20 ms·

School custodian refuses to download app that monitors location, got her fired

458 points by docdeek 6y ago

type0 6y ago
Why didn't they suggested to chip her, you know like some modern sheep farmers do. The APP dystopia is APPalling.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  I believe you're being humorous, but this has come up in the past. One employer in Wisconsin did it to 100 employees (https://trainingindustry.com/articles/learning-technologies/microchipping-employees-a-rising-trend-in-the-future-of-work/ https://trainingindustry.com/articles/learning-technologies/...), though they did not make it a condition of continued employment. Some states have made it illegal. The explosion of smartphone technology has made chipping an infeasibly expensive solution in comparison; it hasn't dampened employer desire to do things like this.
  - rideontime 6y ago
    > Microchips can also reduce health care costs for employers by tracking factors such as sleep duration, blood pressure and activity levels. With this information, microchips can make recommendations on how employees can improve their health, says Dan Lohrmann, chief security officer and chief strategist for Security Mentor, Inc., and author of “Virtual Integrity: Faithfully Navigating the Brave New Web.” What a load of horseshit. How does an implanted RFID tag provide anything but an employee badge that you can't lose?
    - closetohome 6y ago
      It doesn't. The authors don't seem to know the difference between an RFID tag and a microchip.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  Why not strap an employee monitoring device to her ankle? :)
gambiting 6y ago
" telling employees to download an app on their personal phones that would check their location and ensure they were working their scheduled hours." That's 100% illegal on this side of the pond at least, if the company wants an employee to use an app they can provide a company phone. Then sure, whatever, she could switch the business phone off after hours, no problem at all.
- skynet-9000 6y ago
  Or just leave it on her desk at work. She could be working 24x7! If anything, this makes work hours fraud even easier.
- kaiju0 6y ago
  Company is responsible to provide the hardware. The only issue I have is the use of personal equipment.
  - nowherebeen 6y ago
    Yes, asking employees to put spyware on their personal phone is crossing a line.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    This should be the answer. If the company requires the use of an "app" as a condition for doing a job, it should also provide a device that can run such an app. Is the janitor also required to bring her own mop from home to use on the job?
- barsonme 6y ago
  > That's 100% illegal on this side of the pond at least Interestingly enough the app is built by a company in the UK.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    If I recall correctly we also produce a lot of medicinal cannabis despite it still being pretty much illegal and as good as not recognized as a treatment for anything. The UK is a rich man's country
piokoch 6y ago
I think this is not something bad in itself - such practice is well known, for instance truck drivers are being tracked routinely and nobody makes a big fuss about that. But this is unacceptable: "telling employees to download an app on their personal phones that would check their location and ensure they were working their scheduled hours." Why someone is obliged to install something on a private phone? What if someone does not have smartphone, what if that phone will stop working, who is to blame, who is responsible for fixing it, how quickly - will an employee sign SLA for fixing the phone? Employer should provide a phone for an employee and then whatever employer wants can be installed there. If something does not work, well, it is up to employer to provide support.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Personnel location crosses a line to me. If you want to track location, put the locator on company property like the cleaning cart that custodians push around.
  - neaden 6y ago
    This might be legal, but it's still bad management. If you don't trust your employees and you don't think you can evaluate the results of their work, in this case if things are clean, that's on you as a manager to figure out. Tying it in to the process like this and you end up getting false flags when they spend a long time cleaning a mess, or reward them for not cleaning sufficiently to hit their movement metrics.
    - michaelt 6y ago
      A small minority of work can't easily be directly evaluated. If I hire a security patrol company, and they contract to provide a patrol that will visit twice a night and walk around the building, nonperformance would be almost undetectable.
      - neaden 6y ago
        There may be cases sure, but this isn't one of them.
elzbardico 6y ago
I quit a job when after hired they wanted me to use hub staff. I tried for a while, and it is an incredibly hostile piece of software. After some stressful events with it I said: I don't need this s*it and asked to leave. Mind you, I don't care if a company decides to spy on his workers using tools like Hubstaff, but they should be upfront about it during recruiting so both me and the company don't waste our time.
sneak 6y ago
As a general rule, I don't install apps on my phone to complete most tasks. I have a few preselected e2e apps I use, but there is so much spyware in the App Store I am reluctant to engage with most apps. I have a separate burner phone exclusively for food delivery and uber. Beyond that, when a product or service tells me I need to install an app: I just don't. The more of us that take this approach, the easier it becomes over time for people like this person to refuse.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
windex 6y ago
A lot of jobs seem like modern slavery. Rather than focus on the deliverable, managers and people who pay money focus more on the "controlling someone" aspect. Tech has enabled this in a big way.
- simple_phrases 6y ago
  "Slavery with extra steps" often comes to mind.
  - DC1350 6y ago
    It’s slavery as a service. Great for saving costs because you only pay for the time that you actually use, and you can outsource the maintenance of the service to the provider. If real slavery was still legal it wouldn’t even be used because the paycheque to paycheque employee model is so much more cost efficient.
    - simple_phrases 6y ago
      Yeah, you need to feed, house and give free healthcare to slaves. That's not happening any time soon.
      - drummer 6y ago
        It's coming. "You will own nothing and be happy."
        asdff 6y ago
        I wonder what it is going to look like when finally every single dollar you have is sucked up automatically by the month. The scales tip by the year. People in major cities are already paying 50% of their wages to their landlord alone. That's a degenerate economy, not a productive one. Eventually we will reach an equilibrium where there will be just enough vultures out there to eat exactly how many slices there are left in the pie. Complete extraction of 'disposable' income will be achieved this century. For working people in major cities, some are already being completely extracted like this, having to work multiple jobs to keep a roof overhead and bellies fed with no time to do something that isn't low skilled labor for capital.
kevwil 6y ago
Good for her. My phone, my rules. If a smartphone app is how the company wants to operate, that's fine, but they should provide the hardware.
LinuxBender 6y ago
If your employer required this, would you comply? [Edited from Would Google and Facebook employees comply]
- NegativeLatency 6y ago
  No
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  You previously asked about Google and Facebook employees. If you connect your Android phone to your corporate Google account, you will be required to install the corp monitoring software suite, which (among other things) includes both location tracking and nuke-from-orbit features. The company does encourage you to configure your phone properly to keep your private info in a separate non-corp account to minimize undesired data leakage, since the corp side of things is assumed to be observable for security and corporate policy reasons (I can't remember right now if the nuke-from-orbit would wipe the private side of the phone's install also). You can choose not to do this, though it will probably limit your career prospects in the long run (especially if you're SRE and need a convenient notification solution for when you're on-call). Although, honestly, if one doesn't trust Google's handling of private information, one should probably re-think one's employment relationship with them. Anecdotally from my own observation, plenty of employees comply because they trust Google's handling of everyone's private info, including their own (and that's even given the understanding that Google's access to one's "private" info when one is working as an employee on corporate tasks can be more open... They won't snoop your personal Gmail account, but they absolutely reserve the right to investigate your corporate one, for example).
  - silicon2401 6y ago
    > You can choose not to do this, though it will probably limit your career prospects in the long run (especially if you're SRE and need a convenient notification solution for when you're on-call). If a company wants me to be on-call or do any kind of mobile work, they can give me a phone. I let this slide at one job because it was a unicorn where I actually loved the job, but from then I've been able to get corporate phones and it's been key.
shadowgovt 6y ago
I strongly suspect that if this isn't a direction society wants to go, we're going to have to pass laws constraining employers from requiring this sort of thing. In the US at least, I'm not aware of any law that restricts this kind of requirement at present, and many states basically allow an employer to fire an employee for any type of (non-protected-class) non-compliance with policy.
gumby 6y ago
Hourly pay is part of the problem. The school is hiring agency X to get certain tasks accomplished (have people come in in the morning to find empty rubbish bins, clean floors and toilets, etc). They pay a fixed fee for this service. But the agency pays by the hour rather than "by the piece." They clearly estimate a cost per day; if someone can do the job in less time (or more time) should it matter? I think it's OK if employees have to check in that they were there at all (early diagnosis that the customer will be unhappy / first line of defense for an unhappy customer). Security guard evidence of walking around has been accepted for decades. But I don't think custodians need this high level of resolution. It doesn't lead to a good place for employee or employer.
- _carbyau_ 6y ago
  I would argue that hourly vs task pay is a bigger issue in so many workplaces. I think "hourly" is partly a reassurance. 1. Management then doesn't have to specify exactly what tasks are covered, to avoid workers advising "I don't get paid for that." 2. employees are able to say "Well, I was there, but without the tools/bureaucratic-approvals I couldn't do anything." There has to be a sensible middle ground surely.
yardie 6y ago
This policy wasn't instituted by the school but by the custodial contractor. Also, these kind of traditional gig jobs are extremely cutthroat. Like I don't even see why the employer would even bother. If the worker didn't do the job the contractee would complain, a new crew would be assigned, and the old crew may get fired or sent to a different site.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >if the worker didn't do the job the contractee would complain, a new crew would be assigned, and the old crew may get fired or sent to a different site. Yes, that's normally how this works. And that's how this works at the low end. But when you're the custodial/landscaping/whatever body shop for a school/highfalutin office park/etc. your value ad is in the image. These types of body shops do all sorts of stupid things to basically broadcast the image that they hire the good poors and not the dirty poors. E.g. they'll hand out uniforms with collars, only hire people who speak English and are free of tattoos, etc. etc. This tracking app BS is just a way for them to add "look, we're accountable, you can track your contractors with an app" to their website so that some Karen with the company card is more likely to call them up and buy their services. It's not about getting the job done more efficiently. It's about projecting an image to the customer.
pluc 6y ago
Why are they calling those "tattleware" and not spyware?
- Mordisquitos 6y ago
  Probably because the term "spyware" is already widely used for software which surreptitiously spies on the user without their knowledge, which is not the case here. Though I agree that "tattleware" is not a very good name. What about "jailerware" or "bigbrotherware"?
  - pluc 6y ago
    Doesn't this fit your description of "spyware"?
    - a1369209993 6y ago
      They're defining "spyware" in part as requiring that (at least by design) you don't know ahead of time that it's spying on you. (Whereas the location-monitoring app openly admits that it violates your privacy rights.) That's arguably not a very good definition, but it's certainly a definition you could choose to use for a word.
andrew_v4 6y ago
At my last employer, we were asked to install some kind of authentication app (that wanted permission to access all kinds of files, peripherals, etc on the phone) I just told them I didn't have a compatible device - it's not so far fetched that people don't have an android or iphone. In the end they provided a clumsy web based workaround to do the same thing. Outside of tech, I can imagine many people, like the one in this story, are at a disadvantage because they don't know they can plausibly say they don't have a compatible phone, they don't know how to navigate a complicated workaround, and they may be afraid of losing their job.
- _jal 6y ago
  > I can imagine many people [...] are at a disadvantage Yes, power differentials matter a lot. I have quit a job over things I considered overly intrusive, but a lot of people don't have that freedom. For that matter, I now keep a separate work phone. My employer doesn't require anything I object to, but just keeping all work apps off my phone was one consideration when I got it. But that's a big expense for a lot of people.
smitty1e 6y ago
So Dr. Strangelove: "You can't have privacy here; this is the land of the free!" We badly need to find a suitable level of tracking that is less than 100%, or the whole world is a tarted-up game reservation.
- 24bug47 6y ago
  Welcome to 5G...
modzu 6y ago
replace the human race with robots
noxer 6y ago
In a weird twist everyone with a sense of privacy has a windows phone. /s
- drewzero1 6y ago
  Several years ago my brother got a windows phone so that he had an excuse when people asked him to install apps. It worked very well for him and I'm considering replacing my feature phone with a PinePhone partially for the same reason.
  - noxer 6y ago
    That exactly the reason why I have a windows phone. Not that I would use it but I can show it if needed.
    - drewzero1 6y ago
      Yeah, people keep asking me to download their apps, but they stop asking when I pull out my feature phone and slide out the keyboard. I'm going to miss that a little.
jb775 6y ago
This should be illegal. The crazy thing tho is this tracking is currently possible to do within any building by measuring reflected wifi signals. I think that's the next wave of privacy concerns when we need to worry about privacy via relative physical measurements not able to be "locked".
justin_oaks 6y ago
Is it a requirement to own a personal smart phone compatible with the app in order to get/keep the job? I'm not sure why a physical "clock in, clock out" solution couldn't be used instead. Or have a shared terminal/tablet/phone where people clock in and clock out.
justin_oaks 6y ago
I once had a coworker who refused to install a two-factor code generator (such as Google Authenticator, but there a dozens of alternatives) on his personal phone. I told him that he could generate codes any other way he likes, but the personal phone would be easiest. He wouldn't have lost his job but he wouldn't be able to gain production access, which required two-factor codes. He grudgingly installed a two-factor app. I'm sympathetic to the idea of "don't make me install stuff on my phone", but when it can be one of several apps, and the sole purpose of the app is retain a cryptographic key and run some hashes on it... I lose most of my sympathy. I suppose it'd be nice if that employer (I no longer work there) provided a device to generate the two factor codes, but I can understand why they don't.
- Lev1a 6y ago
  > I suppose it'd be nice if that employer (I no longer work there) provided a device to generate the two factor codes, but I can understand why they don't. I mean... aren't there quite literally devices whose sole purpose is to generate 2FA codes? Something with a form factor similar to a small keyfob? I do know these exist but I've personally never seen one "in the flesh". Also I can only imagine these (as a singular solution for all relevant employees) would probably also be easier to administer than a wild growth of different 2FA apps, most likely on different OSs and even different versions of those OSs, while over the years the churn of employees means the variation gets ever larger.
  - unreal37 6y ago
    I used to have to carry around an RSA keyfob to be able to deploy code to production! I've had a few of those at different jobs! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_SecurID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_SecurID I've never had a job that required "Google Authenticator" on my personal phone. I guess I stopped working for other people long before that became the main 2fa method. That might be a step too far.
- ev1 6y ago
  I find this totally reasonable, especially since you can pick what app you want to install, and _it's actually useful for stuff outside of work_. For example, Okta Verify or Duo I would absolutely demand a separate phone for paid for by work - they are remotely monitorable/controllable more than local hashing. But you should be generating TOTP codes for your personal accounts too!
24bug47 6y ago
"We need to take a pause … before we go down some path of being tracked all day, every day, wherever we are." Isn't it neat how we act like this is not already happening by governments, businesses, and employers? As if we have a choice to make right now whether we'd like to live in a world under "mass surveillance"?
- rideontime 6y ago
  My employer isn't tracking me "all day, every day, wherever I am." Is yours?
  - 24bug47 6y ago
    Only to the extent they are able. But you and I are being tracked regardless, by hundreds/thousands of other entities, commercial and government, to the extent they are able. 5G/IoT is the latest weapon in their arsenal.
nophone2134 6y ago
Reminds how in one of my previous jobs I was the only engineer out there with a work-issued phone. This wasn't some early-phase startup with 10 people on board - rather an unicorn getting ready for the IPO. I actually got into argument with my boss a few days before I started, as I did not want to install stuff on my personal phone (it wasn't spyware, but still). It's really an "achievement" when I think about this now - they've managed to burn my goodwill and demoralize me even before I started. Why should I care about this job if you start by invading my privacy from day minus one? Going to the office on my first day I was 50% convinced it will be also the last. I wasn't much worried about this perspective; I'm in really good spot career wise. Ultimately they've agreed to give me a work phone. However, this situation left a pretty bad taste. Turned out there were other culture problems in that place (who knew!) and I did not stay there very long. I feel sad for people who don't have privilege to just quite and find another job when their employer makes unreasonable demands like the one here though.
- bitwize 6y ago
  I lasted 3 weeks at a place that opened by asking me to sign a contract giving them rights to use my name, face, and voice "for marketing purposes" which is about 3 weeks longer than I anticipated to last after I said no.
UweSchmidt 6y ago
Technology rapidly increases the potential to gather and evaluate information about employees, increasing all sorts of pressure first on the lower caste of society, increasingly also for HN-type jobs. We need strong limits on employee surveillance, including transparency to the employee what information has been gathered and a fundamental understanding that people can act 'normal' during their workday: Having an occasional random break, an extra 2 minutes in the bathroom or a short private conversation with a coworker.
Lendal 6y ago
In a way this app is better for the employee, because the alternative is to have the employee punch a time card. In my wife's case, her time card machine is a web page. She has to start up a computer, sign in to the computer, sign in to the web page, and punch the virtual time clock. Some days she has been working 30 minutes before she starts getting paid. Same thing happens in reverse at the end of the day. So she must work a significant amount of unpaid time each day because the process of clocking in and out is itself so time-consuming.
- newsbinator 6y ago
  A puppeteer script could solve that problem. You could have her phone ping a webhook (via Shortcuts on iPhone, for example) when she enters her work location, which then fires the puppeteer script to sign into the web page and punch the virtual time clock. And of course the reverse when she leaves.
chriswarbo 6y ago
At a previous employer we would only push changes to production when all regions were outside office hours, which ended up being around 3AM for us. Only a few people had access to push changes, which they did from home (run deploy script, go through a checklist of what should have changed, run revert script if there's a problem). They'd get paid for being on-call, and used an authentication app to access our systems. One day my boss asked if I would install this authentication app on my phone, so I would be able to push changes. I refused, stating that my phone is my private property. This resulted in quite a long conversation, with reassurances about security, etc. but I didn't budge. At one point they stated that my "argument wouldn't work" if it was on a company-provided phone. I completely agreed and said that would be fine, which seemed to surprise them. I don't think it had even occurred to them that I was being honest: I didn't want to install random things on my phone. I wasn't making up some excuse to avoid being on call in the early hours. (Of course, I also wasn't going to suggest a way to end up on call in the early hours!)
- Forge36 6y ago
  I'll install anything my employer wants on my phone provided they've provided me with the phone :) How did your situation work out?
  - thomasahle 6y ago
    Anything? What about software that continuously records everything you say and sends it to your employer? If we're suddently ok with all kinds of intrusions, just because we got agree phone, that seems like a bad deal.
    - NathanielK 6y ago
      If it's not your personal phone, you can just turn the work phone off when you do not want to be spied on.
    - Forge36 5y ago
      As another response says: turn off phone is an option. Leave in another room. Note: I didn't say I'd carry this phone with me 100% of the time OR keep it turned on. These are good secondary rules to discuss. (Tangent: how do I know my work computer doesn't already do this?)
indymike 6y ago
One of the best moves I've seen a cleaning service company make is provide a pre-paid smartphone to employees (and pay the bill if they worked over 15 hours per week). They had two problems: employees would get their personal phones shut off for non-payment, and they had push back on installing their mobile app. The shut offs were costing the company a lot of money because when they needed an extra person on a shift or someone didn't show up they couldn't reach the employee. Providing a phone also reduced turnover by about 14%.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
korethr 6y ago
I know someone who works for one of the major US pizza chains. He was faced with a similar request. At first, it was just a polite request. Then it became a condition of employment. He rightly did not want a pizza corporation tracking his every move 24x7. His solution was to buy a 2nd phone to be his 'work phone'. Said work phone gets left in the vehicle he delivers pizzas with, and gets turned on and off with the start and end of his shift. His position being that if his employer requires his location data as a condition of employement, then his employer will have only that location data relevant to his duties. I can understand why a pizza chain or other business that delivers food would want this info. How often has it been that you've ordered a pizza, or Chinese, or tacos, and found yourself wondering, "Where the hell is my food? I'm hungry _now_." With the tracking of delivery persons, you can pull your magic rectangle out of your pocket and see that, oh -- the driver is stuck at that one intersection where the thrice-damned stoplight takes at least 10 minutes to cycle -- the same light constantly camped by traffic cops who issue tickets to everyone who does an illegal turn leave the intersection for an alternate route. However, not everyone has the means to do what my friend did -- buy a second phone. And people are right to worry about how their off-the-clock location data will be abused and fall into malicious hands. I suspect we're going to see more and more employers pushing towards mandating location tracking, even ones with less legit business needs than food delivery. I can only hope we'll see pushback against that.
- briffle 6y ago
  Just think about Uber and Lyft. the core of their business is to track your exact location, so they can route you to the closest pickup. On your personal device, since your a contractor, not an employee.
  - darkwizard42 6y ago
    To be fair, you can change your settings to make sure you only share location data when the app is open... which makes sense for this kind of service. You also don't even need to allow location at all if you don't want but then adding your pickup location and destination become very difficult (probably designed to be that way).
annexrichmond 6y ago
My mom was also not thrilled when her union (she works for Canada Post) made it mandatory for them to carry tracking devices
sharken 6y ago
It seems like a very lazy way for the employer to check if the employees are doing their work. That relationship must build on trust and in this case that trust is not there. Sad that the only way to show you disagree is to quit, the workers union should have been able to remove the monitoring requirement.
mLuby 6y ago
Like animal sacrifice, worker surveillance is a lever the manager can pull to feel and appear in control. Okay that's a little harsh. It's more like drilling into someone's skull: it might work, but probably not the reasons you think ("to excise the evil spirits!") and there are almost certainly less harmful, more effective techniques you just don't know about yet. When we can reliably break Goodhart's Law (metrics that are targets aren't good metrics) maybe we'll outgrow our primitive hiring and performance rituals. Speaking of, since the metric is now "moves around the building," do security guards and custodians ever carry the other's trackers for a while? Perhaps there are "custodial red teams" with orders to dirty or disable something and see how long it takes to be restored.
phibz 6y ago
My response to this request would be "I do not have a smart phone for work." On the few occasions I've been asked to be on call for a job this has been my reply. It usually gets a "okay we will provide you with a phone," which is a better solution. Then I can choose when and where to turn it on and issues with the device are their responsibility.
Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 6y ago
Kind of surprised almost no comment (no comment I've seen, at the time of writing of course) takes into account the circumstances stated in the very first sentence of the article. The job was partly about _disinfecting surfaces_ in _schools_ in the midst of a _pandemic_ ; I'm not saying that makes it excusable, or that this case shouldn't have been dealt with better, but in the context of governmental contract tracing apps, lockdowns, constant and various limitations put on freedom of civilians in order to fight the pandemic, I think we can see how even a good willed employer might (wrongly) feel entitled to demand such a thing. Privacy in the midst of emergencies (we can debate the exact scope of the emergency at hand of course) can be a slippery thing.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  That makes it worse; location tracking replaces more effective means of measuring job performance (like actually inspecting things in person), and hence reduces the confidence that surfaces are being properly disinfected. (Albeit probably not by much, since anyone who thinks location tracking is a good idea probably wasn't doing proper inspections anyway.) > Privacy in the midst of emergencies [...] can be a slippery thing. No. In privacy, as in computational complexity, the worse case is the single most important non-aggregate measure, and the second most important measure period, after average case.
agustif 6y ago
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
acomjean 6y ago
One of the weird things is how often you are tracked just by the building sensors. Your phone really track you but there are other ways. In the Isabella Stewart Gardener heist documentary they looked at when the motion sensors where triggered in each part of the museum (this was in the 1990s) to get a sense of how long the thieves were in the building and where they went. When I worked at a home power monitoring company (monitoring by circuit breaker), we could tell very clearly that no one was home at my bosses house when he was on vacation (his house was one of our test locations). It was a little wierd. A higher up got was told by their spouse when he noted she was home early and she asked how he knew (he was monitoring the power usage). that he could keep his toys but don't talk to her about it. Someone wondered if they should talk to the dog walker about how the walk was really short on tuesday.. We switched to commercial monitoring thankfully.
cwkoss 6y ago
It should be illegal for employers to request employees install anything on their personally owned devices or to retaliate against employees if they don't. Her employer could pay for another phone that she keeps at the school to use as a timecard/geofence - but I'd imagine a shitty employer that wants to implement this sort of system is only willing because they can mandate free use of employee property they do not own.
azinman2 6y ago
What no one (few?) are mentioning is that the geofence mechanisms on phone is not reliable enough to do time tracking like this. For power reasons it might be seldom activated or woken up.. could many many minutes after arrival or departure, and that's assuming that the bounds weren't tight enough that it requires a higher-accuracy GPS mode which might take even longer to get that data (since it's opportunistic on other location requests). It would help if the employees used a mapping application to get directions to work, as then high-accuracy location would be on and triggered, but that's not obvious to ordinary people... and not likely to be used on your usual routes either. In this respect the app is kind of selling snake oil with high consequences. Employers would be far better off with the clock in/out that has existed forever.
kazinator 6y ago
Download it onto a device that you leave in the perimeter when you take your little absence? Doh. The app tracks where the device is, not where you are.
qwertox 6y ago
No problem if the employer provides the "phone" and restricts the usage to the time and place where you are doing the work you are getting payed for. Then it's even ok to track me down to the meter in real-time. With no obligation to take it along with you to the restroom or to keep in on you while you're on a break. Not like a short normal coffee/smoking break, but when you're officially clocked out. Install something on my phone? Definitely not.
nobodyandproud 6y ago
I thought this was the US at first, but I see this crazy has spread to our neighbor.

458 points by docdeek 6y ago

type0 6y ago

Why didn't they suggested to chip her, you know like some modern sheep farmers do. The APP dystopia is APPalling.

shadowgovt 6y ago
I believe you're being humorous, but this has come up in the past. One employer in Wisconsin did it to 100 employees (https://trainingindustry.com/articles/learning-technologies/microchipping-employees-a-rising-trend-in-the-future-of-work/ https://trainingindustry.com/articles/learning-technologies/...), though they did not make it a condition of continued employment. Some states have made it illegal. The explosion of smartphone technology has made chipping an infeasibly expensive solution in comparison; it hasn't dampened employer desire to do things like this.
- rideontime 6y ago
  > Microchips can also reduce health care costs for employers by tracking factors such as sleep duration, blood pressure and activity levels. With this information, microchips can make recommendations on how employees can improve their health, says Dan Lohrmann, chief security officer and chief strategist for Security Mentor, Inc., and author of “Virtual Integrity: Faithfully Navigating the Brave New Web.” What a load of horseshit. How does an implanted RFID tag provide anything but an employee badge that you can't lose?
  - closetohome 6y ago
    It doesn't. The authors don't seem to know the difference between an RFID tag and a microchip.
matheusmoreira 6y ago
Why not strap an employee monitoring device to her ankle? :)

gambiting 6y ago

" telling employees to download an app on their personal phones that would check their location and ensure they were working their scheduled hours." That's 100% illegal on this side of the pond at least, if the company wants an employee to use an app they can provide a company phone. Then sure, whatever, she could switch the business phone off after hours, no problem at all.

skynet-9000 6y ago
Or just leave it on her desk at work. She could be working 24x7! If anything, this makes work hours fraud even easier.
kaiju0 6y ago
Company is responsible to provide the hardware. The only issue I have is the use of personal equipment.
- nowherebeen 6y ago
  Yes, asking employees to put spyware on their personal phone is crossing a line.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  This should be the answer. If the company requires the use of an "app" as a condition for doing a job, it should also provide a device that can run such an app. Is the janitor also required to bring her own mop from home to use on the job?
barsonme 6y ago
> That's 100% illegal on this side of the pond at least Interestingly enough the app is built by a company in the UK.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  If I recall correctly we also produce a lot of medicinal cannabis despite it still being pretty much illegal and as good as not recognized as a treatment for anything. The UK is a rich man's country

piokoch 6y ago

I think this is not something bad in itself - such practice is well known, for instance truck drivers are being tracked routinely and nobody makes a big fuss about that. But this is unacceptable: "telling employees to download an app on their personal phones that would check their location and ensure they were working their scheduled hours." Why someone is obliged to install something on a private phone? What if someone does not have smartphone, what if that phone will stop working, who is to blame, who is responsible for fixing it, how quickly - will an employee sign SLA for fixing the phone? Employer should provide a phone for an employee and then whatever employer wants can be installed there. If something does not work, well, it is up to employer to provide support.

hombre_fatal 6y ago
Personnel location crosses a line to me. If you want to track location, put the locator on company property like the cleaning cart that custodians push around.
- neaden 6y ago
  This might be legal, but it's still bad management. If you don't trust your employees and you don't think you can evaluate the results of their work, in this case if things are clean, that's on you as a manager to figure out. Tying it in to the process like this and you end up getting false flags when they spend a long time cleaning a mess, or reward them for not cleaning sufficiently to hit their movement metrics.
  - michaelt 6y ago
    A small minority of work can't easily be directly evaluated. If I hire a security patrol company, and they contract to provide a patrol that will visit twice a night and walk around the building, nonperformance would be almost undetectable.
    - neaden 6y ago
      There may be cases sure, but this isn't one of them.

elzbardico 6y ago

I quit a job when after hired they wanted me to use hub staff. I tried for a while, and it is an incredibly hostile piece of software. After some stressful events with it I said: I don't need this s*it and asked to leave. Mind you, I don't care if a company decides to spy on his workers using tools like Hubstaff, but they should be upfront about it during recruiting so both me and the company don't waste our time.

sneak 6y ago

As a general rule, I don't install apps on my phone to complete most tasks. I have a few preselected e2e apps I use, but there is so much spyware in the App Store I am reluctant to engage with most apps. I have a separate burner phone exclusively for food delivery and uber. Beyond that, when a product or service tells me I need to install an app: I just don't. The more of us that take this approach, the easier it becomes over time for people like this person to refuse.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

windex 6y ago

A lot of jobs seem like modern slavery. Rather than focus on the deliverable, managers and people who pay money focus more on the "controlling someone" aspect. Tech has enabled this in a big way.

simple_phrases 6y ago
"Slavery with extra steps" often comes to mind.
- DC1350 6y ago
  It’s slavery as a service. Great for saving costs because you only pay for the time that you actually use, and you can outsource the maintenance of the service to the provider. If real slavery was still legal it wouldn’t even be used because the paycheque to paycheque employee model is so much more cost efficient.
  - simple_phrases 6y ago
    Yeah, you need to feed, house and give free healthcare to slaves. That's not happening any time soon.
    - drummer 6y ago
      It's coming. "You will own nothing and be happy."
      - asdff 6y ago
        I wonder what it is going to look like when finally every single dollar you have is sucked up automatically by the month. The scales tip by the year. People in major cities are already paying 50% of their wages to their landlord alone. That's a degenerate economy, not a productive one. Eventually we will reach an equilibrium where there will be just enough vultures out there to eat exactly how many slices there are left in the pie. Complete extraction of 'disposable' income will be achieved this century. For working people in major cities, some are already being completely extracted like this, having to work multiple jobs to keep a roof overhead and bellies fed with no time to do something that isn't low skilled labor for capital.

kevwil 6y ago

Good for her. My phone, my rules. If a smartphone app is how the company wants to operate, that's fine, but they should provide the hardware.

LinuxBender 6y ago

If your employer required this, would you comply? [Edited from Would Google and Facebook employees comply]

NegativeLatency 6y ago
No
shadowgovt 6y ago
You previously asked about Google and Facebook employees. If you connect your Android phone to your corporate Google account, you will be required to install the corp monitoring software suite, which (among other things) includes both location tracking and nuke-from-orbit features. The company does encourage you to configure your phone properly to keep your private info in a separate non-corp account to minimize undesired data leakage, since the corp side of things is assumed to be observable for security and corporate policy reasons (I can't remember right now if the nuke-from-orbit would wipe the private side of the phone's install also). You can choose not to do this, though it will probably limit your career prospects in the long run (especially if you're SRE and need a convenient notification solution for when you're on-call). Although, honestly, if one doesn't trust Google's handling of private information, one should probably re-think one's employment relationship with them. Anecdotally from my own observation, plenty of employees comply because they trust Google's handling of everyone's private info, including their own (and that's even given the understanding that Google's access to one's "private" info when one is working as an employee on corporate tasks can be more open... They won't snoop your personal Gmail account, but they absolutely reserve the right to investigate your corporate one, for example).
- silicon2401 6y ago
  > You can choose not to do this, though it will probably limit your career prospects in the long run (especially if you're SRE and need a convenient notification solution for when you're on-call). If a company wants me to be on-call or do any kind of mobile work, they can give me a phone. I let this slide at one job because it was a unicorn where I actually loved the job, but from then I've been able to get corporate phones and it's been key.

shadowgovt 6y ago

I strongly suspect that if this isn't a direction society wants to go, we're going to have to pass laws constraining employers from requiring this sort of thing. In the US at least, I'm not aware of any law that restricts this kind of requirement at present, and many states basically allow an employer to fire an employee for any type of (non-protected-class) non-compliance with policy.

gumby 6y ago

Hourly pay is part of the problem. The school is hiring agency X to get certain tasks accomplished (have people come in in the morning to find empty rubbish bins, clean floors and toilets, etc). They pay a fixed fee for this service. But the agency pays by the hour rather than "by the piece." They clearly estimate a cost per day; if someone can do the job in less time (or more time) should it matter? I think it's OK if employees have to check in that they were there at all (early diagnosis that the customer will be unhappy / first line of defense for an unhappy customer). Security guard evidence of walking around has been accepted for decades. But I don't think custodians need this high level of resolution. It doesn't lead to a good place for employee or employer.

_carbyau_ 6y ago
I would argue that hourly vs task pay is a bigger issue in so many workplaces. I think "hourly" is partly a reassurance. 1. Management then doesn't have to specify exactly what tasks are covered, to avoid workers advising "I don't get paid for that." 2. employees are able to say "Well, I was there, but without the tools/bureaucratic-approvals I couldn't do anything." There has to be a sensible middle ground surely.

yardie 6y ago

This policy wasn't instituted by the school but by the custodial contractor. Also, these kind of traditional gig jobs are extremely cutthroat. Like I don't even see why the employer would even bother. If the worker didn't do the job the contractee would complain, a new crew would be assigned, and the old crew may get fired or sent to a different site.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>if the worker didn't do the job the contractee would complain, a new crew would be assigned, and the old crew may get fired or sent to a different site. Yes, that's normally how this works. And that's how this works at the low end. But when you're the custodial/landscaping/whatever body shop for a school/highfalutin office park/etc. your value ad is in the image. These types of body shops do all sorts of stupid things to basically broadcast the image that they hire the good poors and not the dirty poors. E.g. they'll hand out uniforms with collars, only hire people who speak English and are free of tattoos, etc. etc. This tracking app BS is just a way for them to add "look, we're accountable, you can track your contractors with an app" to their website so that some Karen with the company card is more likely to call them up and buy their services. It's not about getting the job done more efficiently. It's about projecting an image to the customer.

pluc 6y ago

Why are they calling those "tattleware" and not spyware?

Mordisquitos 6y ago
Probably because the term "spyware" is already widely used for software which surreptitiously spies on the user without their knowledge, which is not the case here. Though I agree that "tattleware" is not a very good name. What about "jailerware" or "bigbrotherware"?
- pluc 6y ago
  Doesn't this fit your description of "spyware"?
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    They're defining "spyware" in part as requiring that (at least by design) you don't know ahead of time that it's spying on you. (Whereas the location-monitoring app openly admits that it violates your privacy rights.) That's arguably not a very good definition, but it's certainly a definition you could choose to use for a word.

andrew_v4 6y ago

At my last employer, we were asked to install some kind of authentication app (that wanted permission to access all kinds of files, peripherals, etc on the phone) I just told them I didn't have a compatible device - it's not so far fetched that people don't have an android or iphone. In the end they provided a clumsy web based workaround to do the same thing. Outside of tech, I can imagine many people, like the one in this story, are at a disadvantage because they don't know they can plausibly say they don't have a compatible phone, they don't know how to navigate a complicated workaround, and they may be afraid of losing their job.

_jal 6y ago
> I can imagine many people [...] are at a disadvantage Yes, power differentials matter a lot. I have quit a job over things I considered overly intrusive, but a lot of people don't have that freedom. For that matter, I now keep a separate work phone. My employer doesn't require anything I object to, but just keeping all work apps off my phone was one consideration when I got it. But that's a big expense for a lot of people.

smitty1e 6y ago

So Dr. Strangelove: "You can't have privacy here; this is the land of the free!" We badly need to find a suitable level of tracking that is less than 100%, or the whole world is a tarted-up game reservation.

24bug47 6y ago
Welcome to 5G...

modzu 6y ago

replace the human race with robots

noxer 6y ago

In a weird twist everyone with a sense of privacy has a windows phone. /s

drewzero1 6y ago
Several years ago my brother got a windows phone so that he had an excuse when people asked him to install apps. It worked very well for him and I'm considering replacing my feature phone with a PinePhone partially for the same reason.
- noxer 6y ago
  That exactly the reason why I have a windows phone. Not that I would use it but I can show it if needed.
  - drewzero1 6y ago
    Yeah, people keep asking me to download their apps, but they stop asking when I pull out my feature phone and slide out the keyboard. I'm going to miss that a little.

jb775 6y ago

This should be illegal. The crazy thing tho is this tracking is currently possible to do within any building by measuring reflected wifi signals. I think that's the next wave of privacy concerns when we need to worry about privacy via relative physical measurements not able to be "locked".

justin_oaks 6y ago

Is it a requirement to own a personal smart phone compatible with the app in order to get/keep the job? I'm not sure why a physical "clock in, clock out" solution couldn't be used instead. Or have a shared terminal/tablet/phone where people clock in and clock out.

justin_oaks 6y ago

I once had a coworker who refused to install a two-factor code generator (such as Google Authenticator, but there a dozens of alternatives) on his personal phone. I told him that he could generate codes any other way he likes, but the personal phone would be easiest. He wouldn't have lost his job but he wouldn't be able to gain production access, which required two-factor codes. He grudgingly installed a two-factor app. I'm sympathetic to the idea of "don't make me install stuff on my phone", but when it can be one of several apps, and the sole purpose of the app is retain a cryptographic key and run some hashes on it... I lose most of my sympathy. I suppose it'd be nice if that employer (I no longer work there) provided a device to generate the two factor codes, but I can understand why they don't.

Lev1a 6y ago
> I suppose it'd be nice if that employer (I no longer work there) provided a device to generate the two factor codes, but I can understand why they don't. I mean... aren't there quite literally devices whose sole purpose is to generate 2FA codes? Something with a form factor similar to a small keyfob? I do know these exist but I've personally never seen one "in the flesh". Also I can only imagine these (as a singular solution for all relevant employees) would probably also be easier to administer than a wild growth of different 2FA apps, most likely on different OSs and even different versions of those OSs, while over the years the churn of employees means the variation gets ever larger.
- unreal37 6y ago
  I used to have to carry around an RSA keyfob to be able to deploy code to production! I've had a few of those at different jobs! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_SecurID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_SecurID I've never had a job that required "Google Authenticator" on my personal phone. I guess I stopped working for other people long before that became the main 2fa method. That might be a step too far.
ev1 6y ago
I find this totally reasonable, especially since you can pick what app you want to install, and _it's actually useful for stuff outside of work_. For example, Okta Verify or Duo I would absolutely demand a separate phone for paid for by work - they are remotely monitorable/controllable more than local hashing. But you should be generating TOTP codes for your personal accounts too!

24bug47 6y ago

"We need to take a pause … before we go down some path of being tracked all day, every day, wherever we are." Isn't it neat how we act like this is not already happening by governments, businesses, and employers? As if we have a choice to make right now whether we'd like to live in a world under "mass surveillance"?

rideontime 6y ago
My employer isn't tracking me "all day, every day, wherever I am." Is yours?
- 24bug47 6y ago
  Only to the extent they are able. But you and I are being tracked regardless, by hundreds/thousands of other entities, commercial and government, to the extent they are able. 5G/IoT is the latest weapon in their arsenal.

nophone2134 6y ago

Reminds how in one of my previous jobs I was the only engineer out there with a work-issued phone. This wasn't some early-phase startup with 10 people on board - rather an unicorn getting ready for the IPO. I actually got into argument with my boss a few days before I started, as I did not want to install stuff on my personal phone (it wasn't spyware, but still). It's really an "achievement" when I think about this now - they've managed to burn my goodwill and demoralize me even before I started. Why should I care about this job if you start by invading my privacy from day minus one? Going to the office on my first day I was 50% convinced it will be also the last. I wasn't much worried about this perspective; I'm in really good spot career wise. Ultimately they've agreed to give me a work phone. However, this situation left a pretty bad taste. Turned out there were other culture problems in that place (who knew!) and I did not stay there very long. I feel sad for people who don't have privilege to just quite and find another job when their employer makes unreasonable demands like the one here though.

bitwize 6y ago
I lasted 3 weeks at a place that opened by asking me to sign a contract giving them rights to use my name, face, and voice "for marketing purposes" which is about 3 weeks longer than I anticipated to last after I said no.

UweSchmidt 6y ago

Technology rapidly increases the potential to gather and evaluate information about employees, increasing all sorts of pressure first on the lower caste of society, increasingly also for HN-type jobs. We need strong limits on employee surveillance, including transparency to the employee what information has been gathered and a fundamental understanding that people can act 'normal' during their workday: Having an occasional random break, an extra 2 minutes in the bathroom or a short private conversation with a coworker.

Lendal 6y ago

In a way this app is better for the employee, because the alternative is to have the employee punch a time card. In my wife's case, her time card machine is a web page. She has to start up a computer, sign in to the computer, sign in to the web page, and punch the virtual time clock. Some days she has been working 30 minutes before she starts getting paid. Same thing happens in reverse at the end of the day. So she must work a significant amount of unpaid time each day because the process of clocking in and out is itself so time-consuming.

newsbinator 6y ago
A puppeteer script could solve that problem. You could have her phone ping a webhook (via Shortcuts on iPhone, for example) when she enters her work location, which then fires the puppeteer script to sign into the web page and punch the virtual time clock. And of course the reverse when she leaves.

chriswarbo 6y ago

At a previous employer we would only push changes to production when all regions were outside office hours, which ended up being around 3AM for us. Only a few people had access to push changes, which they did from home (run deploy script, go through a checklist of what should have changed, run revert script if there's a problem). They'd get paid for being on-call, and used an authentication app to access our systems. One day my boss asked if I would install this authentication app on my phone, so I would be able to push changes. I refused, stating that my phone is my private property. This resulted in quite a long conversation, with reassurances about security, etc. but I didn't budge. At one point they stated that my "argument wouldn't work" if it was on a company-provided phone. I completely agreed and said that would be fine, which seemed to surprise them. I don't think it had even occurred to them that I was being honest: I didn't want to install random things on my phone. I wasn't making up some excuse to avoid being on call in the early hours. (Of course, I also wasn't going to suggest a way to end up on call in the early hours!)

Forge36 6y ago
I'll install anything my employer wants on my phone provided they've provided me with the phone :) How did your situation work out?
- thomasahle 6y ago
  Anything? What about software that continuously records everything you say and sends it to your employer? If we're suddently ok with all kinds of intrusions, just because we got agree phone, that seems like a bad deal.
  - NathanielK 6y ago
    If it's not your personal phone, you can just turn the work phone off when you do not want to be spied on.
  - Forge36 5y ago
    As another response says: turn off phone is an option. Leave in another room. Note: I didn't say I'd carry this phone with me 100% of the time OR keep it turned on. These are good secondary rules to discuss. (Tangent: how do I know my work computer doesn't already do this?)

indymike 6y ago

One of the best moves I've seen a cleaning service company make is provide a pre-paid smartphone to employees (and pay the bill if they worked over 15 hours per week). They had two problems: employees would get their personal phones shut off for non-payment, and they had push back on installing their mobile app. The shut offs were costing the company a lot of money because when they needed an extra person on a shift or someone didn't show up they couldn't reach the employee. Providing a phone also reduced turnover by about 14%.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

korethr 6y ago

I know someone who works for one of the major US pizza chains. He was faced with a similar request. At first, it was just a polite request. Then it became a condition of employment. He rightly did not want a pizza corporation tracking his every move 24x7. His solution was to buy a 2nd phone to be his 'work phone'. Said work phone gets left in the vehicle he delivers pizzas with, and gets turned on and off with the start and end of his shift. His position being that if his employer requires his location data as a condition of employement, then his employer will have only that location data relevant to his duties. I can understand why a pizza chain or other business that delivers food would want this info. How often has it been that you've ordered a pizza, or Chinese, or tacos, and found yourself wondering, "Where the hell is my food? I'm hungry _now_." With the tracking of delivery persons, you can pull your magic rectangle out of your pocket and see that, oh -- the driver is stuck at that one intersection where the thrice-damned stoplight takes at least 10 minutes to cycle -- the same light constantly camped by traffic cops who issue tickets to everyone who does an illegal turn leave the intersection for an alternate route. However, not everyone has the means to do what my friend did -- buy a second phone. And people are right to worry about how their off-the-clock location data will be abused and fall into malicious hands. I suspect we're going to see more and more employers pushing towards mandating location tracking, even ones with less legit business needs than food delivery. I can only hope we'll see pushback against that.

briffle 6y ago
Just think about Uber and Lyft. the core of their business is to track your exact location, so they can route you to the closest pickup. On your personal device, since your a contractor, not an employee.
- darkwizard42 6y ago
  To be fair, you can change your settings to make sure you only share location data when the app is open... which makes sense for this kind of service. You also don't even need to allow location at all if you don't want but then adding your pickup location and destination become very difficult (probably designed to be that way).

annexrichmond 6y ago

My mom was also not thrilled when her union (she works for Canada Post) made it mandatory for them to carry tracking devices

sharken 6y ago

It seems like a very lazy way for the employer to check if the employees are doing their work. That relationship must build on trust and in this case that trust is not there. Sad that the only way to show you disagree is to quit, the workers union should have been able to remove the monitoring requirement.

mLuby 6y ago

Like animal sacrifice, worker surveillance is a lever the manager can pull to feel and appear in control. Okay that's a little harsh. It's more like drilling into someone's skull: it might work, but probably not the reasons you think ("to excise the evil spirits!") and there are almost certainly less harmful, more effective techniques you just don't know about yet. When we can reliably break Goodhart's Law (metrics that are targets aren't good metrics) maybe we'll outgrow our primitive hiring and performance rituals. Speaking of, since the metric is now "moves around the building," do security guards and custodians ever carry the other's trackers for a while? Perhaps there are "custodial red teams" with orders to dirty or disable something and see how long it takes to be restored.

phibz 6y ago

My response to this request would be "I do not have a smart phone for work." On the few occasions I've been asked to be on call for a job this has been my reply. It usually gets a "okay we will provide you with a phone," which is a better solution. Then I can choose when and where to turn it on and issues with the device are their responsibility.

Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL 6y ago

Kind of surprised almost no comment (no comment I've seen, at the time of writing of course) takes into account the circumstances stated in the very first sentence of the article. The job was partly about _disinfecting surfaces_ in _schools_ in the midst of a _pandemic_ ; I'm not saying that makes it excusable, or that this case shouldn't have been dealt with better, but in the context of governmental contract tracing apps, lockdowns, constant and various limitations put on freedom of civilians in order to fight the pandemic, I think we can see how even a good willed employer might (wrongly) feel entitled to demand such a thing. Privacy in the midst of emergencies (we can debate the exact scope of the emergency at hand of course) can be a slippery thing.

a1369209993 6y ago
That makes it worse; location tracking replaces more effective means of measuring job performance (like actually inspecting things in person), and hence reduces the confidence that surfaces are being properly disinfected. (Albeit probably not by much, since anyone who thinks location tracking is a good idea probably wasn't doing proper inspections anyway.) > Privacy in the midst of emergencies [...] can be a slippery thing. No. In privacy, as in computational complexity, the worse case is the single most important non-aggregate measure, and the second most important measure period, after average case.

agustif 6y ago

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

acomjean 6y ago

One of the weird things is how often you are tracked just by the building sensors. Your phone really track you but there are other ways. In the Isabella Stewart Gardener heist documentary they looked at when the motion sensors where triggered in each part of the museum (this was in the 1990s) to get a sense of how long the thieves were in the building and where they went. When I worked at a home power monitoring company (monitoring by circuit breaker), we could tell very clearly that no one was home at my bosses house when he was on vacation (his house was one of our test locations). It was a little wierd. A higher up got was told by their spouse when he noted she was home early and she asked how he knew (he was monitoring the power usage). that he could keep his toys but don't talk to her about it. Someone wondered if they should talk to the dog walker about how the walk was really short on tuesday.. We switched to commercial monitoring thankfully.

cwkoss 6y ago

It should be illegal for employers to request employees install anything on their personally owned devices or to retaliate against employees if they don't. Her employer could pay for another phone that she keeps at the school to use as a timecard/geofence - but I'd imagine a shitty employer that wants to implement this sort of system is only willing because they can mandate free use of employee property they do not own.

azinman2 6y ago

What no one (few?) are mentioning is that the geofence mechanisms on phone is not reliable enough to do time tracking like this. For power reasons it might be seldom activated or woken up.. could many many minutes after arrival or departure, and that's assuming that the bounds weren't tight enough that it requires a higher-accuracy GPS mode which might take even longer to get that data (since it's opportunistic on other location requests). It would help if the employees used a mapping application to get directions to work, as then high-accuracy location would be on and triggered, but that's not obvious to ordinary people... and not likely to be used on your usual routes either. In this respect the app is kind of selling snake oil with high consequences. Employers would be far better off with the clock in/out that has existed forever.

kazinator 6y ago

Download it onto a device that you leave in the perimeter when you take your little absence? Doh. The app tracks where the device is, not where you are.

qwertox 6y ago

No problem if the employer provides the "phone" and restricts the usage to the time and place where you are doing the work you are getting payed for. Then it's even ok to track me down to the meter in real-time. With no obligation to take it along with you to the restroom or to keep in on you while you're on a break. Not like a short normal coffee/smoking break, but when you're officially clocked out. Install something on my phone? Definitely not.

nobodyandproud 6y ago

I thought this was the US at first, but I see this crazy has spread to our neighbor.