What would the ethical thing to do be? Most people, especially housekeepers, can't just quit a well paying job without first making preparation for their next steps. If your employer is committing crimes and possibly implicating you in them, you might want to stick around to make sure that you have enough evidence to take them to court. Especially if they're a lot richer than you and have much better lawyers.
Wong - My employee isn't paying me correctly. I better start collecting private information about him and his colleagues, without his knowledge, to use in a future lawsuit.
Also keep in mind the data she is collecting has nothing to do with her complaints about wage etc.
So your claim is that if one person is employed by another, they're obligated to always act with their best interests at heart, even if the employer doesn't do the same for the employee?
Levandowski didn't purchase her ears, memory, and voice. Just her labor for some relatively low wage however many hours per week.
I'm sure in the end he'll purchase them, but at a much steeper cost than if he had just paid for them up front.
I think you are obligated to stop a crime that is being committed.
Imagine this is a typical company/employee relationship. Your boss isn't paying you correctly, instead of bringing it up with him (or HR, or state labor group) and resolving it you begin to collect information that is unrelated to your issue at hand (pay). You notice that your boss is selling trade secrets and paying off competitors. Instead of telling someone (at Waymo, Uber, Telsa, the police etc), you continue to collect information about your boss, including his sex toys in his closet and use that information against him to resolve your unrelated HR complaint. This would not go over well in a traditional employee relationship, let alone a nanny type situation.
Maybe nothing is illegal there, but it's definitely unethical. I could be swayed on her tactics if the info she collected was things like "he also doesn't pay his gardener and housekeeper" but the fact that she hung around so that she could get the license plates of people showing up to his door is incredible unethical. It doesn't make what he did right, but she acted in a totally inappropriate manner.
The only information we both have on this is a TechCrunch article. So they've obviously just glanced the most salacious details and published a quick story. It's impossible, without reading the complaint, for us to know what is relevant.
I'll give you that, from the article, his sex toys seem irrelevant. However, if they're mentioned in the complaint, I suspect it might have something to do with a hostile work environment or sexual harassment. But that's just me speculating.
Wouldn't it be blackmail if she didn't go to the courts and tried to demand money in exchange for not reporting him to the court, which she is now doing?
You see crimes being committed and instead of calling the authorities, you continue to collect data (license plate numbers, phone calls, conversations).
It might have only become clear to her at a later point that it's actually criminal rather than just unethical - if she was able to tell from the beginning it is illegal, she would probably be a lawyer or a paralegal, rather than a nanny.
I don't think you copy down the license plates of cars in the driveway just because. In my opinion, she knew exactly what she was doing and what this information could mean to other people. I think this is straight up blackmail.