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Big Tech call center workers face pressure to accept home surveillance
- teddyh 5y agohttps://dilbert.com/strip/2020-07-05 https://dilbert.com/strip/2020-07-05
- eloeffler 5y agoFunny that the site makes me agree to all the trackers before I can read the surveillance-critical comic strip :D
- anothernewdude 5y agoWhat a waste of money. If the markets were efficient these places would go out of business.
- f6v 5y agoEfficient or not, call center agent supply exceeds demand. There’re millions of liberal arts graduates who don’t have anywhere else to work.
- fogihujy 5y agoSo, you're saying a high labour supply justifies home surveillance of workers as well as their their families?
- golergka 5y agoUsage of the word "justify" implies that there's some objective "just" level of work relations that we can deduce that would be fair for everyone. I don't think that this universality exists. Some people are okay with this, some are not. Some companies want this, some do not. There are plenty of different employees and employers out there, and they can balance their respective wishes on a free market.
- t-writescode 5y agoThe kind of people that end up working in the kinds of call centers that do these activities are not the kind of people that experience a "free market" of employment. They're abused because they are unable to work elsewhere, so they tolerate it, no matter how soul wrenching it is, because they need money to live. Working at a call center is akin to emergency medical care, but for financial surviving.
- Guthur 5y agoWhy are they unable to work else where?
- fogihujy 5y agoI worked for a call center for a few years, first job once I was done with school. A lot of the people who were hired were simply shipped in by the local unemployment agency. After being unemployed for X days, the government simply offered to pay parts of their salaries for six months as a means to stimulate local employers to hiring more people. The result was that various firms like Teleperformance and the like placed call centres in areas of high unemployment, and thousands of people were put on the phone lines with insufficient training, made to work under sub-par conditions for six months, before getting promptly sacked for arbitrary reasons just before their probation period was over. These are just businesses abusing the system. Not accepting the job offers would have meant financial ruin. The people who are subjected to this usually have no other options available, and they're then run into the ground and promptly discarded once they were no longer useful.
- el-salvador 5y agoCall centers (in Central America at least) are the most readily available jobs that allow the worker to achieve a middle class lifestlye. Their entry level positions require only a High School degree and fluent English. And pay more than what a Master Degree could earn in other companies. For example, in El Salvador they pay twice than other jobs, always comply with overtime and night working hours payment rules, offer English improvement classes, University compensation, and offer private medical insurance as a benefit. This benefits are higher than what most small/mid businesses can offer. Employees don't have much choice, faced with the decision of turning on a webcam for a $800+ per month job + benefits, or working in another job for minimum wage for $340 per month (and working on site under CCTV)
- f6v 5y agoYou’re putting words in my mouth, don’t do that. I just explained why workforce oversupply gives employers the possibility to do things they do.
- fogihujy 5y agoI didn't intend to put words in your mouth. That was simply how I read it, and I asked for a confirmation. Thank you for clarifying.
- nonameiguess 5y agoThe cited workers in the article are in Colombia and Albania. I somewhat doubt they're liberal arts graduates or competing with liberal arts graduates. They're competing with whatever next recently failed war-torn state can produce enough passable English speakers once their own country starts to develop a real middle class that can demand things like not having surveillance cameras installed in their houses by their employers.
- suifbwish 5y agoIt’s not because they have a liberal arts degree, it’s also because their hobbies are not technically valuable to anyone. I hold a philosophy degree but I have been obsessed with computers my whole life and learned to code before I had any intention of doing it for a living which is what I do now. Too many people think school is the only way to do anything. That may have been true but now there are very few fields you cannot learn the information side of simply by spending time watching videos on the internet.
- danuker 5y agoIndeed. Why is it not enough to monitor the actual calls going through the system?
- wombatmobile 5y agoPresumably because the employer wants to intimidate the workers to extract more. Once an employee is surveilled, an unscrupulous boss gains all sorts of leverage that can be applied in all sorts of ways.
- tsjq 5y agowhy is this bad? there's a lot of personal / confidential info they deal with. and when they work in office, there are strict rules like no phones, no pen/pencil, etc at the work area.
- okokwhatever 5y agoEasy, because it's their home, not an office, not a place to be video recorded and studied by algorithms. If we don't understand this simple fact we are doomed.
- moritonal 5y agoSo I fully agree, but we have to acknowledge then that the same kind of work can't be done at the home? On the flip side as a customer I wouldn't want my personal data to just float about the country into people's homes with loose security?
- tsjq 5y ago>On the flip side as a customer I wouldn't want my personal data to just float about the country into people's homes with loose security? exactly this is my point, too.
- gambiting 5y agoAlso it's not an insurmountable problem - recently I was paying for something over the phone, and the person said "I'm currently working from home, so in order to take your payment I will have transfer you to an automated system". Done.
- vangelis 5y agoDo you work with PHI or PII? Should there be a webcam in the home of software developers with much more efficient access to that data? They can dump the entire customer database and sell it to spammers, can call center employees do that?
- White_Wolf 5y agoSure thing boss. As soon as you pay for an extension to the house I'll have that extra room that I can allow monitoring in. Tbh This sort of <insert rude word here> shouldn't be legal unless the company pays rent for said room that is turned into a work place(market price for the area). While not a lot can afford the extra room at least those that don't have a choice get a boost to help them move to bigger housing.
- pyrale 5y agoGiving the finger to such requests works well enough for software engineers, but most jobs don't have an equivalent bargaining position. That's why we need protective laws and regulations for the workers. What governments aren't allowed to do, companies should probably not be allowed to do either.
- MereInterest 5y ago> That's why we need protective laws and regulations for the workers. And unions! The collective bargaining position may be strong even if the individual bargaining position is weak.
- xtracto 5y agoExactly. This is Colombia or Mexico jobs what we are talking about here. If you dont want to get recorded then you are fired and 3 or 4 people in the hiring queue will get the job. My concern is that these teleperformance jobs have a huge voluntary rotation rate (people leaving the company). So I wonder how effective will this new surveillance policy be.
- Fnoord 5y ago> shouldn't be legal unless the company pays rent for said room that is turned into a work place(market price for the area) You're trying to make compromises which is dangerous if the opponent aims high to begin with, with an unreasonable take. Even that should not be legal, and it actually is not legal in The Netherlands to monitor employees like that. It has to be in proportion. For example, if laptops keep getting stolen at Friday afternoon, it makes sense to monitor who's there at that time, and use devices to catch the thief red handed. But it is not appropriate to force employees into Big Brother 2.0 with cameras and microphones. Right now, students are forced into such submission as well (via forced remote studying due to COVID), and I very much doubt it holds up in court.
- brainphreeze 5y agoPeople aren't going to like this take, but it's fairly simple from security point of view given that many companies have to adhere to security standards around "physical security", such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2. You either go back in to the office, where companies can ensure the security of their networks and environments, or you don't have a job. I don't agree with this, but in terms of security, when people are working from home there are standards that we simply cannot meet, which could potentially cost a small business large contracts. Scoping is important and these issues will have to be figured out now in the post-pandemic world.
- Freak_NL 5y agoISO 27001 does not prohibit working from home, at all. If a company decides that they cannot secure their work environment with people working from home, than that is on them. We passed our yearly ISO 270001 audit last month, and we all work from home most of the time until going to the office is reasonably possible again, and even then we will remain hybrid. In the end it doesn't really matter where someone is physically working from if they follow basic security precautions if you are in IT (unless you are doing national security type of things; most of us aren't of course), and ISO 27001 just wants to see that you have such policies in place and that risks are mitigated.
- ckdarby 5y agoThat is not the case at all. There have been plenty of companies before pandemic that had remote employees and or individuals who just travel frequently. You're able to be compliant even without being in the office. Most of the compliance is covered by < 5 mins auto lock, security updates turned on, VPN and a yubikey. Nearly everything else in these are documented processes and separation of roles and responsibilities.
- bryan_w 5y agoHow do you guard against someone in their home, taking a picture of your personal information when you call the call center?
- qwerty456127 5y agoAn employee is either performant or not, you can easily just look at the results of their work. Monitoring call center workers is particularly easy - you just record their calls. I have zero idea of how monitoring them, let alone their family visually can add any value. If somebody insisted to install a camera at my home I would let them and then work nude 100% time.
- sethammons 5y agoJust have your naked child run around sans diaper and now Apple's software will detect CP. now, will it be you or the employer who is flagged?
- jdubs 5y agoApple compares picture hashes against a db of known bad hashes.
- nonameiguess 5y agoI've put this is two replies, but I guess it needs to be at the top level so people who don't read the article might have a shot at seeing it. The people being interviewed and quoted in this article work in offshored customer support for Apple and Amazon in Albania and Colombia. Albania was a single-party communist state until 1995. Colombia was effectively a narco state until maybe a decade ago. They're both pretty fast growing now, but I don't think the root of these laborers' problems is they got a humanities degree in a STEM market, and the "market" for their labor may not be much more than this or go work for a local crime lord, who might pay better but definitely will not treat you better. It'd be nice if we as Americans or generally wealthy OECD westerners could be less provincial in our views of how labor deserves to be treated. They're not all in the same situation as us with the same options. When the program I work on told us we all need to have cameras on in meetings, I told them to pound dirt. I only half own this house, and if my wife wants to walk around naked, that's her prerogative. Don't like it, find someone else. Great for me, because I'm in a situation where they need me more than I need them. But I'm not going to act like that's a common situation globally, and these people are no less deserving of giving their families a right to privacy than I am. I don't know what to do about this from a policy perspective. Better labor laws are great and all, but the entire reason companies like Apple and Amazon contract out work like this to the lowest bidder who then hires in Albania is they don't need to adhere to US labor laws.
- 908B64B197 5y ago> It'd be nice if we as Americans or generally wealthy OECD westerners could be less provincial in our views of how labor deserves to be treated. They're not all in the same situation as us with the same options. OECD westerners gave themselves, and their children, options. They were hard earned.
- caseysoftware 5y agoI 100% get this one. A company has an obligation to protect their customers' data, due to GDPR and a variety of other privacy rules. If one of their people - employee or contractor - has access to customer data, the company must mitigate it being stolen. In an office environment, they could do that by limiting personal devices, barring notes and other information going out. When these positions become WFH - even with a company owned/managed device - they have an entire new class of threats to mitigate: personal devices, shoulder surfing, etc by not the employee but someone standing next to them. While I hate the surveillance aspects, I want my account information protected and I don't see a better approach in an uncontrolled/unknowable environment.
- benjaminjosephw 5y agoYou can't imagine other ways to protect data beyond such a dehumanizing denial of liberty? These workers seem forced to accept these conditions by the fear of losing their jobs. This isn't a free choice but an imposed one. Advocating for any form of forced surveillance of a persons home and family for the sake of consumer quality/safety is disgusting. Why is the threat of consumer data loss more important than the threat to their personal freedom? Do they not have inalienable rights too?
- caseysoftware 5y ago> You can't imagine other ways to protect data beyond such a dehumanizing denial of liberty? There are other ways, most don't allow WFH. But obviously, you have some ideas so please share them. I'd love to learn more.
- benjaminjosephw 5y agoBuilding a data processing system that mitigates the WFH risks might be more expensive than exploiting workers but it is absolutely doable. The tasks performed in these contexts are mostly just different types of data transformations. Allowing operators to execute a transformation without exposing the actual state of the data itself should be possible with a well designed system but the details would very much depend on the specific context. Splitting data processing steps between operators would also minimize risk (even if it is a little more cumbersome). Automating sensitive processes like authentication and payment processes may also be an option in some cases. Hacking employment contracts may be a cheaper solution for the companies involved but the cost to human dignity and liberty is far too high and it is being borne by the people least able to do anything about it. This simply isn't the type of business practice that we should tolerate anywhere in our supply chains even if it could mean slightly more customer "friction".