Surveillance company harassed female employees using its own facial recognition

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/26/21535089/surveillance-company-verkada-harassed-female-employees

by jbredeche • 6 years ago

243 170 6 years ago

Lammy2• 6 years ago

After the Slack incident was reported to HR, Verkada CEO Filip Kaliszan gave employees in the Slack channel a choice: leave the company or have their stock options reduced.

Leave the company, or have slightly less of something already worth zero? What a “fuck you” non-response to those women.

0goel0• 6 years ago

This is objectively the wrong way to handle sexual harassment. It only benefits the company by reclaiming some of the options and the harassers who lose nothing (and hence learn nothing).

JoeAltmaier3• 6 years ago

Agreed. Years ago when I worked at Unisys, it was reported to HR that upon leaving an interview at our Training department the candidate overheard "We don't need any bitches working here!" and general laughter. That was Friday. On Monday morning that Training department didn't exist. All 6 employees dismissed instantly; the department functions farmed out to different groups. Some of those employees had worked there for a decade.

But at a startup 10 years later, after interviewing a recent graduate from the local college I asked our VP Engineering if she was a fit. He replied "Did you see the guys around her? If I hired her, we'd get nothing done around here!" I was appalled. He later became an executive at Carbonite.

Fnoord2• 6 years ago

Not sure I understand this correct. Those 6 people got fired for laughing at an inappropriate joke? Was it proven they all laughed? I'd focus on the leader/troublemaker.

My aunt once accused me of laughing at my grandmother's funeral. I don't remember, but I certainly meant to only be respectful at the funeral.

jjones22• 6 years ago

Fired for laughing? You didn't work at the funeral home or anything... Geez. Glad I never subscribed to PC culture!

bsder• 6 years ago

I asked our VP Engineering if she was a fit. He replied "Did you see the guys around her? If I hired her, we'd get nothing done around here!" I was appalled.

Erm, I actually don't think that's an undue assessment necessarily if the guys really were acting like idiots. Hiring a female employee into that atmosphere would be suicidal. And the candidate is lucky she doesn't work there.

The problem is the VP of Engineering not trying to fix his employees acting like jerks around a female candidate. Eventually that's going to bite the company in the ass.

timoth3y• 6 years ago

That was Friday. On Monday morning that Training department didn't exist. All 6 employees dismissed instantly

Without more context, it's hard to know if that response was laudable or horrifying. If this was an ongoing pattern of behavior, then it's good they finally did something.

If this was the big boss making a show by firing employees for laughing at their manager's inappropriate joke bu not reporting it to HR by the end of the day, then that's a pretty horrible place to work.

The person who made the joke and his manager need to go, but the rest of the team? That's a harder case to make.

counterpoint1• 6 years ago

People constantly, openly make statements like "We don't need any jerks working here!" or "We don't hire jackasses" and are lauded and supported. Switching to a synonym which is maybe more often associated with female instead of male gets everyone in the entire department fired?

What a horribly toxic environment. I can't imagine any employees slept soundly at night knowing that if they were in the room when someone said a PG-13 word that they'd be fired on the spot.

woeirua• 6 years ago

This just goes to show how much of a total pushover their CEO is.

A competent CEO would have fired all of them on the spot once the investigation was completed. You don't let someone who sexually harasses coworkers resign in order to save face. Letting these people off the hook, regardless of how good an employee they were otherwise, perpetuates this behavior. I guarantee you that these men will go on to other companies and continue to do the exact same thing to someone else.

Lammy2• 6 years ago

I’ve witnessed way too much general animosity toward women to ever believe the CEO is just incompetent and not “one of the boys”.

t-writescode• 6 years ago

The people that were "disciplined" were the offenders, not the people reporting the offense. Nevermind what I said. That said, I agree, they should definitely not be working for that company anymore (at least). It doesn't matter if you're firing your golden goose. This shows the level of respect this company has for the people it's surveilling, though, if even their own employees, when under surveillance, experience this level of disrespect.

THIS PART IS WRONG, IT'S THE ORIGINAL POST AND I LEFT IT FOR POSTERITY: If in the US, wouldn't this be illegal? Retaliation against employees tends to go poorly for the retaliators.

CaptainZapp2• 6 years ago

"In a statement emailed to The Verge, a Verkada spokesperson said: “Verkada does not tolerate sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior. This isolated incident was investigated and all individuals involved were disciplined accordingly."

So, it was investigated by deleting the evidence? Stellar company!

bronson3• 6 years ago

The perpetrators still have their jobs and the women they harassed still have to work with them.

It seems Verkada actually does tolerate sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior.

jimmaswell2• 6 years ago

This is a sad example of needless extremism where anything short of the nuclear option just isn't good enough.

throwaway0a5e9• 6 years ago

So a company that sells to an industry that is primarily a blue collar boys club hires sales associates for culture fit (with the industry they are selling into) and then acts surprised when they abuse internal resources for amusement and make wisecracks that are wildly out of line for most white collar business environments.

The company is just acting shocked about the gambling to appease the public. Everyone knew something like this was bound to happen eventually. The cultures just aren't compatible.

faitswulff2• 6 years ago

Painting blue collar workers as inherently sexist is classist. There are plenty of blue collar workers who are respectful human beings.

fhood2• 6 years ago

Exactly, what "class" they were should have nothing to do with it, they should have been fired and that should have been the end of it.

delecti• 6 years ago

Not to mention the reverse; there are plenty of very public stories about very sexist white collar workplaces.

throwaway0a5e9• 6 years ago

Everyone who's ever worked blue collar knows exactly what I mean. These people aren't any more racist or sexist or whatever than anyone else. They're just willing to crack jokes about a hell of a lot of stuff that would make most white collar employees cringe.

In a blue collar work place welders are dumb, electricians are gay, jokes about wives and girlfriends are fair game and a suction cup didlo is a tool of endless comedic potential, not a HR disaster waiting to happen. And the overwhelming majority of the time nobody takes any of that seriously or gets offended by any of it. It's just how the culture is.

walrus013• 6 years ago

You've obviously never worked with large numbers of telecom tower climbers, or linemen, or underground utility contractors. There's a reason for the stereotype of toxic masculinity bro culture.

By no means is it everyone but the percentage that could be categorized as such per 100 persons is definitely higher.

If you want to see it taken to an extreme go spend some time with Alberta oil/mining/gas industry workers.

jackhack2• 6 years ago

wisecracks that are wildly out of line for most white collar business environments.

I would daresay out of line for all business environments. Blue collar doesn't mean one must suffer boorishness.

throwaway0a5e9• 6 years ago

A great many of these people would say that their workplace culture is fine and that white collar workplace culture is too PC and stifling.

ok123456• 6 years ago

Nice classsplaining.

quantified• 6 years ago

It went onto a company Slack. These are not sales athletes. An athlete is easily intelligent, in this case would have a private whatsapp group or similar. These are sales dumb jocks.

Which doesn’t alter your point at all.

corobo• 6 years ago

If anyone ever needs a solid example of how sexism is just swept under a rug this company's response is perfect for that

haunter• 6 years ago

So they can't even stop not abusing it inside the company but they also sure have to give the technology to the governments and everyone...

raxxorrax5• 6 years ago

Well, if I worked for a surveillance company, I would expect my co-workers to be dubious at least.

I wonder why they use slack to post images. What went wrong when employees were trained on handling personal data? Would they also post images of clients on a slack channel?

This paints a clear picture. There should not be a place in anything IT that regularly handles confidential information. This might have been the sales team, but especially in their industry it should be dogmatically condemned.

Trust is key in security and sadly the industry has become a shame for anything remotely connected to tech and nobody gets any safer here.

edit: "sales athletes" - talent: talking shit?

soco• 6 years ago

If there's a common thread in all these IT security oriented companies stories, is that they'll abuse their power. By mistake or by business plan, covertly or in the open, it just seems to keep on happening... We are talking on one hand about software development ethics and codes of conduct, and on the other hand... all this flaming mess.

walrus013• 6 years ago

This is something like the 30th or 40th time I've seen a documented instance of toxic "bro" culture in sales/marketing groups.

I think there is a lot to be said for the business plan concept of intentionally NOT hiring "sales" people who come from a traditional sales/marketing background. Have a compelling product and website marketing material about it that doesn't require outbound sales efforts to go hunt down the customers.

My personal theory is that aggressive outbound sales attracts the sort of personality that may be more likely to engage in many possible manners of outlandish behaviour.

Yes, you might be leaving some money on the table, but you'll also have a better corporate culture as a whole.

fhood2• 6 years ago

I don't think that is fair. It may be true but it isn't fair, and to me, the proper response is to have an absolute zero tolerance policy on this sort of thing. If you are harassing women or really anybody at your workplace you should be fired, and the employer should make it extremely clear that that is their policy. I don't think you should exclude someone from the hiring pool because they have a background in the job they want to do.

8ytecoder2• 6 years ago

Yeah, I have seen it too. I have lost the number of times I have had negative interactions with someone only to realise they work in sales. This is not going to 100% accurate but just how I see the parallels between bully/victim culture from high school transforming into workplace. Sales adds value but is also highly rent seeking. The pay for sales executives is no way in proportion to the contribution of you look at it holistically. Because they bring in the “actual” dollars, sales get paid a lot more than the engineers and product people who build the actual product.

daniellarusso• 6 years ago

My current employer is wanting to have a Slack costume party this week.

Only the sales team has shown any enthusiasm for participating.

levi-turner2• 6 years ago

My 2 cents as a person on the sales engineer side of the fence.

I can't speak to your experience or all organizations, but what you're getting at in my eyes are two things.

Sales Executives _tend_ to be the most transparently compensated employees. It generally is 60 (base) / 40 (variable) but other ratio exist (70/30 is more common the technical sales side). Since the sales side has explicit KPIs tied to revenue, it's very clear how success can be determined unlike most other roles inside of organizations. In the best case, there's a stock plan but that is only indirectly related to revenue. Moreover, if you don't hit your quota, you are gone. If you're a seasoned sales rep or have personal relationships, you can skate by having a bad quarter / half / year but this is the exception, not the rule. This is a fine-ish solution for compensation for the sales side of the org, right? You have a quota, your success is based on attainment. Easy-peasy. Didn't hit your quota because of a recession? Didn't hit your number because of a global pandemic? Didn't hit your number because of A, B, or C? Tough luck.

For other roles, in my eyes, there does need to be an intrinsic decoupling of current or next quarter / half / year sales objectives and their incentive structure. Refactoring may be important for a code base but fundamentally doesn't bring in revenue. It nets to _hurting_ short-term revenue since the man hours aren't focused on the newest widget the competitors have. Over a longer time horizon, it can fuel revenue indirectly by making it easier to add new features, etc, etc but for someone like me who has a quota, it doesn't _help_ me in any direct manner. I have to build presentations and demos to work around the bugs I know exist, weak spots in the product. I have to explain roadmaps for feature sets while being very transparent that a purchase today does not entail a customer commitment so that we don't have revenue recognition issues in 3 months when a feature slips. If the company doesn't ship features X and Y within 6 months, are engineers fired? Generally not. Will the net effect from a marketplace competition perspective result in sales reps being fired? Generally yes.

Back to the culture issue, yeah, that's present. The boiler room mentality of a lot of sales reps breeds a locker room mentality and the incentive structure formalizes things. Sales reps aren't retained for being a nice gal / guy / whatever. They are retained based on a single figure: revenue. That's the focus and in poor sales orgs that's the only focus.

Will someone make more money, all else being equal, selling something? Yes. Will they have a stable livelihood? Almost assuredly not.

_fat_santa• 6 years ago

I really don't understand how these things can keep happening at the workplace, really I can't understand the thought that goes through some of these guys' heads that makes them think it's OK to do this.

I understand bro culture through and through, I've got a group of friends and we some of the most vile things to one another after work, in private. The thought that we would turn right around and do the same things we do after work at work is untenable.

Like how can you be so effing stupid for lack of a better term. Some will rightly say that the environment reinforces that behavior but even them I'm at a loss. Out of all my guy friends, not one of us would even think of doing something like this.

xnyan2• 6 years ago

I can't understand the thought that goes through some of these guys' heads that makes them think it's OK to do this.

The answer is in the article. Nothing of consequence happened to them. They think it's ok to do it, because they want to do it and they won't get in trouble for it.

rsynnott• 6 years ago

really I can't understand the thought that goes through some of these guys' heads that makes them think it's OK to do this.

Well, note that in this case they didn't get fired. So... that might make them think it's ok to do this.

goatinaboat• 6 years ago

This is something like the 30th or 40th time I've seen a documented instance of toxic "bro" culture in sales/marketing groups.

This is true but a company founded to do a sleazy thing like “surveillance” is only going to hire sleazebags anyway. Or turn previously decent people into them.

hinkley• 6 years ago

A bad sales team can create huge opportunity costs as well.

Quarter million dollar contracts that promised functionality our system wasn't designed to support? Let's just drop everything for three months and butcher our architecture so that you get your bonus. I'm sure this won't have any negative consequences.

Consultant324522• 6 years ago

Verkada board chairman Hans Robertson has said publicly that he intentionally hired a team of “sales athletes,” and Verkada’s strategy is to “make the culture really fun.”

walrus013• 6 years ago

translation: it's a bunch of frat bros

microtherion• 6 years ago

If the "fun" is consistently had by one group of employees at the expense of another, you don't have a "fun culture", you have an "impunity culture".

Chris20482• 6 years ago

So, the main question: why does a sales director have access to the security cameras?

The culture, behaviour etc aside, that's the question I'd be asking this company.

throwaway0a5e9• 6 years ago

why does a sales director have access to the security cameras?

So he can show off a real world use case to people who might buy it.

He obviously can't be showing off client's installations.

xnyan2• 6 years ago

So, you have a test setup. In addition to violating the privacy of the employee, I assume you could see the employee workstation and whatever information of an actual client that may be on screen.

Nextgrid• 6 years ago

Presumably to demonstrate the product? I guess they have to "pinky swear" they'll only lookup people with their consent, but there was nothing technically preventing them from looking up anyone.

On a similar note, I had a UK credit referencing agency salesman contact me and try to sell me their product; as part of the sales pitch he gave me credentials to their web UI and encouraged me to try it out; on there I saw their other leads' credit reports (including mine, which was empty as expected) and their trial attempts at looking up other companies, and had the possibility to look up any company or individual as long as I pinky-promised I had their consent, and even if I did have their consent, that data would still be exposed to anyone else having access to this demo account.

Chris20482• 6 years ago

to demonstrate the product

..and if they where a bioinformatics company, would sales have access to employee health records?

Security cam info is sensitive, I see no reason anyone but security should have access to it.

testing and demos? create purpose-built test data. Even if you need to use real data, the last thing that should be used is that of fellow employees that you actually know, and therefore have greater scope to act on maliciously.

grafelic• 6 years ago

Verkada board chairman Hans Robertson has said publicly that he intentionally hired a team of “sales athletes,” and Verkada’s strategy is to “make the culture really fun.”

Surveillance is not fun, it is serious business and doesn't deserve a "fun" culture. I guess from a surveilor business' point of view it is a rather effective way to numb the inner critic of your employees.

raxxorrax5• 6 years ago

Surveillance should not be a business at all because violations are always intrinsic to the application.

klmadfejno2• 6 years ago

I don't have any particular knowledge of this company (although at a glance, I probably hate them?). But at a glance I think people don't have a good sense for sales. I've seen maybe a dozen small-mid size company sales operations. Many sales cultures are pretty insane. Many hires don't have much experience or just kind of end up in sales. Sales groups tend to be run extremely competitively against themselves, with high compensation that would likely surprise outsiders, especially for people with no paper credentials that say they're skilled. It's common to find yourself with a bunch of 20 year olds suddenly being told their gods gift and it's not really that surprising when they go cocky with their power, not unlike tech bros in similar situations.

edit: Just to be clear, that's not an excuse for any of the behaviors discussed

faitswulff2• 6 years ago

I would ask "why are they surveilling their own employees? Why don't they have responsible, limited access to the technology?" but then I think if they had any issues with doing so they probably wouldn't be in the business in the first place.

klmadfejno2• 6 years ago

I mean let's not make it more complex than it needs to be.

It happened because they're assholes.

londons_explore• 6 years ago

It's time we started separating actions that are illegal from those which violate company policy.

Illegal actions should be dealt with by the police and the courts. Apart from providing evidence, the company should stay out of things.

Company policy violations should be dealt with by the company as they see fit, including no punishment at all, or even a bonus!

In this case, the article criticizes the company for not sufficiently punishing people for their actions, when clearly it's a matter for law enforcement not the company.

henriquez2• 6 years ago

Devil’s advocate, what about this conduct was criminal? It seems abhorrent to me, but most likely a civil matter.

markstos• 6 years ago

In the United States, sexual harrassment is illegal. https://www.eeoc.gov/sexual-harassment

The parent wasn't claiming it definitely was, so much as expressing that the police and courts are appropriate parties to determine the legality, beyond what actions the company itself may take for violating internal policies.

meheleventyone• 6 years ago

Illegal actions are normally company policy violations as well though.

argomo2• 6 years ago

The average HR department is highly motivated to avoid lawsuits of this kind. Police departments, by contrast, have no liability if they get it wrong. Officers themselves are disproportionately male and have traditional/regressive upbringings (as demonstrated by the high prevalence of domestic abuse against officer spouses).

Then too, we must consider the rights of the accused. Simply being arrested can be a huge life-altering event. Being docked pay or fired is more proportional to the size of the infraction. And society needs a gradient of responses: not every offense should consumer the resources of the police and the courts... that simply doesn't scale, and it's not a humane solution.

zajio1am2• 6 years ago

From rights of the accused point it seems that handling these issues by police seems much better, as criminal justice have established rules to protect accused (e.g. including 'beyond a reasonable doubt' evidence level) that seems to be lacking in these extrajudicional punishments.

dragonwriter• 6 years ago

llegal actions should be dealt with by the police and the courts. Apart from providing evidence, the company should stay out of things.

Illegal actions often violate company policy. Indeed, there are often legal mandates that company policies must also effectively address illegal conduct or else the company will be liable for the conduct.

jmull• 6 years ago

There’s no clear separating line, though.

Generally, illegal things done while on the job or representing the company are also against company policy.

I’m not sure how it could possibly be different. Companies should be able to develop policies about things that affect their business and employees, which obviously includes illegal behavior.

tester34• 6 years ago

What does it mean?

RawVerkadawgz

chandra3814• 6 years ago

Raw-dogging is a slang term for unprotected sexual intercourse

pwinnski2• 6 years ago

I wonder how long it will be before the company changes its name as a result of the bad reputation from this incident.

Any surveillance company, scratch that, any company run by Filip Kaliszan should not be in business. Any company with Hans Robertson on the board should be avoided.

They really shouldn't be able to change the company name to hide their guilt. They should be seeking other lines of work, out of the surveillance industry forever.

People worry about a culture that doesn't seem to allow for grace, but this is the sort of case that seems appropriate. There's no real recognition of fault here, and the affected women are still forced to work alongside their harassers. Horrific!

ReptileMan• 6 years ago

I wonder how long it will be before the company changes its name as a result of the bad reputation from this incident.

Never. People and organizations that purchase that kind of software just don't give a fuck.

pwinnski2• 6 years ago

I wish I disagreed, but I suspect you're right.

chandra3814• 6 years ago

I think after this their reputation is toast.. absolutely nobody will want to work there.

bluntfang• 6 years ago

Unfortunately the people who don't have much of a choice will work there and be unable to leave because missing a paycheck means possible eviction.

chandra3814• 6 years ago

Unfortunately too true

driverdan• 6 years ago

Original source: https://ipvm.com/reports/verkada-culture

All of the bro's involved in that Slack chat should have been immediately fired. No form of sexual harassment should be tolerated.

everdrive• 6 years ago

“Face match… find me a squirt,”

What exactly is a squirt?

notdang• 6 years ago

In Mexico it's a soda drink. Very popular for mixing with alcohol.

http://grupopenafiel.com.mx/bebida/squirt/

randycupertino3• 6 years ago

In the context of the slack channel name "raw dawgz" which is intercourse without protection, squirt in this context is probably referencing male ejaculation.

kelvin0• 6 years ago

It's almost a universal law, if there's a loophole or way to do something the 'wrong' way, someone, somewhere will find a way to abuse it.

rib3ye• 6 years ago

Off the topic, props to Slack for making sure deleted channels stay deleted!

jiveturkey2• 6 years ago

not really. you can configure your paid account to record all history permanently.

this isn't a case of props at all. just a case of tier-locked features.

LatteLazy• 6 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace

BuildTheRobots2• 6 years ago

“This investigation found that one person was responsible for instigating the incident and nine other members of the team were part of the Slack channel. By the time we became aware of it, the Slack channel had been deleted; we attempted to recover it but were unable to...

I find this slightly worrying. We use the free tier of slack (which in itself is a bone of contention), one of the big problems being that there's only a 10,000 message history available to users so useful information quite often drops out of view.

That said, Slack have specific admin tools to deal with harassment and bullying. Even on the free tier it's possible to contact them and ask for this history, even if it's been deleted by a user and even if it's past the 10,000 limit. The fact they can't get the chat log strikes me as suspicious.

Mandatum• 6 years ago

My guess is they did an edit then delete, or it was deleted more than X months ago. This level of logging is really expensive and likely only enabled on Enterprise tiers.

BuildTheRobots2• 6 years ago

I'm almost certain it's not. In the UK I'd assume there's GDPR requirements that mean they need to keep track of it. I also contacted them a couple of years ago after we had a bullying issue and no history of it; Slack confirmed that they had the history and that they could give it to us, but as it would be PMs, they'd have to inform every member of the workspace when they did.

Consultant324522• 6 years ago

I'm apparently old and a quick Google search wasn't helpful. What does "find me a a squirt" mean?

And how could this person have known that "find me a squirt" would return an employee?

randycupertino3• 6 years ago

In the context of the slack channel name being "raw dawgz" which refers to intercourse without protection, squirt in this context is probably referencing male ejaculation.

jiveturkey2• 6 years ago

I imposed the largest financial penalty in our company’s history on the instigator

$0 in zero-valued stock options? I guess technically that is likely the truthfully largest penalty ever because it's unlikely that they have ever imposed any financial penalty on any employee. Or, they do have a policy of imposing financial penalties on employees ... I don't know which is worse.

That said, the zero tolerance being advocated here is not helpful. Based on the story alone, it's not as if the women involved were directly being harassed/assaulted. This is more a case of locker room banter. It's actually lucky this happened in the way it did (ie, with evidence) so that it could be nipped in the bud before possibly escalating.

OTOH, Verkada could have and should have done much better than what they did. It doesn't even amount to a slap on the wrist. Does anyone even believe that the discipline amounted to more than "don't get caught next time"? Laughable. An event like this, for a company like, isn't simply an internal matter. There are predictable public-facing repercussions. They have a lot more space between "nothing" (their response) and firing.

Well, the CEO has essentially no proper experience in real companies; only the ones he founded. But, he seems like a smart guy and should know better than this.

Surveillance company harassed female employees using its own facial recognition

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