- Starbucks ordered to pay $25m to ex-employee in racial discrimination case BBC
- Starbucks says it fired her for an ‘absence of leadership.’ She says it was because of her race. A jury returned a $25.6 million verdict in her favor CNN
- White Starbucks manager wins $25M suit claiming she was fired over her race after arrest of black men New York Post
- Ex-Starbucks manager awarded $25 million in discrimination lawsuit filed in aftermath of incident at Philly store PhillyVoice.com
- Starbucks ordered to pay $25.6M to manager who says she was fired for being white after viral Philly arrests The Philadelphia Inquirer
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: ExEmployee
Facebook drains users’ cellphone batteries intentionally says ex-employee
A long-standing rumor suggests that the Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps drain the battery on cellphones that have the apps installed. If you believe former Facebook employee George Hayward, a data scientist, Facebook can secretly drain the battery on its users’ cellphones on purpose. As reported by The New York Post, there is actually a name for what it is that Facebook is doing, It is called “negative testing” and it allows tech companies to secretly run down the batteries on someone’s phone in order to test features on an app or to see how an image might load.
Hayward was fired by Facebook parent Meta for refusing to participate in negative testing. “I said to the manager, ‘This can harm somebody,’ and she said by harming a few we can help the greater masses. Any data scientist worth his or her salt will know, Don’t hurt people,” he told the Post.
Hayward was axed by Meta in November and originally filed a lawsuit against the company in Manhattan Federal Court. The 33-year-old worked for Meta’s Facebook Messenger app which delivers text, phone calls, and video calls between users. In the suit, Hayward’s attorney, Dan Kaiser, pointed out that draining users’ smartphone batteries puts people at risk especially “in circumstances where they need to communicate with others, including but not limited to police or other rescue workers.”
Social media apps like Facebook Messenger can intentionally drain the batteries powering users’ smartphones
The suit had to be withdrawn because Meta’s terms of employment forced Hayward to argue his case in arbitration. Kaiser says that most people have no idea that Facebook and other social media companies can drain your battery intentionally. Commenting on the practice of negative testing, the lawyer added, “It’s clearly illegal. It’s enraging that my phone, that the battery can be manipulated by anyone.”
Originally hired in 2019, Hayward was receiving a six-figure annual paycheck from Meta. But when it came to the company’s request to perform the negative testing, Hayward said, “I refused to do this test. It turns out if you tell your boss, ‘No, that’s illegal,’ it doesn’t go over very well.”
At one point during his employment at Meta, the company handed Hayward an internal training document titled “How to run thoughtful negative tests.” The document included examples of how to run such tests. After reading the document, Hayward said that it appeared to him that Facebook had used negative testing before. He added, “I have never seen a more horrible document in my career.”
Ex-Employee Punches Holes In Elon Musk’s Latest Twitter Theory
ELon Musk, who acquired Twitter last month, suggested the platform was the biggest source of referrals.
New Delhi:
Elon Musk’s latest claim that Twitter is the massive driver of clicks to other websites on the internet has been widely opposed and mocked by several users, including a former employee of the social media company.
Mr Musk, who acquired Twitter last month, suggested the platform was the biggest source of referrals.
“Twitter drives a massive number of clicks to other websites/apps. Biggest click driver on the Internet by far,” he said in response to an exchange indicating how Twitter “drives so few clicks”.
Twitter drives a massive number of clicks to other websites/apps. Biggest click driver on the Internet by far.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2022
Claire Diaz-Ortiz, a former Twitter employee, rubbished the billionaire’s claim as “100 per cent false”.
“Lies. I worked at Twitter 5 yrs + wrote 2 books on social media mktg. this is 100% FALSE & Twitter knows it. We never sold it on clicks, bc it is much lower on traffic than FB, LI, etc. Twitter has other key strengths. (& mrkting is way more than clicks;) (sic),” she tweeted.
lies. i worked @twitter 5 yrs + wrote 2 books on social media mktg. this is 💯 FALSE & @twitter knows it. we never sold it on clicks, bc it is much lower on traffic than FB, LI, etc. twitter has other key strengths. (& mrkting is way more than clicks;) https://t.co/ie3ZZT3q7E
— Claire Díaz-Ortiz (@Claire) November 13, 2022
Another user, Tom Coates -a product developer – dismissed Mr Musk’s statement as “embarrassingly wrong”.
Here’s just the list for social media from Statcounter for example. This is *just* social media sites. Twitter isn’t even 10% of them! pic.twitter.com/W1RWkUNTL8
— Tom Coates (@tomcoates) November 13, 2022
“100% wrong. Embarrassingly wrong. I mean even if you ignore the search engines it’s wrong. I can feel your ad execs and partnerships people (if there are any left) shrivelling up the more you type,” he wrote on Twitter.
He even shared a study which showed that at 74.1 per cent, Facebook was far and away the leading generator of traffic to other websites, much ahead as compared to Twitter’s 7.73 per cent.
Elon Musk, who has been looking for ways to make Twitter profitable, on Thursday raised the possibility of the social media platform going bankrupt, two weeks after buying it for $44 billion.
He also warned that Twitter would not be able to “survive the upcoming economic downturn” if it fails to boost subscription revenue to offset falling advertising income, as per reports/
After taking over on October 27, Mr Musk moved to clean house and has said the company was losing more than $4 million a day, largely because advertisers started fleeing once he took over.
Twitter has $13 billion in debt after the deal and faces interest payments totaling close to $1.2 billion in the next 12 months. The payments exceed Twitter’s most recently disclosed cash flow, which amounted to $1.1 billion as of the end of June.
He also began charging $8 a month for the Twitter Blue service which will include a blue check verification before pausing it on Friday. It will probably “come back end of next week”, he said today.
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Ghislaine Maxwell Brought Strict Rules to Epstein Home, Ex-Employee Says
After Ghislaine Maxwell took up residence in Jeffrey Epstein’s Palm Beach, Fla., mansion, the rules of the house became strict, a former employee of Mr. Epstein’s said on Thursday: See nothing. Hear nothing. Do not look him in the eye.
Testifying on the fourth day of Ms. Maxwell’s sex-trafficking trial, the former employee, Juan Alessi, who worked at the estate from around 1990 to 2002, said he had a “cordial” relationship with Mr. Epstein. But after Ms. Maxwell arrived in the early 1990s, he said, the dynamic changed.
Mr. Alessi said that Ms. Maxwell instructed him on how to speak to Mr. Epstein: “Mr. Epstein doesn’t like to be looked at in his eyes,” Mr. Alessi recalled Ms. Maxwell telling him. “‘Never look at his eyes, look in another part of the room and answer him.’”
The trial, which began on Monday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, is seen by many of his accusers and others as the trial Mr. Epstein never had, and prosecutors have sought to show that Ms. Maxwell, 59, played a pivotal role in her longtime companion’s sexual abuse of teenage girls.
Mr. Epstein, 66, was charged in 2019 with trafficking dozens of girls, some as young as 14, and engaging in sex acts with them. He was arrested in 2019, and killed himself a little more than a month later in a Manhattan jail cell.
Prosecutors have accused Ms. Maxwell of helping Mr. Epstein recruit his victims. She faces six charges, including sex trafficking, enticing and transporting minors for illegal sex act and three conspiracy counts.
On Thursday, prosecutors called an expert witness who testified about the concept of “grooming,” a technique that predators use to draw in their victims. Later in the day, Mr. Alessi took the stand and provided a rare glimpse of Mr. Epstein’s private life.
Mr. Alessi, 71, testified that he had seen two girls whom he believed to be underage at the mansion, including one, known only as Jane, who has already testified at the trial as a government witness. He said that Mr. Epstein’s employees were under strict orders about how to dress and about how they should address Mr. Epstein, Ms. Maxwell and their guests.
Prosecutors introduced into evidence excerpts from a 58-page booklet titled “Household Manual” that Mr. Alessi said dictated the rules at Mr. Epstein’s home.
“Remember that you see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing except to answer a question direct to you,” one section of the booklet read. “Respect their privacy.”
Mr. Alessi testified that he had taken the instructions as “a kind of warning.”
In her testimony, Jane said she had met Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell in 1994, and she described Ms. Maxwell as acting like an “older sister” before she joined in the sexual abuse.
Mr. Alessi testified that he had first met Jane in 1994, and he recalled the first time she visited the estate with her mother.
“I don’t know exactly how old she was but she appeared to be young,” Mr. Alessi said. “I would say 14, 15.” (Earlier this week, Jane testified that she was 14 when she met Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, and that she was taken to Mr. Epstein’s house by a chauffeur, whom she remembered as a “sweet Latin-American man.” Mr. Alessi is from Ecuador.)
Understand the Ghislaine Maxwell Trial
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An Epstein confidant. Ghislaine Maxwell, the daughter of a British media mogul and once a fixture in New York’s social scene, was a longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself after his arrest on sex trafficking charges in 2019.
Mr. Alessi said either Mr. Epstein or Ms. Maxwell instructed him to pick Jane up from her home; he said he picked her up from school once. He described her as a “strikingly beautiful girl” who was “very pleasant.”
Mr. Alessi identified the second girl who appeared to be underage as Virginia Roberts. Ms. Roberts, who is now known as Virginia Roberts Giuffre, is one of Mr. Epstein’s most prominent accusers. She is not believed to be one of the four victims on whom the charges against Ms. Maxwell are based, and she is not expected to testify at the trial.
Mr. Alessi said he met Ms. Giuffre at Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald J. Trump’s South Florida club, on a day when Ms. Maxwell was visiting luxury spas in Palm Beach County. He said that Ms. Maxwell had asked him to stop the car when she saw Ms. Roberts.
By that afternoon, Mr. Alessi said, Ms. Roberts was at Mr. Epstein’s Palm Beach estate, and that she had returned often. Asked whether he knew where the girls went or what they did while they were at Mr. Epstein’s home, he said he did not.
“It was not my job to see where they were,” Mr. Alessi said.
But his job, he testified, did lead him to see other things. One of his tasks was to clean Mr. Epstein’s massage table, and Mr. Alessi noted that by the end of his employment, Mr. Epstein was receiving three massages a day. In her testimony, Jane said she was often asked to perform sexualized massages on Mr. Epstein as part of her sexual abuse.
Cleaning up after one such session in 1995, Mr. Alessi said he found a large sex toy — and then saw it again “at least four or five times” in the course of his work.
He said he did what he had been told to do: return it to a wicker basket as big as a garbage can that was filled with other paraphernalia. The basket, he said, was in Ms. Maxwell’s bathroom.