Hasta La Gadget!

Remember the name Max Schrems. He’s a European David firing his slingshot at the modern-day Goliath you know as Facebook. Last August, the Austrian law student and privacy advocate filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, claiming the company’s privacy policy violates European Union (EU) law.

Now, as part of that investigation, the European Commission has just admitted to the Court of Justice (CJEU) that it could not “ensure” privacy for the personal information of its citizens or for data transfers sent outside the union. In other words, Europeans who use Facebook and other U.S. Internet companies, which enable the U.S. government to access user data for law enforcement, espionage, and anti-terror purposes, do so at their own risk. How do you think the U.S. feels about that?

All of this emanates from Europe’s long history of supporting and protecting the online privacy rights of its citizenry. Case and point, look at its reaction to Google. Numerous European countries have filed lawsuits and levied fines against Google for privacy violations. The EU has threatened to declare Google a monopoly. And just last year, Google lost a European decision that forced it to remove information on individuals from search engines when requested by that individual.

Did you know the EU used to not allow its citizenry to send personal data outside of Europe? It’s a true story. In 2000 however, the European Commission passed a Safe Harbor directive, a voluntary framework that allowed personal information of Europeans to be sent to the United States as long as the United States maintained adequate levels of data privacy protection.
The European Commission’s admission this week calls into question the whole Safe Harbor directive it helped create. The EU Parliament has said as much with its multiple calls for the Safe Harbor agreement to be suspended. The European Department of Privacy Supervisor similarly requested that the United States take responsibility by improving its privacy protection.

To those who laughed at Schrems’ lawsuit, be forewarned that Schrems has a long history of success against Facebook. He was the first European to request Facebook disclose any information the social network had on him. That request led to his receiving more than 1,000 pages of content. And In 2012, he made Facebook retire its photo-tagging suggestion feature after successfully arguing that it violated people’s privacy. That’s why in part he was featured in the 2013 award-winning documentary film by Cullen Hoback; Terms and Conditions May Apply.

Schrems’ lawsuit has received very little coverage in the United States, mainly because it only indirectly involves us and secondly because Facebook has gone silent on the whole topic, in hopes that by ignoring the claim, it could show the claim lacks merit. In the rest of the world however, this story has become much bigger news. How big? When Schrems filed his lawsuit, he offered any Facebook user outside the U.S. and Canada the opportunity to join. Within days of his filing, Schrems found himself with requests from close to 7,000 Facebook users per day from more than 100 countries. At peak times, someone joined Schrems’ suit every six seconds. Not bad for a day’s work.

Schrems has since locked the number of backers at 25,000, which he reached many months ago. Users can still register as interested parties however, should the suit expand. In the meantime, Schrems has lined up government representatives from Austria, Belgium, Poland, and Ireland on his behalf.

Schrems quest for user privacy reiterates the power that we as law-abiding citizens have to express our right to privacy. It has to be maintained as a natural right, plain and simple. It makes us who we are and gives us the freedom of thought and expression. It’s not an entitlement issue nor is it another oppressive cog in our class struggle. It’s a natural born right. This is why we are seeing a revolution by people in support of their rights and privacy supporting apps such as MeWe, DuckDuckGo, and Wickr.

So what now? The Advocate General of the European Court of Justice will give his opinion on June 24th. Where the suit goes from there, who knows? What we do know however, is that the rock fired by Schrems at Facebook, although not a direct hit between the eyes, could still prove a painful blow to the social media giant and a decisive victory for privacy advocates.

Balancing work and family while trying to climb up the corporate ladder is kind of like the old carnival trick where the performer keeps plates spinning delicately atop long, narrow sticks.

In order to keep the plates from falling and breaking, the carnival worker becomes a part of a never-ending cycle of frantic plate management.

Throw being a single parent into the balancing act of trying to have a home life when you’re tethered to your cell phone or working late but still trying to be home for dinner and you might as well plan on buying a lot of new plates.

Long before I occupied the corner office, there was a time when I was a single dad to my two children and an up-and-coming executive for a large corporation. When the demands of being a single parent required me to miss a day or two at the office, I could feel my superiors pondering the age-old question: “Is Gabriel a parent or a corporate executive first?” The answer of course, was both.

Being good at one made me better at the other.

Forward-thinking executives and companies understand that for an employee to be fully engaged, they need to feel things are secure at home just as they know that for an employee to feel things are secure at home, they need to feel secure at work. The two are inextricably linked.

Employers are beginning to see the light and rather than making employees choose between project deadlines and taking care of their kids after school, we are helping them to keep those plates all spinning in the air at the same time.

One of the ways we’re doing this is by welcoming kids into the workplace.

As a CEO who has moved my company in this direction, I can tell you that employee retention is up, productivity is up, office morale is up and yes, profits are way up. That said, the experience of this transition has given me some key insight for anyone else considering this move.

1. HAVE GUIDELINES
You can’t have a free-for-all. You need guidelines. Will children be welcome every day or just during school breaks and holidays? What times will they be allowed in the office? Are all ages welcome? What process will you use to keep track of how many children are in the office in the event of a forced evacuation, like a gas leak, fire, or killer clowns from outer space?

By making these decisions ahead of time, you provide structure and limits as well as send a subliminal message to your employees the management team has thought long and hard about how best to make this work.

2. BE CONSISTENT
If you’re going to let kids in the office, enforce the rules evenly. Everyone’s child is equally important and the rules have to be applied to everyone. In other words, there should be no special treatment for your kids or the kids of your favorite employees.

3. HAVE A PLACE SET ASIDE FOR KIDS
Is there an old storage room that isn’t being used or that can be emptied out where you can hook up a TV? Is there an open space in the office where kids can be kids? Maybe there are some empty desks children can play video games at, or the older ones can do homework.

Find a space for the children to be, and you’ll find that more often than not they will stay in that general area and not really be much of a disruption to the flow of the office.

4. DON’T CRY OVER SPILLED MILK
This I mean literally.

Kids are going to be kids. There will be spilled milk and stuff will get knocked over. Unless your office is the antiquities basement at the Smithsonian, this is not the end of the world. Don’t make it out to be.

By right-sizing your response, children will respect you and your team and your employees will too. Besides, there has never been a parent who has ever reacted well to another adult reprimanding their children.

Let us be the generation of CEOs who stop asking the question of where an employee’s priorities rest and accept that as we ask our employees to do more and more, that it’s entirely reasonable to provide an environment in which they can.

Recycling is not just a nice thing that hippies do anymore. Recycling is a business—a massive one whose wheels are greased by money, money, and more money. Nowhere is this more apparent right now than in the recycled plastic market, where prices have plunged 50 percent in just six months.

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