Super illegal in Germany, luckily. It's shocking to me how people here accept this as normal.<p>You shouldn't lose all rights just because someone is paying you any amount of money. The company does not own you. You're not a soulless resource that can be used and tossed whenever your boss pleases.
"One use case provided is that a customer service worker walks away from their computer and then a roommate grabs the machine to use its internal search tool and see what a celebrity has been buying on Amazon. But just four cases have actually been identified in which imposters accessed such data. And the result for workers of implementing the software is a constant feeling that someone is watching over them."<p>Not to backseat design (ok, to backseat design), but shouldn't it be the case that access would already be scoped to accounts relevant to active tasks, and not every one of the 300M+ active customer accounts, especially without some sort of escalation or break-glass? That rationale for this software is likely invented, right?<p>"It’d be one thing if these workers were well paid, but they’re not."<p>quick survey -- this would still be put on the "bad ways to treat your workers" list, correct?
I assume that my keystrokes are always being monitored on a company device. Obviously I'd prefer to not be monitored, but I don't really have an expectation of privacy at work on a work device.
When I was younger I used to think I wasn’t good enough to work for a FAANG company and so avoided all the unpleasant interviews with them.<p>Whilst that’s probably still true, I now also wouldn’t want to work somewhere like that if the “prize” for being accepted is to be treated like a machine or worse.<p>Being a contractor seems like a much more honest bargain. You pay me and I make something for you.<p>How I do that is my business as long as it meets the spec.
Today it is to 'combat data theft', tomorrow it will be like Amazon fufillment centers in the Call Center no time to take a potty break. Let's hope we don't hear about the pee jugs there too.....<p><a href="https://www.dailydot.com/debug/amazon-workers-pee-bottle/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dailydot.com/debug/amazon-workers-pee-bottle/</a>
When I was at university, they implemented a register for classes by phone system in the early 90s. (How things were done before computers…)<p>I remember being in the bursars office and someone was complaining that they registered for a class and it didn’t show up. The woman working there spun her screen around and said “here are all you keypresses from last week, you clearly didn’t register.” Now with so much more computing power/networking and storage everything is stored..but I wonder if they’ll ever look?<p>Makes a great target for hackers though.
Amazon's slogan - "creating the worker's dystopia - today!"<p>stopped buying from them a long time ago, I encourage everyone else to do the same.
I feel like people are getting outraged at the title. This isn't a keylogger. It's recording keystroke/mouse patterns to create behavioral profiles, not monitor content. It's just to try to heuristically detect whether the wrong person is operating an account.
It is a fantastic idea.
Next step will be wires on the head and some ai to guess what each worker is thinking.
And fire those with non compliant thoughts must go.
What a wonderful company /s
Between this, the coming back into the office, to the general rumors of Amazon's work culture going back for years, I find it hard to imagine a more undesirable place to work.
Human nature, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Surveillance capitalism is expanding exponentially in the new space created by digital technology. It is shaping the amorphous silicon with software, behaviors and business models that reflect the distorted morality and deficient humanity of a narrow clan.<p>This land grab is only possible in societies with no countervailing forces, either in government, judiciary, journalism, business world or civic society. Alas the US is very nearly such a failed society, as evidenced by its still smouldering Trump period. This is disastrous for the Western world in general (and Europe in particular) which for decades has simply followed the US lead in tech.<p>Tech is not just another cog in eternal societal struggles. Things are coming to a head. The challenges are compounding and the sustainability of our entire (eco)system is at risk. Tech should be at the forefront of shaping healthy social contracts to help us transition to a viable state. It is one of the few levers left that have a positive range. Instead it is abusing and eroding the most vital ingredient of a healthy society: trust<p>To paraphrase: Monitor your own keystrokes and combat soul theft. Make sure you program the kind of future you want to live in.
Is there any reason not to assume they don’t for software engineers as well?<p>Honest question, I assume this isn’t covered by two-party consent of recording. Are there any legal frameworks covering employee monitoring in the US or on the state level?<p>Is it different if alerted on violation as opposed to a manager browsing their employees activity on a whim?
If your company uses teams....you already have a keylogger installed in your machine.<p>The moment I discovered this, I stopped using teams to talk to my manager/teammates about my frustrations or concerns. I ask them to speak on the phone or face to face.
Amazon does not provide a company phone. Employees install paging app on their personal phones. I wonder how closely they monitor activities on phones of their employees.
I've never worked for Amazon and have even avoided them because of news like this.<p>However, now I wonder if it's all overblown, just like other shit in the media.<p>Surely, no one in their right mind would work in such conditions. It could be decent or at least acceptable.<p>Wonder how it compares to a small company where your manager watches everything you do and yells at you for a typo.
Marshall Brain’s short novella “Manna” is worth reading, if only because it keeps becoming reality with every development like this one.<p>To be specific, I’m referring to the first dystopian half of the book. I suppose the people at the top of Amazon are gradually entering the utopian second half.
This is what life below the API would feel like. Expectations: ML and algos are automating most boring jobs like couriers, drivers, cashiers or fulfillment center workers. Reality: ML and algos automating jobs of line managers.
I work in a customer-facing position within network security at AWS. This sounds dystopian and inhumane. But to do their job effectively, these employees (much like myself) must have access to a lot of critical data that can do a lot of damage inappropriately leaked.<p>This may not be the best solution to protecting data, but it's a hard issue to solve.<p>Stuff like SIM swapping and recent Twitter hacks come from insider threats. Consumers want companies to protect them (i.e. the consumers) from insider threats. How are companies supposed to do that? Monitoring the speed of typing is one not-particularly-invasive way to do that.<p>TL/DR: Don't eat the sausage if you can't stomach how it's made.
Here's the thing. It takes one person. Just one. To ruin it for everyone.<p>That's why stuff like this exists.<p>So assume this happened to Amazon one time and cost them a ton of money.<p>Do they sit back and just hope it never happens again?<p>Do they somehow selectively choose which employees to monitor?<p>Don't get me wrong. I would love to live in a world where everyone can trust everyone else but that's a fairy tale.