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Regarding the "attention tracking" feature... If your boss/manager/etc is excited about this feature as a way to monitor you, odds are they already have you un

Regarding the "attention tracking" feature... If your boss/manager/etc is excited about this feature as a way to monitor you, odds are they already have you under surveillance in a bunch of other ways. It's unfortunate that you are in this situation, and I hope you're able to find a way out of it soon (e.g. by switching teams or finding another company that values and trusts you more). This feature is of limited use, though. With my laptop in my lap, it's trivial to hold my phone right in front of the lower half of my screen. It will be outside the field of view of the camera, but there will be no discernible difference between me looking at my laptop screen vs my phone screen. I'm all for fighting against companies chipping away at our privacy, but this one seems pretty far down a rather large list. EDIT: clarification

AznHisoka 7y ago
Isn't it also useless if you got multiple monitors? I connect my Macbook to my external monitors, and move the Zoom screen to my monitor instead of my laptop. Thus, I am never directly looking at my laptop screen. Any employer tracking me will always think I am never ever looking at my Zoom screen.
- bt1a 7y ago
  Correct, if you have Zoom on a secondary monitor and are working on your primary monitor, it will say that you are not paying attention. Thankfully our meeting organizer was quick to understand that most of us work with multiple monitors and decided not to pay the feature much attention.
catacombs 7y ago
> If your boss/manager/etc is excited about this feature as a way to monitor you, odds are they already have you under surveillance in a bunch of other ways. It's unfortunate that you are in this situation, and I hope you're able to find a way out of it soon (e.g. by switching teams or finding another company that values and trusts you more). I can't stand people who get excited at the thought of tracking their employees. What's the benefit? Control? Ego?
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  If Zoom is actually reporting that people are inactive after 30 seconds of no having the window focused, then all the people watching on a second screen while they have relevant docs pulled up on the other are getting stuck in the same category as the people playing games, and might even be getting penalized more than someone who's got Zoom open on one PC and is playing LoL on a different PC entirely. Deeply flawed, IMO.
- allenskd 7y ago
  I'd lean that they are probably control freaks. But there's probably more to it than that and ultimately it seems it boils down to "I'm paying you to work thus it's my right to track your every movement" Years ago I had a boss but set up security cameras. Normally, this is completely okay because you gotta secure the building you just never know who's gonna come in and rob the place or maybe track an incident (rape, violence, etc). This boss of mine however went home or worked from home from time to time or sometimes he would go on a vacation and he would just connect to the video stream of the security cameras. One day I was the only one in the building as I still had to finish my shift. He gaves me a call, he didn't say he was monitoring me of course but he seemed to know what I was doing and proceeded to ask the following question: is everything okay? how's the workload etc etc. Common questions, nothing out of the ordinary. So it seemed he just called because I wasn't receiving a lot of support calls and sometimes I would just go get coffee he probably saw me standing a lot, maybe thought I was neglecting my job. I can be incredibly outspoken at times. A lot of the things in the call just screamed "I'm monitoring you". When the call ended I was furious. There's nothing more damaging than not trusting your employees. It breaks trust and relationships. I've never in my professional life felt so insulted that I need someone to monitor me. If you are this type of manager/supervisor: Kindly put, shame on you. I say kindly put because the words I want to say can't be conveyed here without getting moderated. Cease and rethink your strategy, we are professionals not kids or teenagers and doing this to teenagers remember you are growing professionals, nothing like giving them the ground to grow but if they find stuff like this you are destroying everything. To workers that are aware I can only hope you find other jobs. It's stressful enough, no need to tolerate this behavior.
  - 7y ago
mcpeepants 7y ago
I'm sure "attention tracking" is used by some companies as a (terrible) metric to tell if employees are engaged in meetings. That said, I think the primary or envisioned use case is for webinars and other externally-facing meetings, where you actually have an audience and you want to (badly) track how engaged they are with your live content. GoToWebinar has the exact same functionality, fwiw. Not saying that makes it OK, and not saying that this feature _should_ exist in general. I'm just not really buying the whole "Zoom is evil for having this" argument that is being pushed so heavily here.
decebalus1 7y ago
I did a couple of online interviews in the past 3 weeks over Zoom. It was the first time I ever heard about Zoom (my current company uses hangouts). I had no idea they were able to track all of this and all companies were adamant about using the native client for the interviews and/or sharing my screen even if I wrote code in collaborative documents. I passed the interviews but honestly finding out about this now kind of turns me off..

AznHisoka 7y ago

Isn't it also useless if you got multiple monitors? I connect my Macbook to my external monitors, and move the Zoom screen to my monitor instead of my laptop. Thus, I am never directly looking at my laptop screen. Any employer tracking me will always think I am never ever looking at my Zoom screen.

bt1a 7y ago
Correct, if you have Zoom on a secondary monitor and are working on your primary monitor, it will say that you are not paying attention. Thankfully our meeting organizer was quick to understand that most of us work with multiple monitors and decided not to pay the feature much attention.

catacombs 7y ago

> If your boss/manager/etc is excited about this feature as a way to monitor you, odds are they already have you under surveillance in a bunch of other ways. It's unfortunate that you are in this situation, and I hope you're able to find a way out of it soon (e.g. by switching teams or finding another company that values and trusts you more). I can't stand people who get excited at the thought of tracking their employees. What's the benefit? Control? Ego?

HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
If Zoom is actually reporting that people are inactive after 30 seconds of no having the window focused, then all the people watching on a second screen while they have relevant docs pulled up on the other are getting stuck in the same category as the people playing games, and might even be getting penalized more than someone who's got Zoom open on one PC and is playing LoL on a different PC entirely. Deeply flawed, IMO.
allenskd 7y ago
I'd lean that they are probably control freaks. But there's probably more to it than that and ultimately it seems it boils down to "I'm paying you to work thus it's my right to track your every movement" Years ago I had a boss but set up security cameras. Normally, this is completely okay because you gotta secure the building you just never know who's gonna come in and rob the place or maybe track an incident (rape, violence, etc). This boss of mine however went home or worked from home from time to time or sometimes he would go on a vacation and he would just connect to the video stream of the security cameras. One day I was the only one in the building as I still had to finish my shift. He gaves me a call, he didn't say he was monitoring me of course but he seemed to know what I was doing and proceeded to ask the following question: is everything okay? how's the workload etc etc. Common questions, nothing out of the ordinary. So it seemed he just called because I wasn't receiving a lot of support calls and sometimes I would just go get coffee he probably saw me standing a lot, maybe thought I was neglecting my job. I can be incredibly outspoken at times. A lot of the things in the call just screamed "I'm monitoring you". When the call ended I was furious. There's nothing more damaging than not trusting your employees. It breaks trust and relationships. I've never in my professional life felt so insulted that I need someone to monitor me. If you are this type of manager/supervisor: Kindly put, shame on you. I say kindly put because the words I want to say can't be conveyed here without getting moderated. Cease and rethink your strategy, we are professionals not kids or teenagers and doing this to teenagers remember you are growing professionals, nothing like giving them the ground to grow but if they find stuff like this you are destroying everything. To workers that are aware I can only hope you find other jobs. It's stressful enough, no need to tolerate this behavior.
- 7y ago

mcpeepants 7y ago

I'm sure "attention tracking" is used by some companies as a (terrible) metric to tell if employees are engaged in meetings. That said, I think the primary or envisioned use case is for webinars and other externally-facing meetings, where you actually have an audience and you want to (badly) track how engaged they are with your live content. GoToWebinar has the exact same functionality, fwiw. Not saying that makes it OK, and not saying that this feature _should_ exist in general. I'm just not really buying the whole "Zoom is evil for having this" argument that is being pushed so heavily here.

decebalus1 7y ago

I did a couple of online interviews in the past 3 weeks over Zoom. It was the first time I ever heard about Zoom (my current company uses hangouts). I had no idea they were able to track all of this and all companies were adamant about using the native client for the interviews and/or sharing my screen even if I wrote code in collaborative documents. I passed the interviews but honestly finding out about this now kind of turns me off..