As the ousting of Mark Hurd as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard starts to fade from the headlines, one aspect of it lingers in my mind – the Google search.
Mr Hurd was made to resign by the HP board for allegedly breaching its business conduct rules over his relationship with Jodie Fisher, a marketing contractor to HP (and former soft pornography film actress).
The New York Times notes that:
The situation was made worse after HP discovered that Mr Hurd had viewed some of Ms Fisher’s racy acting on his work computer, signaling that he was aware of her past.
Mr. Hurd has told people that he did a brief Google search of Ms. Fisher in April or May of 2009, nearly two years after she started contract work for HP.
Well, that must send a shudder through many a corporate executive. A single Google search is a pretty flimsy piece of evidence but it is, of course, within the powers of the company to search its records in this way.
HP knows the rules about what it can and cannot do in terms of surveillance very well, having been caught in the pretexting scandal earlier in Mr Hurd’s tenure.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Mr Hurd, for the reasons Joe Nocera neatly outlined in the NYT this weekend but there is something disturbing about the way in which corporations now have access to such minutiae when they choose.
Executives are often required for security reasons to use corporate networks for email and other purposes, and this grants their employers intimate knowledge of their lives.
Mr Hurd himself apparently blurred the boundary between the personal and corporate by claiming dinners with Ms Fisher on his expenses, but that does not justify everything HP did.
If a single Google search can be called in evidence, what chance does any executive have when his company wants him out?
