On Monday, Google fired four employees who were part of a recent protest against the policy, confirms the tech giant in conversation with news agency Bloomberg. According to Google, employees have leaked data from colleagues.

The employees in question allegedly sought personal data from colleagues and shared it outside the company, which is against the rules. Google would have fired them after some warnings.

Other employees involved in the protest claim in a blog post on Medium that the company is trying to silence them. The four opposed, among other things, a Google Cloud test at border control, a censored search engine in China and the YouTube policy on hate speech. Also, a redundant employee would have been told on Friday that data leakage is not the real reason for the dismissal.

The Tech Workers Coalition, a workers’ union within the tech industry, calls the dismissal on Twitter “a draconian act”. Google would like to scare other employees.