The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

135 点作者 jansho超过 7 年前

24 条评论

I remember this post <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/2jtd2f/worked_on_a_completely_locked_down_machine_time/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/2jtd2f/worked_on_a_c...</a>.This is what happens you try to calculate productivity with how much salary you get.The poster make video player in excel to padding his clock time because he already finished his work in 1 hours and need 3 hours to appear busy.

pjc50超过 7 年前

Parodied very effectively in Snow Crash (1992), where one of the characters has to spend exactly the right amount of time reading a document. Too much would be deemed slacking; too little would be inattentiveness.

chewbacha超过 7 年前

This makes work a panopticon prison.> The concept of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon</a>

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albertgoeswoof超过 7 年前

Is this article a joke?"Last year an employee at an IT services company sent a private chat message to a friend at work worried that he had just shared his sexual identity with his manager in a meeting and fearing he’d face career reprisal. Wiretap detected the employee’s concern and alerted a senior company exec who was then able to intervene, talk to the manager and defuse the situation."What. the. fuck.thanks "senior exec" for reading my messages, stepping in and "defusing the situation" whatever that means.it gets worse:"Or if you usually touch 10 documents a day and print two and suddenly you are touching 500 and printing 200 that may mean you’re stealing documents in preparation of leaving the company."of course, that's the only possible logical conclusion.What a waste of time, if I ever saw this in place as an employee or manager I would immediately leave and possibly sue.

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ducttape12超过 7 年前

If an employer feels the need to do this, it's a major red flag that there are serious issues in their culture and management. Monitoring your employees will just make things worse.

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gadders超过 7 年前

A bank I worked for last year rolled out monitoring software to all their IT staff. It recorded the window title of the application with focus on a regular schedule and kept this in a log somewhere. They said the results would only be used in aggregate, but that was treated with skepticism.Also, the app does pop up with alerts every so often suggesting you take a yoga break so it is adding a lot of value. /Sarcasm

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dredmorbius超过 7 年前

I'm coming to the conclusion that, at a society scale, there's a fundamental conflict such that advances in communications technologies undermine trust.This is a case of paradox of composition -- whilst at a personal scale improved communications can increase trust, at a mass scale, the tendency seems to be to undermine it. This increasingly strikes me as a problem.<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communications_advances_undermine_trust/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communi...</a>In a world without high-speed, high-bandwidth, rapid, and reliable communications, you have to extend, and rely on, trust between individuals. Cultures evolve systems (usually religious) to create and foster a sufficiently-reliable trust network.As communications improve, reliance on that trust diminishes. You no longer need to be able to rely on a person working in your interest for days, or weeks, or months, or years. You can check on them at a moment's notice. You can monitor them continuously, across a wide range of metrics, without their conscious awareness.A domain built on Trust becomes instead Panopticon.(Further discussions of trust: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=trust&restrict_sr=on" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=trust&restrict...</a>)

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nopacience超过 7 年前

Companys have no need to get into employee home. And employees should not give access to a camera inside their home. Its impossible to know who has access to that camera. The companies can set up an remote environment(remote pc) that employee must connect to in order to work. And that PC the company can connect to and monitor whats being worked on.If the company can connect to the user computer and install software there, that means the user just opened up his computer to the company. And, if the company software happens to be "buggy" (to say the least) it could mean that company has teorically hacked the employee computer and now has access to every single file on that machine and if it wants it can try to connect to other machines on the same network. If the company software malfunctions, it could delete all the user files or share with others in the internet.Having said that, its probably important to separate. As a last resource if the company really want to monitor the employee, use 1 internet for company (with 1 computer only for work related) and 1 internet for home usage (and home computers).

tsujamin超过 7 年前

It's only creepy when your employer does it, not when your social media platform does ;)

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mooreds超过 7 年前

Huh. I wonder if all of the folks building and selling these systems have it pointed at themselves (the email monitoring, the webcams)? Or is it just for the common workers?Just because someone is paying you doesn't give them carte blanche to examine every minute of your time working. That was never explicit before because it was never possible before, but i guess we need to make it explicit now.

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badrabbit超过 7 年前

This. I live this everyday and they talk about it in terms of "insider threat" and "user behavior analytics". Yes , every last thing you do at work is being monitored and analyzed.You see,I am at a point where I wish it stopped at work. $work these days spies on your off work activities as well. Essentially making you their slave.If you don't experience this,then maybe your company isn't big enough to afford it(or if it is,please tell me more about this wonderful company that let's you do your job without 24/7 surveillance)EDIT:Just search for " user behavior analytics".Orwell would be impressed

throw2016超过 7 年前

These kind of tech has always been marketed to enterprises under various ruses. It's persistent. If the company happens to have immature control freaks in decision maker roles then they manage to sell.Ultimately its culture and the decision makers get to decide. Monitoring is of course downwards and those making the decision do not get to be monitored in this intrusive fashion.

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lambersley超过 7 年前

I would quit, without second thought. I have always been of the opinion that you need to hire the right people and fire and bad ones. Workplace surveillance is a trying to fill a gap for BAD managers/mgmt. This crosses so many lines.

retrac98超过 7 年前

I'd refuse to work anywhere that did this. It puts people on a treadmill they can't get off of.

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xwat超过 7 年前

Relevant: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305701" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305701</a>

jansho超过 7 年前

Now that surveillance is getting cleverer, the question is, how do we know if we’re being monitored? How can we tell which companies practice surveillance?

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Fnoord超过 7 年前

I suppose this entire article is about the USA given the first paragraph plus this being part of The Guardian's World section (ie. not local UK).On which jurisdiction(s) does this apply? Readers (pref lawyers) should check if this is legal in their jurisdiction(s).For people from NL I can recommend Arnoud Engelfriet's blog (a Dutch lawyer specialised in IT law) [1] and its search feature.An ontopic example discussing whether an employer is allowed to see private files in a business OneDrive account is discussed [2]. There are many more examples, but the blog is in Dutch and generally applies to Dutch law, so YMMV. I'm curious if similar websites or platforms exist for other jurisdictions.[1] <a href="https://blog.iusmentis.com" rel="nofollow">https://blog.iusmentis.com</a>[2] <a href="https://blog.iusmentis.com/2016/10/17/mag-werkgever-privebestanden-zakelijke-onedrive-bekijken/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.iusmentis.com/2016/10/17/mag-werkgever-privebes...</a>

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AndrewKemendo超过 7 年前

Obligatory link to Manna:<a href="http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm" rel="nofollow">http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm</a>

tribune超过 7 年前

At a company with a healthy culture, managers should be hiring people who they trust to get their jobs done. If you feel the need to watch your employee's every move, why would you hire them in the first place? Treating employees like delinquent children instead of mature teammates indicates a very sick company culture that I would avoid at all costs.

SkyPuncher超过 7 年前

Hmm, I don't know that "rise" is a good description. This is just a reminder that if you are using employer owned resources, you should not have an expectation of privacy. It has been this way for decades and is no different now. Perhaps, the only difference is the ability for a system to detect anomalies without human intervention.

defo_nonconvex超过 7 年前

"If a paralegal is writing a document and every few seconds is switching to Hipchat, Outlook and Word then there’s an issue that can be resolved by addressing it with the employee"Wait, what? Are they trying to do ADHD diagnosis from window activity?

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mmagin超过 7 年前

“If you are a parent and you have a teenage son or daughter coming home late and not doing their homework you might wonder what they are doing. It’s the same as employees.”Uhh, no. Employees are adults.

the_wheel超过 7 年前

How would you know you’re being monitored?

cooervo超过 7 年前

If a workplace implemented this, this would create anxiety in their workers causing them to leave.