse the 'net for non-strictly work content or not, content should not matter.
Maybe
The first is that HP does a nice job of tracking you. In fact, in general, ALL of Corporate America does this. The important part of that, is that HR is typically given access to the data. That way, if the company needs/wants to fire you, almost ALWAYS, they have SOMETHING to base it on.
The second is that all should realize that Hurd was not fired for Sex harassment. He was fired because ppl on the board wanted him out and did not have the courage to simply fire him.
Third, that is DAMN scary that Sexual harassment can be looking up public information about somebody. Would I, or anybody else, watch that kind of info on an somebody in a public position, esp. an actress? Hell yah. Even the HR would have done that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Although European (EU mainstream) countries are far from perfect in this, legal restraints make it much harder for ambulance chasers to make fortunes by publicly exaggerating allegations, and employment law means that there are proper remedies at reasonable cost which means that companies are not exposed to excessive risks from ordinary human behaviour. (I might add that we don't suffer so much from kneejerk Protestant fundamentalism, but I think that's a sideshow.)
Interestingly, when I had to do the training in the UK, our (US) trainer was quite clued up on UK law, and commented that a number of the overbearing rules that get applied in the US would be rejected by employment tribunals in the UK as unreasonable grounds for dismissal ("you guys are lucky").
Bottom line: your comments may well be correct for the US as it is, but are a sad commentary on the US legal profession and the relationships inside US companies.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
"Already, this should suggest to you that "sexual harassment" covers more than you think it does -- after all, we were given a guide to avoiding it, not just told to show respect to our coworkers."
I use the military "senior NCO self-defense" method though I'm now retired. I don't speak to female co-workers unless it's pure business, I don't socialize with female co-workers, and I'm flawlessly polite to them. I avoid being unaccompanied with them in the same room, but do it subtly.
I ensure they are assigned and evaluated fairly, but given the choice I'd rather keep females at the workplace far enough away to avoid any perception of conflict-of-interest.
Military-origin Protip:
Keep at least one kickass female supervisor around to discipline other females. Bonus if that female is non-White. There are plenty of good females who want to do their job, but the game is what it is and it doesn't respond favorably to resistance.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."