[thu2111]

I think you're assuming it's related to the message content, but that's not what Google are saying and it's not how corporations work in my experience. How you do something matters a great deal in any large bureaucracy. If Spiers wanted to remind people they could unionise there are communication systems that exist for people to talk to each other on their own initiative without approval, systems like email or even memegen.

Modifying the behaviour of people's web browsers isn't a channel intended for employees to push personal messages to each other and this should have been really obvious to her. She and her colleagues were trusted with a tremendous amount of power which could be readily abused (see my other comment on this thread), and the expectation was clear that it'd be used only within the bounds of what her management asked her to do, namely corporate security.

When she went outside those bounds and started using her immense technical privileges in ad-hoc ways, and (worse) making arguments like "I got a colleague to approve a code review so it was OK" she gave an extremely clear demonstration that management simply couldn't trust her. It's not about unionisation. It's about someone with the power to steal cookies from her own colleagues going rogue and deciding her own personal political priorities matter more than company policies she had agreed to follow.