Author / AI Finance and Economics Xue Yongwei Liu Pei Liu Dongxue
Editor / You Yong
On the evening of September 6, the "Ali female employee incident" came to an official conclusion: Wang Mouwen does not constitute a crime and does not approve the arrest. Wang Mouwen was released home after 15 days of imprisonment, but the employee who stabbed the internal network information of the incident to the external Internet was punished.
Earlier media reports stated that Alibaba fired 10 employees who had leaked the internal network article "accused by former company manager of sexual assault", claiming that the actions of these employees violated the company's policy. Alibaba has not yet responded to this.
But the two groups of people who diverge in their positions have long been quarreling. Supporters believe that leaking internal information to the media and the public violated the company’s rules and regulations. Opponents believe that these are not business secrets, employees have the right to let the public know, and those who put the matter on social networking sites, the starting point is not to eat melons, but to bring justice.
Transmitting company internal information to the Internet is a very taboo thing for all Internet companies. Regardless of whether the information is sensitive or not, Internet companies such as Alibaba and ByteDance have become more and more stringent in their control of employee behavior. In the name of preventing the leakage of business secrets, companies are also more or less selfish and unwilling to make internal matters public. This also makes any communication between employees and the outside world more or less cautious.
track the leakers
"XXX corporate layoffs,The proportion is 80%", "Byte employees started general adjustments, and their salaries dropped by 17%", “It is said that XXXX will be sold. Choose one between Byte and Jingdong”...
Anonymous discussion of Maimai The district is filled with all kinds of true and false news all year round. Almost every blockbuster news will attract the attention of the media and public opinion. The account notes that post these news are all employees of related Internet companies.
The founder of , , Lin Fan, once revealed that the average active percentage of employees in major Internet companies has exceeded 50%, reaching a maximum of 80%, which is almost "all employees are on Maimai." In Maimai, one of the employees. The desire to communicate with each other is magnified. In addition to spreading the company’s gossip, they also publish some complaints, or normal personnel changes, or well-known operating rules.
This seems to be heading A paradox: With the growth of enterprises, although all major Internet companies have intranets, the real-name intranets have weakened the role of Shanghai Tong and employees, and employees will turn to other means of communication, but they are very likely to become like this. "Leakers."
For this reason, big manufacturers have established a set of strict standards for information confidentiality. Jincheng works as a game planner at a big game factory in Shanghai, and he gets it when he goes through the entry procedures. HR sent a very thick book of information, the content in it is clear from the intranet, work content to the organizational structure. There are many confidentiality clauses in the intranet information, one of which he remembers deeply: "It is strictly forbidden to upload intranet information to the outside. ".
Tencent, Alibaba and other head companies will also repeatedly indicate to employees that "intranet information cannot be screenshots and external transmission". Newcomers join Alibaba,Documents involving confidentiality will be signed, such as the "Employee Disciplinary System", "Alibaba Group Data Security Specification" and "Confidentiality and Competitiveness Restriction Agreement", and a series of confidentiality training will be required in the later period.
In the new version of "Employee Discipline System" released by Alibaba in 2016, "serious violation of 's confidentiality obligations " is a type of violation. According to the regulations, companies classify "any non-public information" as confidential information, and employees who leak or disseminate confidential information will be dismissed regardless of whether or what they have caused.
And companies have a lot of means to find leakers. Every company’s internal network information screenshots will leave a watermark, and the company’s router can check which websites and mobile applications employees have logged on, and the employee’s browsing traces will be recorded.
For example, on Alibaba’s intranet, not only the screenshots will be watermarked with the employee’s name and job number, but also a layer of things that cannot be recognized by the naked eye will be added to the employee’s access interface, which is difficult to eradicate. The front-end engineer can track the employee after parsing. Some employees even claimed that the background system had already recorded the screenshot at the moment the screenshot was taken.
Real cases have appeared frequently. According to AI Finance News, an employee of a major Internet company was dismissed because he broke the news about internal personnel changes to the media. The company found him because he had visited the background information of the executives involved.
A typical case is that an employee of an Internet company in Shanghai died suddenly due to overtime work. A colleague took a picture of an ambulance and posted anonymously on the pulse of “seeing a colleague being carried into an ambulance”.Finally, the company found the employee who broke the news by checking the front desk monitoring method and fired them.
However, compared to tracking down the “leakers” who speak online, daily business information leakage is easier to be investigated.
Lin Li has worked in a large technology company in Yizhuang, Beijing for 2 years, mainly engaged in technology research and development. Her company has strict confidentiality regulations for projects and technologies, so she generally does not take her work home, and only does it in the company.
At work, she only uses the company’s computer and intranet. The USB port of the USB flash drive on the computer cannot be used. All work files cannot be stored privately, nor can they be photographed or uploaded. When Lin Li and his colleagues have some technical exchanges, they can only use an internal teleconference platform.
As for the consequences of the leak, she had heard about it a long time ago: an employee of a branch of the group was directly expelled for taking a photo of the instrument.
In 2020, NetEase Hangzhou a former employee from the headquarters copied a large amount of company information before leaving. Therefore, at the end of the year, all employees of the group received a ban on company information in their mailboxes: it is strictly forbidden to transmit company information, emails, etc., if employees need to copy company information, they must go through the approval of the company's supervisor.
competes for the right of interpretationRegardless of whether the information is sensitive or not, companies do not want internal information to be leaked to the outside, so as to formulate strict confidentiality rules as much as possible. But sometimes being too tight can make employees and the company fall into a deeper antagonism.
Recently, Zhang Xiaoting, a designer from Shanghai Hema Company, was browsing a file in and clicked to download it. Because the file was downloaded to the employee's personal mobile phone, the company believed that Zhang Xiaoting had violated the confidentiality obligation and caused a huge risk of the company's business secret disclosure, and expelled her.
Zhang Xiaoting refused, she chose to sue the company. She opened the Dingding software and demonstrated in court: Some files do need to be clicked to preview, that is, saved in the employee's mobile phone to view. In court, the company was unable to provide any reasonable explanation for this, and the company’s confidentiality obligations did not clearly stipulate the scope of documents that need to be kept confidential. Zhang Xiaoting won and received 140,000 yuan in compensation.
Regarding the "leakage", Jianghua and the company have been entangled for more than a year. In 2018, he worked as a department manager for a technology company in Guangzhou. In his opinion, it is normal to provide quotations when purchasing equipment for customers. So he attached the quotation information to the work email so that relevant personnel can see it. But later, the company expelled Jianghua for "serious violation of labor discipline". After
applied for labor arbitration in Jianghua and received compensation of more than 470,000 yuan, the company still claimed that Jianghua’s offer of quotations was a “serious leak” and initiated two lawsuits. In 2019, the court determined that Jianghua’s actions were not “disclosure”: the supplier’s quotation was not within the scope of the company’s clear confidentiality of information, and the company did not take corresponding confidentiality measures. Jianghua, as a non-project leader, can obtain the quotation and explain the quotation information It is not strictly confidential.
But even if there are examples of employees winning the case,When companies define whether employees are leaking secrets, they can also use many clauses, including specific and express provisions, as well as general principles and clauses. And how to put a certain behavior of an employee into these rules, the right to interpret more belongs to the enterprise.
A legal officer of a cultural communication company in Beijing told AI Finance and Economics that companies have a natural dominance in formulating these rules, which is usually a one-way release to employees after the company takes the lead in formulating and fulfilling certain democratic procedures. Can.
"Enterprises should be more cautious when determining whether employees are leaking secrets and cannot dismiss employees casually." Lawyer Liu Siyao, who serves as the legal counsel of a car company, told AI Finance and Economics that companies must first look at whether the leaked information is clearly stipulated. The information to be kept secret depends on the fact that you have not done enough to keep confidentiality measures.
The accusation of leaking trade secrets is a great deterrent for ordinary people. A lawyer who has represented a large factory in leaking cases told AI Finance and Economics that many cases involving trade secrets may not necessarily enter the litigation process. , Often a lawyer’s letter can effectively solve a large part of the matter, which is enough to dispel the idea of confrontation with the company.
This kind of deterrence and lethality also determines that when the interpretation power of leaks is handed over to the law from the enterprise, the legal ruling needs to be more cautious. Liu Siyao said, "The determination of trade secrets should be stricter. In current judicial practice, trade secrets and company secrets are often confused."
In the judgment, it was specifically emphasized that although some confidentiality agreements are not illegal, they are too strict for workers.
Of course,Companies and bosses often operate in reverse, deliberately leaking so-called secrets.
In the recently hit workplace drama " Ideal City", the scene of "Donglin being expelled" caused a wave of discussion. Tiancheng won a bid and the other company Tianke refused to accept it. It is said that Tiancheng arranged for an insider to steal bid data from Tianke. For a while, Tianke was busy investigating the insider and Tiancheng was busy looking for informers. The two companies began to quarrel with each other because of "disclosure." In the end, the audience knew that everything was a farce directed and performed by Tianke’s economist Xia Ming in order to delay the audit. The “leaked” data was deliberately let Tiancheng employees see it.
The general manager of Tianke Company questioned the rival Tiancheng Company for stealing his own data after the bidding. Photo/Screenshot of "Ideal City".
This scene has also been staged in reality. In 2018, when Mobike negotiated the acquisition with Meituan, the investors and the company's management behind them will frequently report to the media in favor of their own information, in order to put pressure on the other side.
There are many similar operations in daily life. "Some bosses send internal letters in the group for the employees to read. Some companies send internal emails with beautiful layouts, which are for the media." A person who has worked in a number of Internet companies told AI Finance and Economics. Summarize.
"legitimate" revelations
The enterprise hopes to build a high wall,Avoid the outflow of information and improve the efficiency of internal autonomous operation, but there are some exceptions. Whether they should also be kept secret is still a controversial topic.
Mr. Tang has worked at Foxconn for more than ten years. During his tenure, he used his office computer to access the company’s public disk and sent documents such as the company’s recruitment status, number of people, and overtime to a WeChat account via QQ mailbox. Buddy. In August 2019, news about Foxconn’s illegal employment was circulated on the website: “Employees’ wages have been cut and they rely heavily on vocational school interns with a minimum age of 16 years old. Some of them are forced to work overtime.” The information spread, a large number of employees from The factory left, and the company adjusted its salary accordingly.
One month later, the company took Tang to court, believing that the salary adjustment caused the company’s official labor costs to lose more than 1.4 million yuan, and that Tang had leaked trade secrets and brought the company Serious negative effects. Tang was finally sentenced to two years in prison and a fine of 10,000 yuan.
This later period of punishment also caused controversy and discussion in the legal profession. "Simply put, it means that employees are dissatisfied with the company, and then disclose the company's illegal employment. The company is outraged by the employee's disclosure of information, and finally uses criminal means to crack down on sanctions." Lawyer Liu Siyao believes that the information disclosed by Tang is not commercial. The secret is only some internal employment management information, which can at best provide the company with a reference basis for employment, and has no commercial transaction value. And even if it is a trade secret, it should be deemed invalid. Guangdong Province has made a clear provision on this: "Technical secrets that harm the public interests of society and violate social morals are not protected by the Guangdong Provincial Technical Secrets Protection Regulations."
Beijing Qianqian Law Firm Lu Yu also stated that if there are suspected violations of laws or ethics within the company, employees should not assume confidentiality obligations, but should report, expose and condemn.
Similar incidents are not uncommon. Three years ago, a photography company where Huang Kai worked forced employees to encourage relatives and friends to book travel packages, and use relatives and friends to single-check performance, and everyone had to reach a designated goal. , Otherwise the fine is 300 to 500 yuan. Sales, editing, pre-photographing, makeup, post-digitalists, network management and even security have to bear indicators. Everyone is arranged to go to the e-commerce website to check orders every day.
Huang Kaihe Colleagues are angry at this kind of mandatory in-app purchase and feel that it is very unfair. "The company can't achieve performance, why should employees pay for it? "They exposed the matter to the outside world. In the report at the time, there was also a chat record in the work group about asking employees to pay 300 yuan in bets. But soon, the company issued two consecutive statements denying it, and Huang Kai was also caught by the company. Expelled on the grounds of "leaking secrets."
"It is an extreme corporate culture to be convicted of words in the workplace. "Henan Yulong Law Firm Fu Jian lawyer said to the AI Finance and Economics Agency that the national law stipulates that citizens have the right to free speech. On the basis of ensuring the protection of company business secrets, free speech can spur collective progress and stimulate collective vitality. Promote collective progress.
Exposing a company scandal is regarded by some as an infringement of the company’s interests, but when an incident is included in the public agenda, its nature has changed. "For an emergency, we It is difficult to tell the authenticity from the fake one at a time, which often requires multiple parties with different opinions to express their opinions separately. "Attorney Lu Yu said that only the two or more parties in conflicting views can fully express and provide evidence to help advance legal facts and obtain the truth.
One has worked for Tencent for more than a dozen. The veteran employee of 20 years expressed his complaint to the AI Finance and Economics Agency.It is very difficult for him to understand why some people enjoy high salaries and still tell the outside world that the company is not good. Even in his opinion, he can choose to leave if he feels that the company is not good.
However, more people believe that the operation of large factories also requires media supervision. Especially when things that infringe on the interests of employees happen, everything is handled by internal managers, which is often difficult to resolve reasonably.
This is also the point of dispute caused by the Ali incident. "This kind of intranet information is not a trade secret, it belongs to the scope of internal rules and regulations. Ali CEO's remarks on the intranet have also been exposed. I don't know if the exposed employees have been fired? If it's just a selective expulsion, then There is a problem.” Lawyer Lu Yu believes that if an Ali employee is really expelled for spreading intranet information, it is an improper thing. “Employees can apply for labor arbitration, and the probability of winning is relatively high.”
Now, three years after being fired from the company, Huang Kai has entered a new life track. Looking back now, he never regretted his choice, nor did he regret that he and his colleagues exposed the company's injustice to the outside world, "I just did what I should have done at the time."
Picture/Screenshot of "Ideal City".
(the characters in the text are pseudonyms except for Fu Jian, Lu Yu, and Chen Siyao)
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