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At a previous employer I helped build an employee monitoring system that was essentially a keylogger and would also take screenshots periodically and on every c

At a previous employer I helped build an employee monitoring system that was essentially a keylogger and would also take screenshots periodically and on every click. All this data was piped into our cloud and could be used by middle management for granular monitoring and evaluation. The whole product was positioned for process optimisation but I know for a fact that it was used to monitor and eventually reduce headcount at multiple customers. I still feel gross just thinking about it but the company is supposedly making good money off of it given that they just announced a new version.

pvorb 4y ago
Process optimization and reducing headcount are more or less the same thing. It's about reducing the amount of work first. Only if you manage to find more customers to keep work at the same level you can avoid reducing headcount.
- peer2pay 4y ago
  Not necessarily. "Optimising" a process doesn't always mean increasing per-operator throughput with the goal of reducing the amount of operators required to keep the lights on. You can optimise for many other things such as on-time delivery in production processes or duplicate/late/early payments of invoices just to name some straightforward examples. In the former case you're optimising the process with the goal of increasing customer satisfaction and in the latter you're optimising many things such as cash flow and working-capital while balancing early payment discounts and late payment penalties.
pornel 4y ago
I'm too forgetful to log and fill in time sheets reliably, so I started building a tool do it for me automatically and retroactively (so I don't have to press start/stop on some timer, or even remember to run the software ahead of time) based on data gathered from the system, like file timestamps, browsing history, syslogs, etc. I got deep into gathering all the data and ML analysis, to the point I started brushing with digital forensics. I got spooked and abandoned it when I've realized I can never release such tool without it being abused for surveillance ;(
- sitzkrieg 4y ago
  hey i did a not super deep version of this but it would hit toggl api to create my time sheet for me. i abandoned it after having to use lots of different software constantly, but i considered releasing it and didnt for same reason
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  No need to use actual surveillance and machine learning to fill out time sheets. I had a friend Josh who worked at Los Alamos National Labs, who wrote a script that automatically filled out his timesheet with plausible looking working hours and tasks, an emailed it in at the right time every month. One month his boss was chatting with his assistant about how happy he was with how promptly and efficiently Josh always sent in his time sheets, saying what a good worker he was, and that he just received his timesheet on time that day. The assistant explained to the boss that Josh was actually away on vacation that week. So when Josh finally got back from vacation, his boss summoned him into his office for an awkward sit down talk. And insisted that Josh set him up with the same system to automatically fill out and send in his time sheet, too!
- Liskni_si 4y ago
  https://arbtt.nomeata.de/ https://arbtt.nomeata.de/ has been around for quite a while. Never heard about it being abused for surveillance. Hm, but was it?
that_guy_iain 4y ago
I built a tool for an influencer marketing agency that would log which instagram pages they visited. This info could be used for machine learning and discovering new influencers which was a major problem for the agency. The first changes I made to the poc was making the ability to identify which employees did what and when so hard that if they asked us to do it, it would either not be possible or cost so much that it wouldn’t be feasible.
tdeck 4y ago
Maybe it's time to write a guide for employees on how to detect that this is running.

pvorb 4y ago

Process optimization and reducing headcount are more or less the same thing. It's about reducing the amount of work first. Only if you manage to find more customers to keep work at the same level you can avoid reducing headcount.

peer2pay 4y ago
Not necessarily. "Optimising" a process doesn't always mean increasing per-operator throughput with the goal of reducing the amount of operators required to keep the lights on. You can optimise for many other things such as on-time delivery in production processes or duplicate/late/early payments of invoices just to name some straightforward examples. In the former case you're optimising the process with the goal of increasing customer satisfaction and in the latter you're optimising many things such as cash flow and working-capital while balancing early payment discounts and late payment penalties.

pornel 4y ago

I'm too forgetful to log and fill in time sheets reliably, so I started building a tool do it for me automatically and retroactively (so I don't have to press start/stop on some timer, or even remember to run the software ahead of time) based on data gathered from the system, like file timestamps, browsing history, syslogs, etc. I got deep into gathering all the data and ML analysis, to the point I started brushing with digital forensics. I got spooked and abandoned it when I've realized I can never release such tool without it being abused for surveillance ;(

sitzkrieg 4y ago
hey i did a not super deep version of this but it would hit toggl api to create my time sheet for me. i abandoned it after having to use lots of different software constantly, but i considered releasing it and didnt for same reason
DonHopkins 4y ago
No need to use actual surveillance and machine learning to fill out time sheets. I had a friend Josh who worked at Los Alamos National Labs, who wrote a script that automatically filled out his timesheet with plausible looking working hours and tasks, an emailed it in at the right time every month. One month his boss was chatting with his assistant about how happy he was with how promptly and efficiently Josh always sent in his time sheets, saying what a good worker he was, and that he just received his timesheet on time that day. The assistant explained to the boss that Josh was actually away on vacation that week. So when Josh finally got back from vacation, his boss summoned him into his office for an awkward sit down talk. And insisted that Josh set him up with the same system to automatically fill out and send in his time sheet, too!
Liskni_si 4y ago
https://arbtt.nomeata.de/ https://arbtt.nomeata.de/ has been around for quite a while. Never heard about it being abused for surveillance. Hm, but was it?

that_guy_iain 4y ago

I built a tool for an influencer marketing agency that would log which instagram pages they visited. This info could be used for machine learning and discovering new influencers which was a major problem for the agency. The first changes I made to the poc was making the ability to identify which employees did what and when so hard that if they asked us to do it, it would either not be possible or cost so much that it wouldn’t be feasible.

tdeck 4y ago

Maybe it's time to write a guide for employees on how to detect that this is running.