Whistleblowing is sometimes a lonely and difficult process. It can help to know that you are not alone.
Below are the stories of four notable whistleblowers who spoke out against discrimination, harassment, and corruption at major tech companies — from an election-altering data firm to the world’s most popular search engine. Each shares personal anecdotes, lessons learned, and advice for the next whistleblower, to foster a sense of support and help instill courage in those wishing to speak up. The stories of additional prominent whistleblowers appear in later sections of this guide.
Chris Smalls — Amazon
After more than five years as an Amazon warehouse supervisor in Staten Island, New York, Chris Smalls organized an employee walkout as COVID-19 raged through the city in the spring of 2020. The demand? Better worker safety protections in the face of a pandemic. He was promptly fired, with the e-commerce giant claiming he had violated social-distancing guidelines. But Chris knew what the real story was: employer negligence impacting thousands of frontline workers.
Leading up to the Amazon walkout, Chris knew that, to be effective, he had to get the media’s attention. “I actually worked in reverse,” he said. “We all know the media loves headlines, so I said, ‘I’m going to give them a headline.’” Chris alerted the press, and then he started planning. “We had less than 48 hours.” At first only one journalist from the New York Post took the bait, but soon news of the March 30 event was circulating on every major news outlet, as was Chris’s name. “I talked to everybody. I didn’t turn nobody down.”
By April 2020, Amazon’s internal notes describing Chris as “not smart or articulate” were shared with the media. “I was like, ‘Jeff Bezos doesn’t know who the hell I am,’” he said. “I was definitely disgusted, but it motivated me to actually start organizing.” The experience solidified Chris’s determination to expose working conditions at Amazon warehouses, and he began assisting Amazon employees at other locations in organizing walkouts of their own. “We are starting a revolution and people around the country support us,” he wrote in an open letter to Amazon CEO Bezos.
In November 2020, Chris filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon, alleging racial bias. As the case makes its way through the legal system, he continues to fight for employee protections through rallies, other events, and engagement on social media — often from his Twitter account @Shut_downAmazon.
Brittany Kaiser — Cambridge Analytica
Brittany Kaiser made global headlines in 2018, when it came to light that Cambridge Analytica had been acquiring voter data through Facebook to manipulate governmental elections around the world — including the 2016 US presidential election. Brittany, who had served as the company’s Director of Business Development for nearly three years, became a key informant in the ensuing investigations after her name was disclosed by a fellow whistleblower, Chris Wiley.
Brittany was initially hesitant to come forward, even after the media began to uncover details regarding Cambridge Analytica’s data-collection practices and her own involvement. “I wish that I could have been more blunt in the beginning, but because we had no idea where all of this was going I was a bit . . . terrified, to be honest,” she said. She hired a PR agent to act as a “gate” between her and the public. “If I would have tried to handle it all myself, I probably would have ended up with lawsuits, and I somehow have never had a filed lawsuit against me. Which is shocking.”
After leaving the company in 2018, Brittany began the Facebook campaign #OwnYourData, which called on the public to “take back” data rights — and led her to co-found the Own Your Data Foundation. In 2019, she was a main subject of the Netflix documentary The Great Hack and authored Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again.
Chelsey Glasson — Google
Chelsey Glasson, a former user experience researcher at Google, first noticed pregnancy discrimination in her workplace when her boss claimed that a woman on her team was “hard to work with when pregnant.” For more than a year, Chelsey documented and reported statements like this to the HR department — and was then subjected to discrimination herself when she became pregnant in 2019, with her boss asserting that her maternity leave would “stress the team” and “rock the boat.”
To make matters worse, the Google executive who had a hand in pushing Chelsey out of the company is also a woman and a mother. “When your abuser or your harasser is a woman, it opens the door for this increased level of gaslighting. You start to gaslight yourself,” Chelsey said.
While on leave, Chelsey wrote an internal memo detailing her decision not to return. “It was clear Google wasn’t going to take action, my mental health was deteriorating, it was a really awful situation. It just became obvious to me that in order to begin my healing journey, I had to make sure that my story was used to help other people,” she said. Once coworkers began commenting on the memo with similar stories and frustrations, this was a “trigger” for Chelsey to share it with a reporter.
In late 2019, Chelsey filed a complaint to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which offered “some additional protection in terms of being able to speak about my story externally.” She eventually filed a lawsuit against Google for “discriminatory culture and disdain for motherhood”; the case will go to court in December 2021. Chelsey also worked with Washington State Senator Karen Keiser to pass legislation extending the statute of limitations for reporting pregnancy discrimination to the Washington State Human Rights Commission.
