With the whole of Italy’s 60 million population in lockdown and other countries taking drastic measures to control the coronavirus outbreak, the tech-giant companies are now asking their employees to work remotely.

Google

Due to fears of COVID-19 spreading through large numbers of staff, Google had already announced last week that it was temporarily closing its office in Dublin and asking the 8,000 employees to work from home.  Google has more than 70 offices in 50 countries and back at the end of January, Google also temporarily closed its offices in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan when the outbreak was still mainly based in China.

Amazon

Amazon, which restricted all nonessential travel in the U.S for employees as of last month has, after an employee tested positive for coronavirus, asked workers from its Seattle and Bellevue, Washington, offices to work from home until the end of the month.

Facebook

In addition to cancelling its annual developer conference which was due to be held on May 5 and 6 in San Jose, California (which attracted 5,000 people last year), Facebook has closed its Seattle office and asked all 5,000 of the office’s employees to work from home until the end of the month. Facebook has also closed its three London offices after an employee was diagnosed with COVID-19 and all 3,000 employees from those offices have been asked to work from home.

Slack

After an employee of Slack returned from travel and was suspected to have contracted COVID-19 (which turned out not to be the case), Slack closed its offices in San Francisco at the end of last week and a deep clean of the premises took place at the weekend.  Meanwhile, employees were encouraged to work from home.

Others

Microsoft has advised its Seattle and San Francisco employees that they can work from home until March 25th, Twitter has encouraged its employees to work from home, and Apple CEO Tim Cook has encouraged employees at several global offices to “work remotely from March 9th to 13th”.

One piece of positive news for Apple, however, is that all but four of Apple’s stores in mainland China, which is a vital market for Apple, have now reopened after being closed there during the main coronavirus outbreak.

Musk Sceptical

Some scepticism about closures and reactions to the coronavirus outbreak has been expressed by Elon Musk who tweeted that the “coronavirus panic is dumb”, a tweet that was liked by around 2 million people.

Pay

In the UK last week, prime minister Boris Johnson announced in parliament that new rules will mean that statutory sick pay (SSP) will come into force on the first day of absence in order to make those who feel they may have the virus and want to self-isolate, by staying at home rather than coming into the office and potentially infecting others.

Tech Industry, Work From Home

On the plus side, the nature of many tech industry jobs means that working from home is perhaps more possible than for many other industries, and for the UK as a whole, a 2019 CIPD Job Quality Index survey reported that 54% of the UK’s workforce works flexibly.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

For those businesses that can’t easily allow employees to work home e.g. manufacturing, bricks and mortar retail, construction, events and entertainment, transport and logistics etc, the threat of a shutdown of work for what could be an unspecified period creates a real threat to the life of the business. The situation also presents a threat to many small businesses, sole traders, and self-employed people who may not have resources to last-out ‘lockdowns’, self-isolating, disruptions and complications caused by the spread of the coronavirus.

For companies that are forced to close offices, they now need to make sure that relevant staff can access company systems and intranets remotely, and that they have VPNs installed.

This situation is also a reminder of how business continuity planning and disaster recovery plans should have disease epidemic and pandemic scenarios built-in to them for the future, and this situation is likely to expose what work needs to be done by many companies in this areas of planning.

Six years after the personal data of 87 million users was harvested and later shared without user consent with Cambridge Analytica, Australia’s privacy watchdog is suing Facebook for an incredible £266bn over the harvested data of its citizens.

What Happened?

From March 2014 to 2015 the ‘This Is Your Digital Life’ app, created by British academic, Aleksander Kogan and downloaded by 270,000 people which then provided access to their own and their friends’ personal data too, was able to harvest data from Facebook.

The harvested data was then shared with (sold to) data analytics company Cambridge Analytica, in order to build a software program that could predict and use personalised political adverts (political profiling) to influence choices at the ballot box in the last U.S. election, and for the Leave campaign in the UK Brexit referendum.

Australia

The lawsuit, brought by the Australian Information Commissioner against Facebook Inc alleges that, through the app, the personal and sensitive information of 311,127 Australian Facebook Users (Affected Australian Individuals) was disclosed and their privacy was interfered with.  Also, the lawsuit alleges that Facebook did not adequately inform those Australians of the manner in which their personal information would be disclosed, or that it could be disclosed to an app installed by a friend, but not installed by that individual.  Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges that Facebook failed to take reasonable steps to protect those individuals’ personal information from unauthorised disclosure.

In the lawsuit, the Australian Information Commissioner, therefore, alleges that the Australian Privacy Principle (APP) 6 has been breached (disclosing personal information for a purpose other than that for which it was collected), as has APP 11 (failing to take reasonable steps to protect the personal information from unauthorised disclosure).  Also, the Australian Information Commissioner alleges that these breaches are in contravention of section 13G of the Privacy Act 1988.

£266 Billion!

The massive potential fine of £266 billion has been arrived at by multiplying the maximum of $1,700,000 (£870,000) for each contravention of the Privacy Act by the 311,127 Australian Facebook Users (Affected Australian Individuals).

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Back in July 2018, 16 months after the UK Information Commissioners Office (ICO) began its investigation into the Facebook’s sharing the personal details of users with political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, the UK’s ICO announced that Facebook would be fined £500,000 for data breaches.  This Australian lawsuit, should it not go Facebook’s way, represents another in a series of such lawsuits over the same scandal, but the £266 billion figure would be a massive hit and would, for example, totally dwarf the biggest settlement to date against Facebook of $5 billion to the US Federal Trade Commission over privacy matters.  To put it in even greater perspective, an eye-watering potential fine of £266 billion would make the biggest GDPR fine to date of £183 million to British Airways look insignificant.

Clearly, this is another very serious case for Facebook to focus its attention on, but the whole matter highlights just how important data security and privacy matters are now taken and how they have been included in different national laws with very serious penalties for non-compliance attached. Facebook has tried hard since the scandal to introduce and publicise many new features and aspects of its service that could help to regain the trust of users in both its platform’s safeguarding of their details and in the area of stopping fake news from being distributed via its platform.  This announcement by the Australian Information Commissioner is, therefore, likely to be an extremely painful reminder of a regrettable and period in the tech giant’s history, not to mention it being a potential threat to Facebook.

For those whose data may have been disclosed, shared and used in a way that contravened Australia’s laws, they may be pleased that their country is taking such a strong stance in protecting their interests and this may send a very powerful message to other companies that store and manage the data of Australian citizens.

A survey by ContractorCalculator has revealed that many private sector companies may be at risk of legal action through misinterpreting the new IR35 tax reforms.

What Is IR35?

The IR35 tax reform legislation, set to be introduced this April, is designed to stop tax avoidance from ‘disguised employment’, which occurs when self-employed contractors set up their own limited company to pay themselves through dividends (which are not subject to National Insurance).  IR35 will essentially mean that, from April 2020, medium-to-larger private sector organisations become responsible for determining whether the non-permanent contractors and freelancers should be taxed in the same way as permanent employees (inside IR35) or as off-payroll workers (outside IR35), based upon the work they do and how it is performed.

Also, the tax liability will transfer from the contractor to the fee-paying party i.e. the recruiter or the company that directly engages the contractor. HMRC hopes that the IR35 reforms will stop contractors from deliberately misclassifying themselves in order to reduce their employment tax liabilities.

The idea for the introduction of the legislation dates back to 1999 with Chancellor Gordon Brown and Chancellor Philip Hammond introduced IR35 for public bodies using contractors from April 2017.

National Insurance

One of the potential problem areas for private sector companies revealed by the ContractorCalculator questionnaire, answered by some 12,000 contractors, is that some may be unlawfully deducting employers’ national insurance contributions (NICs) from their contractors’ pay.  This means that they are effectively imposing double taxation on these contractors.

Given that 42% of contractors said they weren’t aware that such deductions were unlawful, the survey appears to show that although these companies have been acting unlawfully, it is likely to be because they have simply misinterpreted the new tax reforms given the complicated nature of the IR35.

Tribunal Threat

The survey also showed that 58% of survey participants are classified as ‘inside’ IR35 (taxed in the same way as permanent employees) said that they would consider taking their client to an employment tribunal because, if they have to pay the same amount of tax as a permanent employee, they feel that they should receive the same benefits as permanent employees e.g. sick pay and a pension.

Contractor Loses Case

On this subject, there was news this week that an IT contractor who had worked through his limited company Northern Light Solutions for Nationwide for several years and been treated as outside IR35 has lost an appeal to HMRC against a £70,000 tax demand whereby HMRC had argued, successfully, that he should have been categorised as inside IR35.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

When the IR35 tax reforms were first announced, many business owners thought that the reforms appeared to be very complex and that not enough had been done by the government to raise awareness of the changes and to educate businesses and contractors about the implications and responsibilities.  This survey appears to support this and shows that this lack of knowledge and awareness of IR35 by businesses could be leaving them open to the risk of legal action.  Contactors and the companies that use their services need to learn quickly about the dangers of hiring freelance workers long-term and companies that use freelancers need to conduct correct due diligence in order to ensure that the business relationship they have with them complies with IR35.

To have access to Google’s many features and services, as with other platforms, we need to give some personal information and then sign-in, but have you ever wondered just how much information Google keeps about you and your activities?

Google

This article looks as some of the many different types of personal information that Google stores, and how you can manage the situation, and reduce any potential risks that you may perceive as coming from your personal data being stored by Google.

Your Personal Data

Many of us accept that certain personal information needs to be stored privately with Google, but you may wish to know which information Google categorises as ‘public’.  To check this, login to your Google account, go to ‘Manage Your Google Account’, click on ‘Personal Info’, scroll down to ‘Choose What Others See’ and click on ‘Go to About me’.  Here you’ll be able to see which information is ‘hidden’ e.g. with a padlock icon, or ‘visible’ with an earth icon.  From here you can also click on ‘Privacy Check-up’ link so that you can manage other aspects of what information is stored about you and your Google-based activities.

‘Data and Personalisation’ Section

When you log into your Google account, go to your account page and click on the ‘Data and Personalisation’ link.  At this point, you will be able to see if your ‘Web & App Activity’, ‘Location History’ and ‘YouTube History’ are switched on or off.  If they in the ‘On’ position on tick-box control, then you can assume that Google is tracking and storing plenty of your data relating to these factors.

Web & App Activity

As the name suggests, this relates to your activity on Google sites and apps, and this also includes your location. The stated reason for collecting this information (with your consent, via the toggle control) is to give you “personalised experiences”.  Within the ‘Activity Controls’ section here you should also be able to see tick-box controls for the tracking and storing of your Chrome history and activity from sites, apps and devices that use Google services, and for including any voice and audio recordings.

You can stop Google from tracking this further by turning off the blue toggle switch in the ‘Activity Controls’ section relating to your Web & App Activity which then gives you the option to ‘pause’ this type of tracking.

If you’d like Google to automatically delete this data either every 3 or every 18 months, you can select the gear icon and choose the ‘Automatically Delete’ option and then choose which timeframe. Once this has been done Google will immediately delete current data that’s older than the timeframe specified by you.  Also, you choose to Delete activity by either Last hour, Last day, All time or a custom range.

Location History

By allowing Google to track your location history, Google can record and display information about where you’ve been with your devices, even if you haven’t been using a specific Google service at the time.

The positive aspects of Google storing this information is that you can get personalised maps and recommendations from Google based on places that you’ve visited, and if you click on the ‘Manage Activity’ link in your location history section in Google, it can be interesting to see where you’ve been on holiday and checked in with your location.  Google lists all of what it calls the ‘confirmed’ places you’ve visited (which Google gives you the option to confirm yourself) and the so-called ‘unconfirmed’ places.

The disadvantage of Google storing (and of you reviewing) this kind of information is that if it fell into the hands of criminals or those you would specifically not want to know where you are the data could be a threat damaging e.g. showing a burglar that you’re away from your home on holiday.  You may also feel personally that the information stored about your habits is a little bit too much like ‘big brother’ or borders on an infringement of your privacy.

You can stop Google from tracking this further by turning off the blue toggle switch in the ‘Activity Controls’ section relating to your Location History which then gives you the option to ‘pause’ this type of tracking.

If you’d prefer Google to automatically delete this data either every 3 or every 18 months, you can select the gear icon and choose Automatically delete Location History, then choose which timeframe. Once this has been done Google will immediately delete current data that’s older than the timeframe specified by you. You can go back over these steps and check that the visual location timeline is empty is you really want to be sure that Google has complied with your request.

Your YouTube History

Google tracks your YouTube search and watch history i.e. what videos you’ve searched for, watched and when, and this is used by Google to show videos at the top of the page when you next visit YouTube that you may be interested in based on your History.  There could, however, be several downsides to this e.g. on a shared computer, not wanting others to see which videos you have been watching, or the suggestions may not be things you are actually interested in at that point in time.

As with the other aspects of what Google stores and tracks, it’s a case of following the arrow next to ‘YouTube History’ link in your ‘Data & personalisation’ section of Google and setting your preferences from there.

Your Purchase History

CNBC research in May 2019 highlighted how Googlemail creates a (difficult to delete) page of your purchase history which it was believed was created by tracking your purchase receipt emails, and perhaps details stored in locations other than the inbox.

Google states in its accounts help section that “Your Google Account includes purchases and reservations made using Search, Maps, and your Assistant” (note that there’s now no mention of Googlemail) and according to Google, the feature is included as a way of organising things “to help you get things done”.  Getting things done, for example, means asking your Google Assistant about the shipping status of a purchase, or asking your Google Assistant to show you your flight reservations, or using Google’s search to ask questions like, “Is my flight on time?”

Deleting From Your Purchases Page

In Google’s help section here https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7673989 and in the subsection ‘delete your purchases and reservations’, Google provides instructions on how to delete them i.e. sign in to your Google account, go to the Purchases page (for which a link is provided),  view your purchase details and select ‘Remove Purchase’, and follow the on-screen deletion instructions.

Downloading Your Data

If you’d like to download the data from the Google ‘products’ you’ve used, Google lets you do this here: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en&ref_topic=7188671

Beware

Even though Google does appear to allow you to manage most aspects of what data is collected about you and your activities when signed in, there have been suggestions, reports and stories published online that may indicate that you could still be tracked by Google when signed-out.  For example, back in August 2018, An Associated Press report accused Google of recording the locations of its users via their mobile devices, even when they had requested not to be tracked by turning their “Location History” off. Also, some have suggested that cookies have been used to help track YouTube activity when you’re signed out, that Google can use information from Wi-Fi and other wireless signals near your phone to keep tracking you, and that there appear to be some contradictions between Google’s statements on certain privacy issues.

Looking Forward

For many of us, we’d like to have control of our personal data (if we had the time to check it all) and are pleased that there are now laws (e.g. GDPR) to help us to do this, but we’re also aware of the value of personal data to legitimate businesses e.g. for personalisation of services, and in marketing communications which have always been valuable in gaining, retaining, and maximising the value of customers.

Clearly, data security and privacy laws perform an important role of protection, and technology giants, as well as other companies and organisations, need to continue abiding by these laws and it is helpful to allow customers easy access to see and to personally manage what information is held about them both privately and publicly.