9 ms·
> 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 employe
by CivBase 6y ago
> 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.
Buy a scanner. Put it in somewhere the building which is accessible by employees (eg custodial office). Give each employee a unique, scannable card with which to identify themselves. Instruct employees to clock in and out by scanning the card.
Mission accomplished. No phones or location tracking necessary.
What this person's employer did should be illegal, and that extends to other industries as well. A shipping company can track their trailer or their shipments, but they shouldn't be allowed to track the truck driver himself.
- snow_mac 6y agoThis is something I've seen at places like Whole Foods. In the bathroom they have a digital card scanner. One day I saw an employee scan their ID, they said that they have to check on certain things every hour and scanning a badge in the bathroom tells their minders that "Hey, the bathroom was checked in on by an employee and thus should be in of good condition". I think something like that is fine and reasonable if your job is to move about a building.
- rrauenza 6y agoCorporate security has something like this as well - there are little button shaped things on the wall everywhere they scan with their device as they make their rounds.
- SllX 6y agoGenerally anywhere with security patrols, even outside some residential buildings and townhouses in San Francisco.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoI have a NFC app on my phone, read one of those buttons ... they left it unlocked, so I posted a message. Not sure anyone will read it, presumably they just pick up the location ID in an app. I guess someone could just clone the locations and sit in a chair and spoof it. Library books in my area use NFC, the tags weren't locked on the last book I checked. Probably not a security problem (ha!?), but you'd think the possibility of vandalism would cause them to be locked.
- ticviking 6y agoI've often wondered how often NFC is unlocked like that.
- HenryBemis 6y agoI've seen buildings where the buttons are 'burried' in a few mm 'deep' the wall, and painted over so that you don't notice them at all, the wall looks really smooth. The guards know where exactly the spots are, you see them waving their devices in a seemingly flat/blank wall, then the beep sounds, and they walk towards their next 'random' spot.
- xxpor 6y agoYep, those have been in retail stores forever. In the grocery store I worked in it was specifically for making sure there weren't hazards on the floor (like a broken jar that fell from a shelf) that someone could slip on and break their neck. It was required by their insurance.
- j16sdiz 6y agoIt is called "iButton" https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R3GRBD8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_K7RJXGPMP998QBB0GFEZ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R3GRBD8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_...
- dkdk8283 6y agoThat’s a temperature sensor.
- dheera 6y agoI think it's okay to track employees while on the clock for certain circumstances but that tracking should cease as soon as they are not on the clock. An app on a personal phone can violate this way too easily. The tagging system is a good way to do it and limit it to only being on the clock.
- SamBam 6y agoI'd rephrase: it's ok to monitor that the jobs are being performed, and sometimes this involves an employee doing something in a certain place at a certain time. Though highly-overlapping, this is not a 1:1 correspondence with "tracking employees." You may need to know that a security guard visited this station at 1:00 and this station at 1:30. You do not need to track whether he was in the bathroom five minutes longer today that yesterday.
- bluGill 6y agoA real guard needs to run a somewhat random schedule, otherwise attackers will figure out the pattern. I don't need to know how long you spend in the bathroom (unless it is excessive), that is just data that I happen to get by tracking to ensure there is enough randomness in your patterns. It should go without saying that guards need sufficient time to handle biology needs, and this varies a bit.
- dheera 6y agoIf you are so high profile that attackers are trying to profile guard movement patterns, you need more than 1 guard, and they can take turns using the bathroom.
- cosmodisk 6y agoBack at home I used to see a schedule on a wall in most toilets(shopping centres, some public buildings) where rows with time slots were filled with names and signatures to ensure constant cleaning every 15-30 min. Carrying a phone with a tracker is a complete BS.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y agoI worked retail in highschool during the 90s. It was exactly like this. Just because something is possible with modern tech doesn't mean it should be done or is better than bog simple stuff like a log book.
- HenryBemis 6y agoAs Meja sang some years back: it's all about the money (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcXMhwF4EtQ)(cute https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcXMhwF4EtQ)(cute song) Logbooks: someone needs to distribute them, collect them, read them, transfer the (many many many) written lines to a computer, validate the signature samples/writing style, etc. etc. An app that automates that in 2 mins is so much better. A solution could be: 1) give each employee a (corporate) cheap $100 android phone, 2) configure these to allow only 1-2 apps to 'escape' to the internet so the bandwidth is not wasted on updates or browsing, 3) provide a 1GB per year data plan, 4) ask them to switch on right before entering the 'site' and switch off right when they leave the 'site' 5) give them a monthly $5 subsidy to keep it charged.
- Amezarak 6y agoThey don’t need to do anything but distribute and maybe collect them. Typically they simply look at them periodically and make sure they’re being filled out, and only closely looked at if there’s some kind of incident.
- HenryBemis 6y agoYes and no. This would cover some of the functions. How about overtime? How about 'less time'? How about an extra Sudnay because game/football/concert/office-party? The HR of each company would need this data to adjust salaries. I am not discussing incidents and/or user-access-management (apologies if my above comment was misunderstood). I meant it for time-tracking purposes. An app where one can add an exception note "I had to pop to X shop to buy Y material" would also help document and approve. Geofencing requirement makes sense in some lines of work and a work-phone (switched on only the work-hours) is a reasonably 'invasive' tool.
- pas 6y agoSee also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchclock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchclock
- moistbar 6y agoI think most grocery stores have something similar. When I worked at Giant about 15 years ago, I used a self-contained scan gun (basically an overpriced Windows Mobile 5 PDA stapled onto a barcode scanner) when I had to do "the walk," which was the hourly store inspection. Decidedly lower-tech than even a badge reader, but it got the job done and my boss didn't have to know where I was during my time off.
- adolph 6y agoTo solve the problem, Burger-G contracted with a software consultant and commissioned a piece of software. The goal of the software was to replace the managers and tell the employees what to do in a more controllable way. Manna version 1.0 was born. https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
- crocodiletears 6y agoI honestly hate that story with a passion. Not because it's bad, it's actually very compelling. But it presents two very dystopian futures which I perceive to be antithetical to human and individual dignity, one which is as miserable as it is likely, and one that I find far more disturbing and undesirable which it presents as a Utopia, which I hope never has a chance to come to pass.
- GeoAtreides 6y agoI'm curious: would I be wrong to assume you're not of fan of the Culture, either? In case you haven't the series ignore me :)
- crocodiletears 6y agoI'm not familiar with the series. But after skimming a few articles on it, I don't think my distaste for Manna transfers. The Culture series seems to create a platonic ideal of a post-scarcity pseudo-anarchistic liberal society under technocratic governance, and explores its interactions with the outside world. Though the details of that society's implementation may be somewhat distasteful to me personally, it seems the author is more than willing to critique the society and its behavior from as good a faith a position as he took to create it. Manna doesn't do the same. SPOILERS FOR MANNA AHEAD Brain constructed the Australia Project as a desirable alternative to the corporatist dystopia of the United States - where the majority of the population has been rendered technologically obsolete, and are held in cheap public housing where they wait to die. Despite what he may claim, he writes the Australia Project less as an exploration, and more as a sales brochure. Brain breathlessly and uncritically describes the Australia Project as heaven on earth, or a 'luxury cruise'. In the process of doing so, he leaves little nuggets of text that suggest a much grimmer reality than he lets on at surface level. Luxury Cruise is an apt description. You may be there to relax, but the experience is purposeless without the contrast of your real life. The ship may be stocked to the gills, but when things go belly up it quickly becomes clear how constrained the ship's resources truly are. You may be free to have fun now, but upset the wrong person on staff or become even a minor nuisance, and you'll soon learn how autocratically the ship is actually ran. It's made quite clear that Australia cannot truly be considered a post-scarcity society. In AP, no individual's activities may exceed their allotment of resources (and certainly, there must be an allotment because one's resource consumption cannot come at the expense of another's) In AP, anyone may be free to create, make, or do whatever they want, but whatever they want is tightly constrained. No individual's activities may make anyone uncomfortable. This is reflected in Brain's description of the criminal justice system, where he describes automated 'referees' detaining or potentially pre-empting citizen's control over their own bodies in response to an emotional outburst in public, "mainly because no one wants to be around when it happens". He describes this as if it were desirable. If this is seen as a proportional response, I would be terrified for anyone who sought to do or say anything of real consequence. Finally, as evinced by my previous two examples: everything in Brain's world is on lease, down to your body. Once you're inside of the AP's network every sensation, sight, smell and action is recorded, analyzed, and mediated through it. Your permission to use your body may be revoked at the leisure of an algorithm perfectly enforcing complex rules of indeterminate (if ostensibly democratic) origin. This happens so often it seems, that it's regard as "sort of like a lifeguard yelling at you at the pool for something you thought was OK". Your privacy is forfeit, and it's quite clear that the closes thing one can come to owning anything in the AP is inside a virtual space. Somehow Brain treats this as an ideal future. If this is the best we can hope for, I would sooner be drafted into WWIII than experience it.
- ailun 6y agoThat’s something Whole Foods uses for the subcontracted cleaning crews, not the directly-hired employees. They laid off all their maintenance crews a year before Amazon bought them. It’s also not on the workers’ personal phones, they have some old phones that they keep at the store with the app already installed.
- irrational 6y agoAt my company, there are these black sensors on the walls around all the buildings. Security is supposed to patrol the buildings and they have to scan their badge at each sensor to show they were there.
- dghughes 6y agoWatchclocks have been used for over a century. Guards or watchmen on patrol had to be at a specific spot at a certain time to prove they were not asleep. They had to prove via the clock that they were at that location. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchclock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchclock
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoLOL. Just noticed we posted the same link ;-)
- dghughes 6y agoI wrote it at noon and never clicked reply until I was off work. I see another link too even earlier.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoStuff like this has also been around for decades. Detex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchclock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchclock) was a manufacturer of Watch clocks that used a key at the inspection stations to verify that someone had been to inspect that location at a certain point in time.
- mikeklaas 6y agoThis is partially due to liability: if someone slips on a wet spill and hurts themselves, Whole Foods is liable if they haven't been taking reasonable measures to clean up such spills in a timely fashion (1/hour). Scanning is a way to later prove that such cleaning was happening.
- derefr 6y agoDevil's advocate: I think the idea with the app isn't to figure out if you're in the building, but rather whether you're moving around within the building in a manner consistent with the fingerprint of doing your particular job. A janitor could clock in and then just sit around in the custodial storage area doing nothing, and a card-based system would be none the wiser. But the app would identify that as "not working." The app isn't to know whether you're on the clock; the app is a digital whip cracker to keep employees constantly working 100% of the time that they claim to be working. --- Which, in theory, wouldn't be a bad thing... if this was combined with a sufficient number of break-minutes per day, to be spent flexibly. Whenever you're not doing the "doing your job" movement pattern, the app could automatically mark you as being on break. If they calibrated the number of break-minutes to the actual average observed productivity of employees in each role across the industry, then the app would have a useful output — allowing employers to figure out who's doing less work than average. (And employees+unions could also use the data as evidence for uncompensated overtime disputes.) But of course such a system won't be used/configured that way. Employers will instead wrong-headedly assume that their employees should be capable of productive output 100% of the time that they're not on their 90 minutes per shift of legally-mandated break time; and then will randomly punish/fire employees for taking "extra" breaks, even when those "extra" breaks merely bring them to the industry average level of productivity.
- CivBase 6y agoA janitor certainly could clock in then sit around in the custodial storage area doing nothing. They could also clock in and wonder around the building doing nothing. If the concern is really whether they are doing their job, management can easily verify by just checking whether the job was done.
- derefr 6y agoYou presume management has the capability to judge the quality of the work. Janitorial work — like, say, being a sysadmin — doesn't necessarily result in instant visible problems if you just decide to skip work one day. The problems are probabilistic, and often consist of smaller problems that compound over time. In this sort of job, you can frequently "get away with" not doing your job for a few hours, at the expense of working a bit harder the rest of the day; you can sometimes even "get away with" not doing your job for a day or two, at the expense of likely having to do a bit of "fire-fighting" work when you get back, rather than only prophylactic maintenance work. In either case, your absence won't necessarily be noted, if you're not part of a team with a supervisor specifically attuned to the KPIs you're delivering on. In jobs where "when you're doing the job right, nobody notices", the reverse also applies: as long as nobody is noticing anything going wrong, then they assume you're doing your job.
- Lev1a 6y agoThe place where I did my internship used electronic keys that one would have to activate when coming into work each day (at least one of those little wall mounted stations (not much bigger than a fire alarm trigger) for that purpose on each floor in the stairwells). It would then stay active and capable of opening doors for ~8 hours, ie. a normal work day. Also, a nifty feature of these things as explained to me by the on-site guy dealing with electronics (including the management of these keys): these keys could be managed in different ways, e.g. grouped for departments, grunts vs. managers etc. AND the settings didn't have to be flashed to every single key or every single activation station, but instead flashed to one key (like the one of this employee) who then went around to a couple of stations and "activated" his key again, thereby transferring the updated/new setting(s) to the station which would then update every key inserted into it etc. etc. Meaning the key management was quite literally "viral".
- cwkoss 6y agoI bet they could produce 90% accurate data without any installations on personal phones, just watching for wifi beacons
- dzhiurgis 6y agoJust buy the data from telco providers - they already track your location by cell tower.
- twobitshifter 6y agoLow tech is the way to go. People want to equip electric cars with tracking devices to determine road taxes. It’s like they don’t realize each car has a yearly inspection and odometer reading. The added value of knowing exactly how many miles are driven in state or out of state will just be noise.
- peterburkimsher 6y agoI used to work for an IoT startup that is doing vehicle tracking. Along with the main market of rental cars, the client also wanted to track rural vehicles for off-road distances. Over a few months, I designed and implemented an algorithm for counting the distance travelled off-road. It took a TomTom road map of the whole country (not a cheap license fee), divided the trip into pairs of points, checked whether each segment intersected with or came within 10m of a road, and finally made a total of the distance. There were deviations (odometer compared to on road + off road straight line distance) but it was good enough to be usable, and we shipped it. It also generated reports for reclaiming road tax for off-road driving. In practice, the client realised that our $7 per vehicle per month fee for the service will only save them $2 or $3 in road taxes for their most off-road vehicle. Just because it's technically exciting doesn't make it financially logical.
- stevula 6y agoSchools can have a lot of different buildings and outdoor spaces. There’s nothing to stop an employee from scanning in, leaving campus, then coming back to scan out. Ethical questions aside, tracking their location is a much better way to see if they’re actually on-site throughout their shift.