Apple, Google, HP and other tech giants again refuse to release workplace diversity data

Google, Apple and other tech titans continue to stonewall questions on the diversity of their workforce, five years after the San Jose Mercury News kicked off a quest to find out the racial makeup of the workforce at the country's most important technology companies.

CNN Money, which began its own investigation in 2011, reported that its attempts to obtain the data -- which companies with more than 100 employees must provide to the federal government annually -- from 20 prominent tech firms in the U.S. have hit the same roadblocks. Of the 20, only Intel, Dell and Ingram Micro voluntarily released the data. Ten companies were able to block the release of the data from the U.S. Department of Labor because they are not federal contractors: Facebook, LinkedIn, Netflix, Twitter, Yelp, Zynga, Amazon, Groupon, Hulu and LivingSocial. Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), IBM and Microsoft successfully appealed to the Labor Department to keep their information private, claiming that public release of the data would cause "competitive harm." Cisco and eBay data was released through the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, filing, providing the news organization with information from five of the 20 companies it originally contacted.