>The latest claim comes after Rippling alleged earlier this year that a staff member had been spying on behalf of Deel. The employee locked themselves into a bathroom and smashed their phone with an axe when confronted with allegations, according to their own testimony.

I admire their enthusiasm!

>posed as a customer and accessed details of Deel’s products and business practices over the course of six months.

I've never seen anyone pretend to be a customer, BUT I've been given customer presentations made by sort of similar software in the past just to get a feel for what is out there. I assume that competitors possibly have recordings of presentations I've made ... once you show customers I assume the data is out in the wild.

The rest of the spying does seem, excessive but when you have roles like “competitive intelligence manager” I gotta think they almost certainly go overboard.

related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43388133