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On workplace surveillance / "bossware": > Mazzoli seems to have either not used his product, or, if he did, did so under conditions where he was in charge of i

On workplace surveillance / "bossware": > Mazzoli seems to have either not used his product, or, if he did, did so under conditions where he was in charge of it – using it the way an athlete might use a stopwatch to time their own sprints, and not the way a boss might: to decide whether to dock your pay or fire you. > This inability to understand the difference between using a technology and having the same technology used against you is endemic to the industry. I think this is a key failure of understanding for the "tech is neither good nor bad!" camp: just as the Death Star clearly was never going to be used for mining planetoids, it's very clear how workplace surveillance tech will be used to harm workers, if nothing else because of how it is currently being used. Continuing to work on such tech just because it could theoretically be used for non-evil purposes is morally bankrupt, and something the industry needs to establish ethical standards to prevent.

draw_down 4y ago
mistrial9 4y ago
semi-randomly, I was reading about the colonial Spanish mining city of Potosi in the South American Andes today, before opening YNews. The Spanish Viceroy (administrator for the King) oversaw the conscription (slavery) of 1 in 7 adult males each year, over a vast area, to service the poisonous and intensely profitable silver mines. Stories of courage and death predictably follow, while the administrators, unconnected to the daily life in the mines in that region, made record profits, among the largest wealth in Europe at the time (late 1500s). Comments on the social structures that supported that, left as an exercise to the reader. Consider history; Do you think for one minute, that a Viceroy somewhere, and legions of new administrators, won't inflict endless and strictly enforced conditions on anyone they can find, using software? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/1776_Potosi_2_reales_obv.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/1776_Pot...
WilTimSon 4y ago
Yeah, if tech is developed with the explicit purpose of surveillance on workers, it's definitely not some dubious case where "well maybe it's done with good intentions". Nothing good comes from putting extra mental strain on your workers, showing you don't trust them and being an invasive boss overall.
bigDinosaur 4y ago
This stuff is worse than the Death Star. At least that thing made no pretence about helping its targets. I cannot fathom how much my mood has dropped on reading about Bossware. I'd do pretty much anything in my career to avoid it.
- skyfaller 4y ago
  I was referring to some material from the no-longer canon Star Wars Extended Universe, where it was referred to during development as the "Imperial Planetary Ore Extractor", and some characters working on its design genuinely believed (due to brainwashing) that the Death Star "was developed to break up dead, lifeless planets to extract the valuable ores and elements within". https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Qwi_Xux https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Qwi_Xux Of course, if programmers are raised from a young age and brainwashed into believing that workplace surveillance is innocent / good, that's a different problem than adults who should know better when it comes to the real world results of using the tech they are building.
  - bigDinosaur 4y ago
    Thanks for the context, I was unaware.
hotpotamus 4y ago
This made me think about other tech that has no good use. Flamethrowers come to mind. Not the fun ones that Elon will sell you as a gimmick, but the ones that toss sticky flammable liquids at people. I was listening to someone describe their use in WWII, and he was I suppose trying to defend it by saying that actually most of the people it killed weren't burned at all, but rather killed because they were in enclosed fortifications and apparently flamethrowers produce prodigious amounts of carbon monoxide - basically you'd take a couple breaths and it's over - the carbon monoxide will bind into your blood cells such that even if you immediately step out into fresh air, you're a dead man walking. But at least your corpse will be recognizable for your friends and family I suppose; you won't be burned beyond recognition. But building a reliable flamethrower is an interesting technical challenge, so I'm sure you can find an engineer who will be willing to give it a go.
rogermecizki 4y ago
>I think this is a key failure of understanding for the "tech is neither good nor bad!" camp: I like the addendum, "...but nor is it neutral"
Kalium 4y ago
Once upon a time, I worked for a shop that did auto insurance. This involves handling a lot of fairly sensitive data about people and datasets about a lot of people, for reasons that boil down to it being incredibly useful data for actuarial purposes. Bossware, or working machine monitoring software, endpoint monitoring, or whatever turned out to be a key part of making it possible for our data scientists to function. At all. It was the only way we could both protect the incredibly sensitive information about lots of people while allowing analysis work to proceed. Aside: anyone who wants to talk about doing data analysis without access to the underlying data is cordially invited to explain how to do this to statisticians who only understand R and local Jupyter notebooks. "But wait!" you protest, "Can't the business work just as well without that sensitive information?". That's a good question! The short answer is no. No, it cannot, and unfortunately there's a great deal of actuarial history behind this. "But wait!" cry you, "Could you have not simply trusted them?". That's also an excellent question! To which the uncomfortable response runs roughly: how comfortable do you feel with "we trust them" as the primary security controls when some company has your data? Especially when that trust means you might not even know about a breach? How do you think a regulator concerned with privacy would look at "we trust them" as a security and privacy approach? Unfortunately, I think some forms of bossware serve a purpose. Sometimes it's one of the few options available that enables trust beyond the directly interpersonal.
- detaro 4y ago
  I think there is certainly a place for audit trails etc, but it again comes back to how that data is used. An access log is an access log, but it's a difference if you analyze it to find people looking at data they have no reason to look at, or if you analyze it to track who spends how long on their toilet break. And a lot of what's offered by current "bossware" clearly falls in the latter category.
  - Kalium 4y ago
    I agree. My goal here is to set out that there are important uses for monitoring. Uses important enough that it would be irresponsible to discard the notion entirely.
- 4y ago
Ntrails 4y ago
> it's very clear how workplace surveillance tech will be used to harm workers My takeaway is not just that that, but that it will be used to harm businesses as they train their employees to do the measured thing over and above the best thing for the company. I suspect most people here could envision this as an extension of a "Lines of Code written" based performance metric and intuit the likely outcomes.
Ancalagon 4y ago
Oh come on. He's playing dumb for the positive PR view. Of course he knows what his product is going to be used for.

draw_down 4y ago

mistrial9 4y ago

semi-randomly, I was reading about the colonial Spanish mining city of Potosi in the South American Andes today, before opening YNews. The Spanish Viceroy (administrator for the King) oversaw the conscription (slavery) of 1 in 7 adult males each year, over a vast area, to service the poisonous and intensely profitable silver mines. Stories of courage and death predictably follow, while the administrators, unconnected to the daily life in the mines in that region, made record profits, among the largest wealth in Europe at the time (late 1500s). Comments on the social structures that supported that, left as an exercise to the reader. Consider history; Do you think for one minute, that a Viceroy somewhere, and legions of new administrators, won't inflict endless and strictly enforced conditions on anyone they can find, using software? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/1776_Potosi_2_reales_obv.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/1776_Pot...

WilTimSon 4y ago

Yeah, if tech is developed with the explicit purpose of surveillance on workers, it's definitely not some dubious case where "well maybe it's done with good intentions". Nothing good comes from putting extra mental strain on your workers, showing you don't trust them and being an invasive boss overall.

bigDinosaur 4y ago

This stuff is worse than the Death Star. At least that thing made no pretence about helping its targets. I cannot fathom how much my mood has dropped on reading about Bossware. I'd do pretty much anything in my career to avoid it.

skyfaller 4y ago
I was referring to some material from the no-longer canon Star Wars Extended Universe, where it was referred to during development as the "Imperial Planetary Ore Extractor", and some characters working on its design genuinely believed (due to brainwashing) that the Death Star "was developed to break up dead, lifeless planets to extract the valuable ores and elements within". https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Qwi_Xux https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Qwi_Xux Of course, if programmers are raised from a young age and brainwashed into believing that workplace surveillance is innocent / good, that's a different problem than adults who should know better when it comes to the real world results of using the tech they are building.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  Thanks for the context, I was unaware.

hotpotamus 4y ago

This made me think about other tech that has no good use. Flamethrowers come to mind. Not the fun ones that Elon will sell you as a gimmick, but the ones that toss sticky flammable liquids at people. I was listening to someone describe their use in WWII, and he was I suppose trying to defend it by saying that actually most of the people it killed weren't burned at all, but rather killed because they were in enclosed fortifications and apparently flamethrowers produce prodigious amounts of carbon monoxide - basically you'd take a couple breaths and it's over - the carbon monoxide will bind into your blood cells such that even if you immediately step out into fresh air, you're a dead man walking. But at least your corpse will be recognizable for your friends and family I suppose; you won't be burned beyond recognition. But building a reliable flamethrower is an interesting technical challenge, so I'm sure you can find an engineer who will be willing to give it a go.

rogermecizki 4y ago

>I think this is a key failure of understanding for the "tech is neither good nor bad!" camp: I like the addendum, "...but nor is it neutral"

Kalium 4y ago

Once upon a time, I worked for a shop that did auto insurance. This involves handling a lot of fairly sensitive data about people and datasets about a lot of people, for reasons that boil down to it being incredibly useful data for actuarial purposes. Bossware, or working machine monitoring software, endpoint monitoring, or whatever turned out to be a key part of making it possible for our data scientists to function. At all. It was the only way we could both protect the incredibly sensitive information about lots of people while allowing analysis work to proceed. Aside: anyone who wants to talk about doing data analysis without access to the underlying data is cordially invited to explain how to do this to statisticians who only understand R and local Jupyter notebooks. "But wait!" you protest, "Can't the business work just as well without that sensitive information?". That's a good question! The short answer is no. No, it cannot, and unfortunately there's a great deal of actuarial history behind this. "But wait!" cry you, "Could you have not simply trusted them?". That's also an excellent question! To which the uncomfortable response runs roughly: how comfortable do you feel with "we trust them" as the primary security controls when some company has your data? Especially when that trust means you might not even know about a breach? How do you think a regulator concerned with privacy would look at "we trust them" as a security and privacy approach? Unfortunately, I think some forms of bossware serve a purpose. Sometimes it's one of the few options available that enables trust beyond the directly interpersonal.

detaro 4y ago
I think there is certainly a place for audit trails etc, but it again comes back to how that data is used. An access log is an access log, but it's a difference if you analyze it to find people looking at data they have no reason to look at, or if you analyze it to track who spends how long on their toilet break. And a lot of what's offered by current "bossware" clearly falls in the latter category.
- Kalium 4y ago
  I agree. My goal here is to set out that there are important uses for monitoring. Uses important enough that it would be irresponsible to discard the notion entirely.
4y ago

Ntrails 4y ago

> it's very clear how workplace surveillance tech will be used to harm workers My takeaway is not just that that, but that it will be used to harm businesses as they train their employees to do the measured thing over and above the best thing for the company. I suspect most people here could envision this as an extension of a "Lines of Code written" based performance metric and intuit the likely outcomes.

Ancalagon 4y ago

Oh come on. He's playing dumb for the positive PR view. Of course he knows what his product is going to be used for.