7 ms·

The Rise of Workplace Surveillance

135 points by jansho 9y ago

mmagin 9y ago
“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.
pjc50 9y ago
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.
degurechaff 9y ago
I remember this post https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/2jtd2f/worked_on_a_completely_locked_down_machine_time/ https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/2jtd2f/worked_on_a_c.... 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.
xwat 9y ago
Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305701
gadders 9y ago
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
- PeachPlum 9y ago
  The solution is to provide terminals with only access to work tools. No-one plays Solitaire on a supermarket checkout till (cue someone finding a photo of someone playing Solitaire on a supermarket checkout till)
  - albertgoeswoof 9y ago
    The solution is to hire people that care about their job, or at least people who are accountable for their output. Difficult in a supermarket checkout scenario though.
    - PeachPlum 9y ago
      Hiring people who care and keeping them in that mindset is hard, especially at scale. 32.9% of U.S. employees "engaged" in workplace in February (2015) http://news.gallup.com/poll/181895/employee-engagement-reaches-three-year-high.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/181895/employee-engagement-reach... and from a 2014 report http://www.aon.com/attachments/human-capital-consulting/2014-trends-in-global-employee-engagement-report.pdf http://www.aon.com/attachments/human-capital-consulting/2014... There are signs that the employee value proposition is breaking down. Perceptions of internal brand alignment have decreased 4 percentage points in the last two years. More employees are saying positive things about their organization and striving to go above and beyond. Engagement overall has increased, but the global element signifying intent to “Stay” with their companies has shown no change. Employees are engaging more, but only a little over half see a long-term path with their current company and fewer see a compelling value proposition to keep their talents with the current company.
  - gadders 9y ago
    By IT Staff, I mean (for example) developers writing risk management and trading systems, as well as support and infrastructure staff.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    How about a chip and pin terminal playing Tetris? https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2006/12/24/chip-pin-terminal-playing-tetris/ https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2006/12/24/chip-pin-term...
tsujamin 9y ago
It's only creepy when your employer does it, not when your social media platform does ;)
- jansho 9y ago
  No what’s creepy is that we’ve got enough surveillance from social media and CCTV, now it’s in our workplace too. That’s most of our day. Sheesh, these people need to get a life Edit: typo
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  Eh - Facebook I can walk away from, and I did. Employment is not nearly so opt-out.
cooervo 9y ago
If a workplace implemented this, this would create anxiety in their workers causing them to leave.
throw2016 9y ago
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.
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  Except we’re getting better at quantifying, and the better we are at it, the more we can optimize. Factory workers didn’t use to be measured, but then they were. And now they’re automated. Many aspects of white collar jobs are not impervious to this either. As we move up the chain, we’ll see that even more can be measured and optimized, even for the decision makers. Just make sure you keep climbing! Edit: it also helps when firing people, as you can make a list of metrics and then make goals that are just out of reach for bottom 50% of performers. Then when you need to fire people and deny unemployment, you point to the metrics they were failing and you have a valid cause to terminate for lack of performance, thus saving you money on unemployment insurance premiums.
  - throw2016 9y ago
    This is a bit of a straw man. You don't need surveillance technology for this. If a worker is expected to make 10 pieces of an item per hour its easy for managers to verify this. For a knowledge or creative worker it's similarly easy to verify expected performance. This is not new, workers have been measured for performance everywhere since manufacturing and corporate jobs began. If we ignore that for a moment, the point you are making applies to management too, yet this tech is guaranteed to not be used for management where things and outcomes are left 'more fuzzy'. Why? How about we apply it to governance with complete transparency to the electorate. Nope, not going to happen. Because its exploitative and intrusive and will only be applied to the powerless lowest who have no choice.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      > For a knowledge or creative worker it's similarly easy to verify expected performance. No it really isn't! Coding performance metrics are a wasteland of failed techniques.
retrac98 9y ago
I'd refuse to work anywhere that did this. It puts people on a treadmill they can't get off of.
- falcolas 9y ago
  I think it's safe to assume that every employer does this, to some extent. Sure, some may simply be doing automated scanning of your emails and document access to ensure you're not leaking secrets, but it's a slippery slope that only takes one leader to go to hell.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
Obligatory link to Manna: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
mooreds 9y ago
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.
- colejohnson66 9y ago
  It’s almost certainly not being used by the creators. It’s the same thing as politicians; It doesn’t affect me, and it sounds like a good idea on paper, so go for it.
Fnoord 9y ago
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] https://blog.iusmentis.com https://blog.iusmentis.com [2] https://blog.iusmentis.com/2016/10/17/mag-werkgever-privebestanden-zakelijke-onedrive-bekijken/ https://blog.iusmentis.com/2016/10/17/mag-werkgever-privebes...
- Create 9y ago
  CERN certainly does this for at least a decade, although it has its own "jurisdiction". Management likes it a lot, because it is so easy to abuse.
nopacience 9y ago
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).
albertgoeswoof 9y ago
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.
- w458cmau 9y ago
  I lost it at "[...] when an All State Insurance franchise did a live demonstration of Interguard’s software to other dealers. The technology started scanning the network and almost immediately found an email with the words “client list” and “résumé”. The demonstrator opened the email in front of a room full of peers to discover his best employee was plotting to move to another company." What is wrong with people?
  - falcolas 9y ago
    When you optimize for profit at any cost as a company, that kind of mindset carries over into you employee/leadership culture.
  - supermdguy 9y ago
    I wonder why he/she wants to leave?
- gambiting 9y ago
  I feel like this is a part of UK's ongoing effort to make ubiquitous surveillance a completely normal thing and have the citizens accept it as such. It's not creepy and disturbing, it's actually normal and should be celebrated!
the_wheel 9y ago
How would you know you’re being monitored?
chewbacha 9y ago
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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
- MisterTea 9y ago
  This is is automated, real time, omnipresent surveillance of everyone. It's worse than a panopticon as in a panopticon prison you have one person surveilling 1000 for example but only able to watch one at a time. The idea is the prisoners never know who is being watched so in theory they all behave thinking they are all being watched. But math kinda destroys that theory as they each have at least a 1000:1 chance of being watched so the odds are in the prisoner's favor.
  - chewbacha 9y ago
    True that this is worse! But you still don’t know if someone is going to be reading it or if it will be flagged. The relation I was trying to make to panopticon is that workers will live under constant fear. In regards to the math, I don’t believe that humans perceive risk with such objectivity. If the cost of being observed is high, then even a low risk may impose constant anxiety. Of course, perhaps criminal behavior selects for a group that tends to undervalue the costs and under estimate the risk.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Foucault was prescient about the sorts of harms panopticon would cause, and the metaphor is still an informative one. In particular, it was an insightful as to psychology under uncertain surveillance. But people are still calling it hyperbole when in fact we surpassed it years ago. Panopticon had vulnerabilities: a brief or infrequent transgression could go uncaught, and an uncaught transgression could never be recovered. The current situation is that active surveillance can be applied algorithmically to everyone, and 100% of past data can be retained for later analysis. That's utterly unprecedented, and I don't think we've really done much to grapple with what it's going to mean.
ducttape12 9y ago
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.
- Pigo 9y ago
  My last company started having design sessions to build a system that would monitor how much employees were actively engaged at their desk. I tried to steer them to "rewarding employees who were working hard" goal, but they were only interested in punishing people. It was a real eye opener into the culture that was forming.
  - tomjen3 9y ago
    The sad thing is that at that point they probably did need those systems, as I imagine all the good workers would leave.
- Balgair 9y ago
  Anecdote: A friend was working at a large DoD contractor. Seeing as the job was mostly meaningless not during crunch time (end of the Quarter, usually), he looked at CNN.com to pass time. Reasonable? Not to the bosses who monitored everything from start to finish. He got fired, after a lengthy process with his manager, and the one above, fighting for him hard, as he was actually a good hire. Still got fired. About 3 weeks after that boozy Friday night, about 5k other people got fired too. Not laid off, fired. Closed the plant and essentially nuked this county's economy. Fun times. Sometimes, yeah, there are major red flags with this idea, but sometimes we can think that they are only affecting us, not the entire company. Schadenfreude? Oh you bet. But it still stinks for the local schools as their tax base is gone.
jansho 9y ago
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?
- nathanaldensr 9y ago
  It's a chilling effect. Because you probably can't detect who's monitoring you, you must assume all companies do--potentially even the ones that say they don't.
  - jansho 9y ago
    Must the 21st century be characterised by paranoia/vigilance? :(
    - falcolas 9y ago
      No, it doesn't have to be that way. But when both corporate government leaders want, and are getting, unparalleled visibility into what we do and what we think; the only practical counter to that is paranoia and vigilance. There is another alternative - acceptance - something which is much easier on your mind. Acceptance isn't an option for everyone, however.
SkyPuncher 9y ago
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.
lambersley 9y ago
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.
badrabbit 9y ago
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
tribune 9y ago
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.
dredmorbius 9y ago
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. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communications_advances_undermine_trust/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communi... 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: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=trust&restrict_sr=on https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=trust&restrict...)
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  This ties interestingly to the news about Bitcoin power usage from last week: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mi... The beauty of Bitcoin is an inherently-trustworthy transaction structure without the need for a central authority or trust between parties. The cost is exactly what you describe - trust is replaced by a massive expenditure of work to independently verify everything. It's an interesting microcosm of what's happening throughout society in general.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, has made just that point. I can't quote it enough (three times so far at my Reddit blog): Decentralisation is the paramount feature in bitcoin, but it turns out that that's a bad idea that's really, really expensive, because it turns out that a tiny bit of trust saves you a fortune. "Decentralised" isn't a useful buzzword in a lot of ways, because it turns out that you want to be a part of society. From his interview with the Financial Times: https://soundcloud.com/user-544122300/gerardpod https://soundcloud.com/user-544122300/gerardpod
defo_nonconvex 9y ago
"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?
- fapjacks 9y ago
  And stupider, "can be resolved by addressing it with the employee"... You just know this company is going to put that employee through a couple hours of some awful corporate video training about motivation.

135 points by jansho 9y ago

“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.

pjc50 9y ago

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.

degurechaff 9y ago

I remember this post https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/2jtd2f/worked_on_a_completely_locked_down_machine_time/ https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/2jtd2f/worked_on_a_c.... 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.

xwat 9y ago

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305701

gadders 9y ago

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

PeachPlum 9y ago
The solution is to provide terminals with only access to work tools. No-one plays Solitaire on a supermarket checkout till (cue someone finding a photo of someone playing Solitaire on a supermarket checkout till)
- albertgoeswoof 9y ago
  The solution is to hire people that care about their job, or at least people who are accountable for their output. Difficult in a supermarket checkout scenario though.
  - PeachPlum 9y ago
    Hiring people who care and keeping them in that mindset is hard, especially at scale. 32.9% of U.S. employees "engaged" in workplace in February (2015) http://news.gallup.com/poll/181895/employee-engagement-reaches-three-year-high.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/181895/employee-engagement-reach... and from a 2014 report http://www.aon.com/attachments/human-capital-consulting/2014-trends-in-global-employee-engagement-report.pdf http://www.aon.com/attachments/human-capital-consulting/2014... There are signs that the employee value proposition is breaking down. Perceptions of internal brand alignment have decreased 4 percentage points in the last two years. More employees are saying positive things about their organization and striving to go above and beyond. Engagement overall has increased, but the global element signifying intent to “Stay” with their companies has shown no change. Employees are engaging more, but only a little over half see a long-term path with their current company and fewer see a compelling value proposition to keep their talents with the current company.
- gadders 9y ago
  By IT Staff, I mean (for example) developers writing risk management and trading systems, as well as support and infrastructure staff.
- pjc50 9y ago
  How about a chip and pin terminal playing Tetris? https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2006/12/24/chip-pin-terminal-playing-tetris/ https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2006/12/24/chip-pin-term...

tsujamin 9y ago

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

jansho 9y ago
No what’s creepy is that we’ve got enough surveillance from social media and CCTV, now it’s in our workplace too. That’s most of our day. Sheesh, these people need to get a life Edit: typo
Bartweiss 9y ago
Eh - Facebook I can walk away from, and I did. Employment is not nearly so opt-out.

cooervo 9y ago

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

throw2016 9y ago

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.

lotsofpulp 9y ago
Except we’re getting better at quantifying, and the better we are at it, the more we can optimize. Factory workers didn’t use to be measured, but then they were. And now they’re automated. Many aspects of white collar jobs are not impervious to this either. As we move up the chain, we’ll see that even more can be measured and optimized, even for the decision makers. Just make sure you keep climbing! Edit: it also helps when firing people, as you can make a list of metrics and then make goals that are just out of reach for bottom 50% of performers. Then when you need to fire people and deny unemployment, you point to the metrics they were failing and you have a valid cause to terminate for lack of performance, thus saving you money on unemployment insurance premiums.
- throw2016 9y ago
  This is a bit of a straw man. You don't need surveillance technology for this. If a worker is expected to make 10 pieces of an item per hour its easy for managers to verify this. For a knowledge or creative worker it's similarly easy to verify expected performance. This is not new, workers have been measured for performance everywhere since manufacturing and corporate jobs began. If we ignore that for a moment, the point you are making applies to management too, yet this tech is guaranteed to not be used for management where things and outcomes are left 'more fuzzy'. Why? How about we apply it to governance with complete transparency to the electorate. Nope, not going to happen. Because its exploitative and intrusive and will only be applied to the powerless lowest who have no choice.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > For a knowledge or creative worker it's similarly easy to verify expected performance. No it really isn't! Coding performance metrics are a wasteland of failed techniques.

retrac98 9y ago

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

falcolas 9y ago
I think it's safe to assume that every employer does this, to some extent. Sure, some may simply be doing automated scanning of your emails and document access to ensure you're not leaking secrets, but it's a slippery slope that only takes one leader to go to hell.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

Obligatory link to Manna: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

mooreds 9y ago

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.

colejohnson66 9y ago
It’s almost certainly not being used by the creators. It’s the same thing as politicians; It doesn’t affect me, and it sounds like a good idea on paper, so go for it.

Fnoord 9y ago

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] https://blog.iusmentis.com https://blog.iusmentis.com [2] https://blog.iusmentis.com/2016/10/17/mag-werkgever-privebestanden-zakelijke-onedrive-bekijken/ https://blog.iusmentis.com/2016/10/17/mag-werkgever-privebes...

Create 9y ago
CERN certainly does this for at least a decade, although it has its own "jurisdiction". Management likes it a lot, because it is so easy to abuse.

nopacience 9y ago

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).

albertgoeswoof 9y ago

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.

w458cmau 9y ago
I lost it at "[...] when an All State Insurance franchise did a live demonstration of Interguard’s software to other dealers. The technology started scanning the network and almost immediately found an email with the words “client list” and “résumé”. The demonstrator opened the email in front of a room full of peers to discover his best employee was plotting to move to another company." What is wrong with people?
- falcolas 9y ago
  When you optimize for profit at any cost as a company, that kind of mindset carries over into you employee/leadership culture.
- supermdguy 9y ago
  I wonder why he/she wants to leave?
gambiting 9y ago
I feel like this is a part of UK's ongoing effort to make ubiquitous surveillance a completely normal thing and have the citizens accept it as such. It's not creepy and disturbing, it's actually normal and should be celebrated!

the_wheel 9y ago

How would you know you’re being monitored?

chewbacha 9y ago

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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

MisterTea 9y ago
This is is automated, real time, omnipresent surveillance of everyone. It's worse than a panopticon as in a panopticon prison you have one person surveilling 1000 for example but only able to watch one at a time. The idea is the prisoners never know who is being watched so in theory they all behave thinking they are all being watched. But math kinda destroys that theory as they each have at least a 1000:1 chance of being watched so the odds are in the prisoner's favor.
- chewbacha 9y ago
  True that this is worse! But you still don’t know if someone is going to be reading it or if it will be flagged. The relation I was trying to make to panopticon is that workers will live under constant fear. In regards to the math, I don’t believe that humans perceive risk with such objectivity. If the cost of being observed is high, then even a low risk may impose constant anxiety. Of course, perhaps criminal behavior selects for a group that tends to undervalue the costs and under estimate the risk.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Foucault was prescient about the sorts of harms panopticon would cause, and the metaphor is still an informative one. In particular, it was an insightful as to psychology under uncertain surveillance. But people are still calling it hyperbole when in fact we surpassed it years ago. Panopticon had vulnerabilities: a brief or infrequent transgression could go uncaught, and an uncaught transgression could never be recovered. The current situation is that active surveillance can be applied algorithmically to everyone, and 100% of past data can be retained for later analysis. That's utterly unprecedented, and I don't think we've really done much to grapple with what it's going to mean.

ducttape12 9y ago

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.

Pigo 9y ago
My last company started having design sessions to build a system that would monitor how much employees were actively engaged at their desk. I tried to steer them to "rewarding employees who were working hard" goal, but they were only interested in punishing people. It was a real eye opener into the culture that was forming.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  The sad thing is that at that point they probably did need those systems, as I imagine all the good workers would leave.
Balgair 9y ago
Anecdote: A friend was working at a large DoD contractor. Seeing as the job was mostly meaningless not during crunch time (end of the Quarter, usually), he looked at CNN.com to pass time. Reasonable? Not to the bosses who monitored everything from start to finish. He got fired, after a lengthy process with his manager, and the one above, fighting for him hard, as he was actually a good hire. Still got fired. About 3 weeks after that boozy Friday night, about 5k other people got fired too. Not laid off, fired. Closed the plant and essentially nuked this county's economy. Fun times. Sometimes, yeah, there are major red flags with this idea, but sometimes we can think that they are only affecting us, not the entire company. Schadenfreude? Oh you bet. But it still stinks for the local schools as their tax base is gone.

jansho 9y ago

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?

nathanaldensr 9y ago
It's a chilling effect. Because you probably can't detect who's monitoring you, you must assume all companies do--potentially even the ones that say they don't.
- jansho 9y ago
  Must the 21st century be characterised by paranoia/vigilance? :(
  - falcolas 9y ago
    No, it doesn't have to be that way. But when both corporate government leaders want, and are getting, unparalleled visibility into what we do and what we think; the only practical counter to that is paranoia and vigilance. There is another alternative - acceptance - something which is much easier on your mind. Acceptance isn't an option for everyone, however.

SkyPuncher 9y ago

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.

lambersley 9y ago

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.

badrabbit 9y ago

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

tribune 9y ago

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.

dredmorbius 9y ago

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. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communications_advances_undermine_trust/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communi... 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: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=trust&restrict_sr=on https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=trust&restrict...)

Bartweiss 9y ago
This ties interestingly to the news about Bitcoin power usage from last week: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining-electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mi... The beauty of Bitcoin is an inherently-trustworthy transaction structure without the need for a central authority or trust between parties. The cost is exactly what you describe - trust is replaced by a massive expenditure of work to independently verify everything. It's an interesting microcosm of what's happening throughout society in general.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, has made just that point. I can't quote it enough (three times so far at my Reddit blog): Decentralisation is the paramount feature in bitcoin, but it turns out that that's a bad idea that's really, really expensive, because it turns out that a tiny bit of trust saves you a fortune. "Decentralised" isn't a useful buzzword in a lot of ways, because it turns out that you want to be a part of society. From his interview with the Financial Times: https://soundcloud.com/user-544122300/gerardpod https://soundcloud.com/user-544122300/gerardpod

defo_nonconvex 9y ago

"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?

fapjacks 9y ago
And stupider, "can be resolved by addressing it with the employee"... You just know this company is going to put that employee through a couple hours of some awful corporate video training about motivation.