Welcome to the era of the hyper-surveilled office

Feels like every damn thing that happens gets used as a pretext to enable more and more surveillance. Will we need job boards specifically for jobs that don&#x27;t do surveillance too?<p>&gt;Last year Fujitsu, a Japanese technology group, unveiled AI software which promises to gauge employees’ concentration based on their facial expression.<p>Just need software that punishes employees who aren&#x27;t happy enough at work, then we&#x27;ll have a proper nightmare.

I worked at a place once where we got a memo that asked everyone to stop clipping nails and farting because the microphones installed in our desks were picking these noises up. The memo even added that if you need to fart please go to the bathroom. It wasn&#x27;t a joke email, they were serious.<p>Oh, also not many people realize this but CCTV cameras all have the capability to convey audio captured via an internal microphone. It just depends on whether they have hooked the wires up to enable this feature. But, the innate ability is there. And, the CCTV software the guards use have the ability to store, retrieve and play this back alongside the video playback.

I&#x27;m a software developer working remotely most of the time. My unionized colleagues and I pushed for and won an agreement to prevent our employer from surveilling us in this manner. Several other recently organized companies have gotten similar agreements.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;WeBuildNPR&#x2F;status&#x2F;1522586389774221313?cxt=HHwWgoCy5aSQqKEqAAAA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;WeBuildNPR&#x2F;status&#x2F;1522586389774221313?cx...</a>

I recently had a manager insist that I install some MDM-like software on my laptop so that it could be tracked and managed remotely.<p>I said, &quot;okay I&#x27;ll do that, but then I&#x27;m <i>never</i> going to put that laptop on my home network, or use it on any network I may frequent outside of the office, so I&#x27;ll just leave my laptop on my work desk instead&quot;. The point, of course, is the same reasoning behind IT policies that don&#x27;t let people install stuff on work computers: if you&#x27;re going to access my computer remotely, I won&#x27;t trust it one single bit, so it doesn&#x27;t belong on my home network.<p>This changed their mind, quick. All it took was a little resistance and &quot;good for the goose and the gander&quot; mindset, and the manager droid &#x27;got it&#x27;. No, I won&#x27;t be letting you spy on my family ..

I&#x27;m convinced that keeping track if your employee is visibly working or not is so fundamentally wrong. Especially in an office setting.<p>Just look at the output. Nothing more. Does the employee provide value at the end of the day or not. That&#x27;s important. Not hours or anything else.

This is what scares me about Metaverse. Initially I was like &quot;Oh good, Facebook is blowing all of their resources on a bad idea everyone hates. I hope this goes badly for them!&quot;. Then I realized, the target audience for Metaverse won&#x27;t have a choice-- it&#x27;ll be a virtual office where people can work from home while under constant surveillance.

This needs to be illegal.<p>In Germany a lot of that stuff is illegal already or needs to be approved by the Betriebsrat (work council) but can come in through the backdoor as little known features of common software anyway.

I worked in a telco call centre. Everything was recorded on our computers, whee as t we said on phones and they had cameras in the office to watch us, plus human supervisors.<p>And yet everyone still flaunted all the rules: we were drunk and on drugs, we ate and had our cellphones.<p>Rules exist to selectively enforce against people who are not liked.

Get this. I worked for the company that produces most of the porn on the Internet. You know, the porn you can go to any torrent site and download for free within 10 minutes (and that statement has been true for as long as there has been an Internet and BitTorrent).<p>That company periodically took screenshots of all (ALL!) their employees&#x27; workstations. They monitor internal network for suspicious traffic and, until COVID happened, they did not let anyone work remotely.<p>Never understood what they were afraid of. Their content is already plastered all over the Internet.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.today&#x2F;SGfHh" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.today&#x2F;SGfHh</a>

In the EU, or any country with strong privacy protection legislation, data of this sort is a liability.

Don&#x27;t forget the home. With the ubiquity of security cameras privacy is eroding even in private. I am struggling now with properly placing cameras in an apartment and balancing safety, security, and privacy in a family environment.

Security cameras at work are debatably legal under many states eavesdropping laws as I interpret the text. Of course INAL, and many places have better reason to have cameras, e.g. to curb shoplifting, but a corporate office really isn&#x27;t one of those places. What am I going to do, steal some paperclips?

Any devs here work on stuff like this? Why?

I recently had to install chrom&#x27;ium&#x27; on my work pc, because all the mainstream browsers were auto installing an un-removable tracking extension via some domain policy :(. I&#x27;m sure my manager gets some report at the end of the month detailing how many hours I had a news.ycombinator.com tab open

What is the reality here? If a company adds MDM software to a laptop they have given you for work and you use it at home on your home network. Is it easy enough for them (in theory) to get on to the network and look on your kids or partners devices?<p>Or is that tin hat thinking?

imagine thinking this is tolerable.<p>i might get checked up on a couple of times by the customer im framing houses for, and another two times by the city inspector.<p>no HR, no surveillance, no office politics.

The great human-robot convergence. AI and robotics are getting closer to humans and humans (especially workers) are pushed closer to robots

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