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Amazon will monitor workers' keystrokes to 'combat data theft'
- OrvalWintermute 5y agoToday it is to 'combat data theft', tomorrow it will be like Amazon fufillment centers in the Call Center no time to take a potty break. Let's hope we don't hear about the pee jugs there too..... https://www.dailydot.com/debug/amazon-workers-pee-bottle/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/amazon-workers-pee-bottle/
- MrStonedOne 5y agoa good chunk of CSAs are remote.
- newscracker 5y agoIt doesn’t matter that CSAs are working remote. There are monitoring solutions for those too. Here’s a recent report on one of the companies that counts Apple as its customer monitoring employees by video. [1] Apple in this instance responded that it prohibits such monitoring. [1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/09/workers-complain-about-monitoring-plans/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/09/workers-complain-about-...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fieldcny 5y agoHate to break it to you, but every large companies call centers are already like this. There’s an entire suite of software companies that have been building this stuff for twenty years, companies like Verint.
- kamaal 5y ago>>tomorrow it will be like Amazon fufillment centers in the Call Center no time to take a potty break That's already two decades back. I remember back when I started out in the 2000s. I worked at a call center here in Bangalore. The breaks were one 35 mins(lunch), three 15m breaks spread over the shift, which most people took to use rest rooms. Many times you need to call the floor manager, and they turn it down. You need to hold your rest room emergency until they let you go to the toilet for 15 minutes. You got penalised if you over shot the 15m rest room break. They even had metrics like resolve rate, calls per day, escalation count, data collection metrics(if you made 3 mistakes entering the user email, you were fired) etc etc.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- comeonseriously 5y agoWhy not their IT department also? And management? Why are companies like Amazon constantly kicking the shit out of the lowest paid employees!?
- spaetzleesser 5y agoModern management believes that the lower ranks need the whip while upper ranks need the carrot to get motivated. It's the same as people are getting nervous about inflation when lower wages are rising but not when the top 1% incomes are going up.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Modern management believes that the lower ranks need the whip while upper ranks need the carrot to get motivated For some in the upper ranks, applying the whip to lower ranks is the carrot.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> It's the same as people are getting nervous about inflation when lower wages are rising but not when the top 1% incomes are going up. Not really. Which do you think is a larger increase in total income? - Bottom 50% of all wages increase by 5% - Top 1% of all wages increase by 20%
- random314 5y agoAverage top 1%ile income 1.7M USD. 20% increase = 340K. Average Bottom 50%ile wage = 46K USD. 5% increase = 2.3K Multiply by 50 = 115K So the 20% increase in top 1%ile represents a 3X increase in total income when compared with bottom 50%ile.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoI'm willing to believe this, but I want to be clear - you've marked an average bottom 50% wage and an average top 1% income. Is that top 1% wage income or all income?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chadcmulligan 5y agoAmazon's slogan - "creating the worker's dystopia - today!" stopped buying from them a long time ago, I encourage everyone else to do the same.
- pas 5y agoAre any other call centers significantly better?
- JCharante 5y agoMy highschool job was working at a call center for resort & hotel reservations (big range from $40/night to $9000/night). I loved that job and soon got promoted to train new agents. Hung out chit chatting with management and reading books / creating static websites with Notepad++ (no outside software allowed) when the call volume wasn't too high. Googling "pac man" yields the pac man doodle, which I played so much (google obviously wasn't blocked but a lot of sites were).
- ramesh31 5y agoNot a big deal really. I know that I already treat all work devices as if they were keylogged anyways.
- quantified 5y agoLooks this was being downvoted. Probably for the “Not a big deal really”, possible tone of saying “we should accept micromanaging distrust”, and the behavior monitoring of drivers and warehouse workers is dystopian, this could well go that direction. However, if you’re working at an employer-provided work device, your practice is a wise one.
- SN76477 5y agoThey go to far over and over.
- dylan604 5y agoAnd yet they remain. So is it too far? If it were too far, they would get regulation slap on the wrists, or it would be impossible to find employees for their positions. So as long as the signals of being too far, there's no need for them to change behavior. (from their PoV at least)
- SN76477 5y agoOne example here: Amazon is losing 3% of its hourly employees each week, an incredibly high rate that means the e-commerce giant experiences 150% turnover a year https://www.syracuse.com/business/2021/06/report-amazon-churns-through-employees-at-super-high-rate.html https://www.syracuse.com/business/2021/06/report-amazon-chur...
- devoutsalsa 5y agoI assume that my keystrokes are always being monitored on a company device. Obviously I'd prefer to not be monitored, but I don't really have an expectation of privacy at work on a work device.
- 1123581321 5y agoIs that warranted by other practices of your employer (locked down laptops, etc.?) We give full admin rights to laptop owners and don’t install spyware. I would be sad if a coworker acted as if their keystrokes were being recorded; thinking that would surely slow them down and make them more careful about pursuing all promising research paths. So I think it’s important for companies that don’t spy to signal that they don’t; the opportunity cost outweighs the marginal security benefit.
- travoc 5y agoIt’s standard in the finance industry where risk management is the highest priority.
- theamk 5y agoDoes your company has network-based IDS? Or local antivirus/ endpoint protection? What happens if those detect something? In a lot of places, in case of severe signal, like computer reaching out to know malware C&C servers, the computer is taken by IT and investigated - does it really have malware? How did it get on PC? Did it propagate? This sometimes involves digging through browser cache and history. So even if you not recorded all the time, you should be prepared that your computer will be taken away from you at any moment and browser history examined. Such is the life in a big company.
- 1123581321 5y agoYep, the responses are interesting as they all assume a certain company size (which makes sense given how many faang etc. employees post here.) Eventually a company will hire IT that create their own work and aren’t mindful of the chilling effect monitoring has. We are much smaller and still larger than the median company size in the US: https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/ https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/
- codyswann 5y agoHere's the thing. It takes one person. Just one. To ruin it for everyone. That's why stuff like this exists. So assume this happened to Amazon one time and cost them a ton of money. Do they sit back and just hope it never happens again? Do they somehow selectively choose which employees to monitor? Don't get me wrong. I would love to live in a world where everyone can trust everyone else but that's a fairy tale.
- saagarjha 5y agoBut this applies to any sort of crime: there are limits to what is reasonable surveillance. Of course the legal system is different than what a private company does with its employees, but I think it’s useful to note that there are limits to how far we can go to catch these things.
- codyswann 5y agoI'm all open to hear other ways how Amazon could reliably stop employees from stealing data.
- 0x0nyandesu 5y agoThis is impossible no matter how many safe guards you put up. Like keeping drugs out of prison.
- shawnz 5y agoSimply audit the events where data is accessed (they also suggest this in the article). What advantage does monitoring keystrokes give? This smells more like an attempt to detect unproductive workers to me.
- zoomablemind 5y ago> Simply audit the events where data is accessed.... That would be a sane approach. Indeed, if there's "data" to guard, then one just properly secures it and allocates access to it. If "theft" happens, then there's access log. If data is ubiquitous that everyone should be able to access it, then it's hardly data to "guard". In any case, it makes more sense to monitor access to data, not just a sea of keystrokes... unless the concern lies with something other than the data.
- pacifika 5y agoWhat about the workers’ data theft?
- mattparcens 5y agoBetween this, the coming back into the office, to the general rumors of Amazon's work culture going back for years, I find it hard to imagine a more undesirable place to work.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoEven the people in their promotional videos look burnt out: https://youtu.be/lX1P-gGqNjo https://youtu.be/lX1P-gGqNjo
- loosetypes 5y agoIs there any reason not to assume they don’t for software engineers as well? Honest question, I assume this isn’t covered by two-party consent of recording. Are there any legal frameworks covering employee monitoring in the US or on the state level? Is it different if alerted on violation as opposed to a manager browsing their employees activity on a whim?
- foepys 5y agoSuper illegal in Germany, luckily. It's shocking to me how people here accept this as normal. You shouldn't lose all rights just because someone is paying you any amount of money. The company does not own you. You're not a soulless resource that can be used and tossed whenever your boss pleases.
- garmaine 5y agoEven when the company owns the computer and it is on company time?
- flimflamm 5y agoYes.
- jcelerier 5y agoCompanies are never ever more important than human beings
- garmaine 5y agoOk sure, but I was asking a technical question about German law, not morality.
- foepys 5y agoThe company cannot even look at the employee's work emails unless there are already indications that the employee is acting in bad faith ("Anfangsverdacht").
- refurb 5y agoThat doesn’t seem true? ” According to the guidelines, if the use of the Internet and email services is only permitted for business purposes, the employer can check the Internet use of the employees randomly, to make sure that they use it for business purposes only.” https://www.mondaq.com/germany/privacy-protection/496710/germany-issues-privacy-guidelines-for-employer-access-to-employee-email-and-internet-use https://www.mondaq.com/germany/privacy-protection/496710/ger...
- acomjean 5y agoWhen I was at university, they implemented a register for classes by phone system in the early 90s. (How things were done before computers…) I remember being in the bursars office and someone was complaining that they registered for a class and it didn’t show up. The woman working there spun her screen around and said “here are all you keypresses from last week, you clearly didn’t register.” Now with so much more computing power/networking and storage everything is stored..but I wonder if they’ll ever look? Makes a great target for hackers though.
- mister_tee 5y ago"One use case provided is that a customer service worker walks away from their computer and then a roommate grabs the machine to use its internal search tool and see what a celebrity has been buying on Amazon. But just four cases have actually been identified in which imposters accessed such data. And the result for workers of implementing the software is a constant feeling that someone is watching over them." Not to backseat design (ok, to backseat design), but shouldn't it be the case that access would already be scoped to accounts relevant to active tasks, and not every one of the 300M+ active customer accounts, especially without some sort of escalation or break-glass? That rationale for this software is likely invented, right? "It’d be one thing if these workers were well paid, but they’re not." quick survey -- this would still be put on the "bad ways to treat your workers" list, correct?
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoRight, no need for a keylogger for that, your computer should be activated by your badge, which you need to move around.
- jjulius 5y agoThe quote in question mentions a roommate using the computer, implying working from home. No need for a badge to move around your own residence.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoYeah but similar techniques can be used. Like a yubikey with fingerprints to do important things, a bt ring that needs to be close to the computer to keep it unlocked, etc. The idea is that you can solve the problem without having to spy in your employees every move, and focus on securing important operations.
- lupire 5y agoIf your roommate has your laptop, they probably have your yibikey.
- rajeshmr 5y ago1984
- Lio 5y agoMore like YT’s mother’s job in Snow Crash. She’s monitored doing everything including the time it takes to read management emails and going to the toilet. She puts up with being treated like crap because she thinks the job has prestige. When the book was first published that all sounded hilariously preposterous. These days it’s almost standard. :(
- darawk 5y agoI feel like people are getting outraged at the title. This isn't a keylogger. It's recording keystroke/mouse patterns to create behavioral profiles, not monitor content. It's just to try to heuristically detect whether the wrong person is operating an account.
- glitchcrab 5y agoThere's more to it than that though. As the article notes, Amazon are ruthless when it comes to squeezing every last drop out of their workers. Sure, this software is _currently_ going to be used to try and reduce imposter attacks, but given their reputation I don't think it's unreasonable to see this as potentially leading to increased surveillance of their workers (which will be marketed as 'helping increase productivity'). I would wager that this is why people are getting bent out of shape over the article.
- darawk 5y agoI mean, I guess that could happen. But it's not clear why we should be upset about something that might happen in the future. This software doesn't really get us any closer or further from that happening. If Amazon wanted to keylog its employees, they'd just create a keylogger for that purpose, not repurpose this thing.
- Lio 5y agoWhen I was younger I used to think I wasn’t good enough to work for a FAANG company and so avoided all the unpleasant interviews with them. Whilst that’s probably still true, I now also wouldn’t want to work somewhere like that if the “prize” for being accepted is to be treated like a machine or worse. Being a contractor seems like a much more honest bargain. You pay me and I make something for you. How I do that is my business as long as it meets the spec.
- talmr 5y agoI used to care about that too until I got enough money (not a TON, but enough to put my worries aside for 5-10 years) from equity working at a smaller company. Now I'd rather keep a simple job and work on side projects that interest me than working at a FAANG.
- Lio 5y agoYep totally. There’s a lot to me be said for a steady pay check at a decent firm. I just don’t want to wear one of L. Bob Rife’s headsets to get that. :P
- tpmx 5y agoIs it that grueling to interview for a customer service job at Amazon?
- smellsinore 5y ago...If the keystrokes stop for 7 minutes. ToT (Time off task)
- streamofdigits 5y agoHuman nature, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Surveillance capitalism is expanding exponentially in the new space created by digital technology. It is shaping the amorphous silicon with software, behaviors and business models that reflect the distorted morality and deficient humanity of a narrow clan. This land grab is only possible in societies with no countervailing forces, either in government, judiciary, journalism, business world or civic society. Alas the US is very nearly such a failed society, as evidenced by its still smouldering Trump period. This is disastrous for the Western world in general (and Europe in particular) which for decades has simply followed the US lead in tech. Tech is not just another cog in eternal societal struggles. Things are coming to a head. The challenges are compounding and the sustainability of our entire (eco)system is at risk. Tech should be at the forefront of shaping healthy social contracts to help us transition to a viable state. It is one of the few levers left that have a positive range. Instead it is abusing and eroding the most vital ingredient of a healthy society: trust To paraphrase: Monitor your own keystrokes and combat soul theft. Make sure you program the kind of future you want to live in.
- AdrianB1 5y agoWhat is "surveillance capitalism"? I remember in my country when we had "socialist" in the country name we used to have a huge surveillance system called "state security" (Securitatea Statului, in Romanian) and I figure surveillance and capitalism can coexist, but they are independent.
- antifa 5y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
- bserge 5y agoI've never worked for Amazon and have even avoided them because of news like this. However, now I wonder if it's all overblown, just like other shit in the media. Surely, no one in their right mind would work in such conditions. It could be decent or at least acceptable. Wonder how it compares to a small company where your manager watches everything you do and yells at you for a typo.
- edoceo 5y agoI'm manager at a small company. We don't have time for that shit.
- taurath 5y agoSimple, they pay a little more. The problem is they’re running out of people to churn through they get rid of people so fast
- nly 5y agoI know a small company CEO who had Internet connected CCTV, complete with audio, installed in the office following a break-in and theft. His COO later stopped taking meetings in the office because the CEO would sometimes sit and watch and listen in to the office from home.
- hiddencache 5y agoSeems a little overboard to prevent just 4 cases so far.
- whoknew1122 5y agoI work in a customer-facing position within network security at AWS. This sounds dystopian and inhumane. But to do their job effectively, these employees (much like myself) must have access to a lot of critical data that can do a lot of damage inappropriately leaked. This may not be the best solution to protecting data, but it's a hard issue to solve. Stuff like SIM swapping and recent Twitter hacks come from insider threats. Consumers want companies to protect them (i.e. the consumers) from insider threats. How are companies supposed to do that? Monitoring the speed of typing is one not-particularly-invasive way to do that. TL/DR: Don't eat the sausage if you can't stomach how it's made.
- mithusingh32 5y agoIf your company uses teams....you already have a keylogger installed in your machine. The moment I discovered this, I stopped using teams to talk to my manager/teammates about my frustrations or concerns. I ask them to speak on the phone or face to face.
- easton 5y agoHow does Teams log anything more than any other piece of software with compliance functionality?
- jonathantf2 5y agoAny evidence to back up this claim? All the messages on Exchange Online and Teams are logged and can be searched through by an admin, that's to be expected. It's not logging keystrokes of other apps.
- mithusingh32 5y agoMaybe keylogger was too harsh of a term. My current admin told me that our Teams essentially tracks everything you do. For example: if you use a macro tool to stay "online" on teams, the admins/managers/etc know.
- jonathantf2 5y agoYour current admin is lying to you - there's no way they could see if a program was moving the mouse every now and then to keep the indicator green.
- rainhacker 5y agoAmazon does not provide a company phone. Employees install paging app on their personal phones. I wonder how closely they monitor activities on phones of their employees.
- leopaacc 5y agosounds like a nightmare employer, won't be tempted to apply.
- barbarbar 5y agoIt is a fantastic idea. Next step will be wires on the head and some ai to guess what each worker is thinking. And fire those with non compliant thoughts must go. What a wonderful company /s
- SergeAx 5y agoThis is what life below the API would feel like. Expectations: ML and algos are automating most boring jobs like couriers, drivers, cashiers or fulfillment center workers. Reality: ML and algos automating jobs of line managers.
- john_yaya 5y agoMarshall Brain’s short novella “Manna” is worth reading, if only because it keeps becoming reality with every development like this one. To be specific, I’m referring to the first dystopian half of the book. I suppose the people at the top of Amazon are gradually entering the utopian second half.
- Lapsa 5y agolulz
- hikerclimber1 5y agoEverything is subjective so company can do anything it wants.