46 ms·

JPMorgan Chase and Co tracks employees to dystopian extents

734 points by notRobot 3y ago

curiousgal 3y ago
Actual article: https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-is-tracking-zoom-calls-workplace-activity-using-wadu-2022-5?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-is-tracking-z...
- king_magic 3y ago
  Much more helpful. Only initially seeing this through the lens of the Reddit thread immediately made me question if it was legit or some clever GPT-4 disinformation.
  - cmilton 3y ago
    looks like its from 2022
- tyingq 3y ago
  https://archive.is/Qr3lk https://archive.is/Qr3lk and related https://archive.is/iBiG2 https://archive.is/iBiG2
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gamesbrainiac 3y ago
This seems like something out of a Dystopia novel. For some reason, it reminded me of severance.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ipunchghosts 3y ago
Reddit in a nutshell... Hi everyone! Just jumping in to make a comment on this. The post initially got caught in our spam filter for low karma, approved by us, then gaining tens of thousands of upvotes and tons of awards, and then removed because the OP had their account shadowbanned due to being perceived as 'spam' Screenshot of post being approved here: https://you.banned.today/6FE6X2f.png https://you.banned.today/6FE6X2f.png
- draw_down 3y ago
  [dead]
andrewclunn 3y ago
Worked there (in Chase tower downtown Chicago) last year. The oddest thing is that it was hybrid work (where we were onsite 3 days out of the week). So good luck tracking things the other two days. I took to listening to midi files of old VG music as my "background tunes" during work, so as to not use bandwidth that would be tracked for streaming music while coding. The tracking didn't really get to me (after all, it is "their time" that they're paying for). The tough part is that it makes "Oh I need to do a personal thing for 5 / 10 minutes." a near impossibility, and a change in my personal life drove me to switch jobs for better work life balance. So no, I don't think that this tracking is the dystopian nightmare it's being portrayed as, but it does have consequences, which make the post-covid work / life intermingling schedule impossible to maintain. The real dangers of such a policy are who they will lose as a result of it. EDIT - I feel the need to add, that the tracking at the time of my departure was not as extensive as some of the claims being made here, which I am a bit... skeptical of.
- Zeyka 3y ago
  You say that, yet I'm sure you would be against a system like china's social credit score.
  - andrewclunn 3y ago
    Changing jobs is something very different from escaping a country.
- largepeepee 3y ago
  You do realize once this is normalized, it wouldn't even come as a surprise to have them eventually mandating company devices to be on when at home and so on.
- Frost1x 3y ago
  >after all, it is "their time" that they're paying for On so many levels, it is not. Even if you're being paid for time, people don't "own" your time or shouldn't be allowed to "own" your time. Ultimately you own your time, they should pay for the privilege to nudge or direct your agency during that time. You should always have agency within that time to refuse to work or do whatever, otherwise we're on paths back toward slavery. On another level, most employees these days are salaried. Businesses adopted this for several reasons but the primary reason is its a beneficial reduction of labor costs in most cases. Paying employees salary not only makes labor costs more predictable (one argument) it sets a cap on the labor expense to try and maximize work within. Under a salary model, you're really paid for function not time, even though employers want to conveniently, to their advantage, choose when they want to view you as a functional or time based cost within that salaried definition. If you're salaried, there's almost no argument for your "time" which is why most salaried employees have infinite queues of uncompletable tasks stacked on them whilst hourly employees are often scrambling just to find tasks to do, depending again on the context.
nologic01 3y ago
Does anybody know if the tracking extends all the way to top? As we are now deep into a digital surveillance society an interesting (if abstract) question is if privacy will be somehow a luxury product, stratified according to socio-economic status. Will there be a partially private middle class, a fully tracked underclass and a mostly private upper class etc. The correlation of privacy with wealth in paper-based infromation societies is clearly there (e.g., offshore financial centers) but it is interesting to think how all this might mutate in the digital era.
- eternalban 3y ago
  OP:> "I know there was this 10-minute period where I totally look like I'm a bad employee — but really, I'm a good employee." > Will there be a partially private middle class, a fully tracked underclass and a mostly private upper class etc. Almost 3 decades ago I was doing a consulting gig for a telecomm in Austin. It was a call center and turned out that the operators were on a strict bathroom regiment, timed down to the seconds. After the shock was over, realization of the just how disjoint is the life experience for even contempories in the same society hit me. It was clear to me that this sort of micromanagement and assertion of control is directly correlated with socio-economic standing. 30 years later and we have JPMorgan employees -- that woman quoted likely went to an ivy league -- pleading for understanding for a "10 minute" activity. (!) This commoditization of the 'educated but financially dependent class' is relatively new and imo reflects the economic-technical paradigm shift. The battle lines are already drawn and blows are already being exchanged over at WFH and BigBrother@Work frontlines. > a mostly private upper class As for WFH, we hear that execs at these companies still wfh. We don't know to what extent they are also surveilled but it would be surprising if c-suite was being monitored by IT security. A bifurcated humanity is imho a very likely future unless there are major global events that disrupt the current (aggregate trends) curve.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    At the end of the day, it's power that stratifies life experience. Wealth is just the most obvious summary of power in capitalist societies. Controlling the means of production (or, say, housing) is also power. Historically, the worst excesses were prevented by labor having its own inherent power: farms didn't get harvested without labor. As we've moved further away from inherent power in every human (i.e. to industrialization, then knowledge work), that leaves a lot of people with little to no power. And when you have none, people can exploit the hell out of you. Personally, that's why I think UBI is going to be a required bandaid on the system -- you're going to have to afford people some level of "I will not willfully enslave myself to you, even if I don't have any skills / education." Otherwise Amazon warehouses are going to seem free and quaint.
Havoc 3y ago
Does sound like there is at least a bit of speculation in there though. Stuff like automatic reporting when you say something bad about coworkers seems a bit far fetched
shmatt 3y ago
Kind of terrifying to see all the comments just believing it as is Line managers, even managers of managers, would have 0 loyalty to the company and could easily prove this is all true. The thousands of employees could prove the webcam flash every laptop login. Things like this would be VP+ (who would have an org of 1000 or more, why would they even look if one of their reports body language is different this morning?) if it even existed under such a secretive blanket. Plus banks are literally known in the tech world as having the absolute oldest and crumbling tech And lastly, as someone who works in the CV world, even having all those cameras up, successfully streaming, uploading, and inferencing as described in that post would be a technological marvel
- hardware2win 3y ago
  >why would they even look if one of their reports body language is different this morning?) Ineeed
- ethbr0 3y ago
  This is on r/antiwork... which isn't a particularly objective source when it comes to employers.
  - KyeRussell 3y ago
    I’m a staunch unionist and whenever I happen across this subreddit it makes my blood boil. I wouldn’t take anything there seriously.
    - CapstanRoller 3y ago
      [dead]
  - aerhardt 3y ago
    I don’t have trouble believing that working conditions in the US are sometimes dire, but I also suspect that r/antiwork and other associated subreddits are heavily influenced by foreign actors. I mean, why wouldn’t they?
DoneWithAllThat 3y ago
This is /r/antiwork, which is basically equal parts socialism advocacy, creative writing, and unfocused gen-z frustrations that the world doesn’t operate like they wish. It is not a source of accurate or useful information.
unpopularopp 3y ago
That sub is +95% made up posts though. Like frustrated fanfiction + attention seeking at the same time. Maybe there is some truth to this post but there are so many fake stories and made up iMessage conversations posted there that it's hard to take anything seriously anymore.
- phantomathkg 3y ago
  Maybe it is up to JPMorgan Chase and the manufacturer come out to "clarify"?
- sledgehammers 3y ago
  Surveillance and monopolies are out of control regardless of whatever content is in a subreddit.
  - KyeRussell 3y ago
    Okay, but “Surveillance and monopolies are out of control” isn’t what are talking about. Some kid’s complaint about The Man is not HN-worthy. And that’s all that you’re posing.
    - sledgehammers 3y ago
      I hear you, though you don't get to decide what's HN-worthy and what's not. I guess my brain felt compelled to remind about the important underlying message of the post, because the comment felt like it was undermining it. The main motivation is probably fear of a shitty dystopian future, because I cannot remember the last time I read any positive news.
- luma 3y ago
  Business Insider ran essentially the same story last year: https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-employees-describe-fear-mass-workplace-data-surveillance-wadu-2022-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-employees-des... If you Google "JPM WADU" you'll find communications to employees about the system: https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chase-and-co/documents/suppliers-documents/systems-monitoring.pdf https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chas... Job listings: https://www.disabledperson.com/jobs/33566500-wadu-tech-and-tools-stream-lead-vice-president https://www.disabledperson.com/jobs/33566500-wadu-tech-and-t... Even patent filings: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-7668849-B1 https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-7668849-... This isn't "made up" and it's easily verified with a couple seconds of google.
A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
There is always a question of what is acceptable. My current employer seems to employ wide range of scanning, but it seems to mostly targeted at ensuring there is no 'data leakage'. All I can tell you for sure is that JPM is off my potential employer list although admittedly that is partly because compared to other peers its pay does not even begin to offset that level of intrusion.
tomatocracy 3y ago
What's often missed when people get upset about this type of thing is how few distinct types of information you need to build up a pretty good picture of someone's life to the point of working out quite private details - it's more about getting a long time series. Simply tracking things like badge swipe times (in/out and within areas etc), time logged in/out of computers, and company email metadata could easily be enough to deduce quite a lot of private details about someone's personal life. In that sense, 1984/Orwell gives a false sense of security because you don't need some all-seeing "big brother" style panopticon to lose a lot of privacy you think you have.
- asah 3y ago
  WADU tracks you in the office, but most JPM staff are 9-5 and WADU has no data on what staff do outside of work. For other reasons, JPM staff are on best behavior in the office. There are orgs & jobs that require staff be on-call outside the office and require them to carry a "work phone" which tracks your location, etc.
  - tomatocracy 3y ago
    It can reveal a lot more than you might at first think. For example, just with badge swipe timings for the whole cohort (and email/internal office chat metadata - even if people are careful with message content) you could see who might be likely having an affair with someone at work.
    - alchemist1e9 3y ago
      > could see who might be likely having an affair with someone at work. This is your example? privacy needed at work to protect employee freedom to have affairs on company time? I don’t get it
      - tomatocracy 3y ago
        Not on company time - that's the point. In this example, you can look at eg who arrives together or leaves together, then perhaps restrict that to times which are out of the norm, and correlate with when and how often they message each other as well. And that's a fairly straightforward one.
chadash 3y ago
> Upper management wants to see everyone at all levels back in the office five days a week. They have invested millions into the WADU system, and they want to get a return on that investment. That only happens whenever people are in the office as much as possible. Lol. Millions to JP Morgan would be like dollars to the average person. Upper management there is not making any big decisions over anything involving less than 9, and maybe 10 zeros.
cebert 3y ago
I am not sure how much more Business Insider is than Reddit, but this article seems relevant: https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-employees-describe-fear-mass-workplace-data-surveillance-wadu-2022-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-employees-des...
joezydeco 3y ago
I'd start to question any company that's using Office365 corporate wide. There's ML-based sentiment analysis on email, and it doesn't seem out of reach to apply it to Teams chats and video calls as well. And if they can observe your LinkedIn activity? Maybe you replied to that recruiter last week. Maybe your boss knows that now?
urthor 3y ago
For the record, working for these companies. JPMorgan Chase is a bank. Insider trading/financial fraud is a concern. For companies where insider trading is a serious issue. As an employee, you will be key-logged, tracked, spied upon. That's the deal, same as working for the Pentagon. Every employee understands this. It's not in any way, shape or form unethical. It's just the deal.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Most of the surveillance is because of banking compliance. I'm not convinced they actually use that data for managerial purposes. The last time I worked for a financial company, they were reasonably open about all the tracking, but never really looked at the data.
  - blitzar 3y ago
    If one of many keywords got dropped in a written communication or on a recorded line my boss would get a call within 5 minutes to explain, and an incident report would get filed.
    - aceofspades19 3y ago
      What sort of keywords? Surely there would be a lot of false positives if it was just 1 word being matched with no context.
      - blitzar 3y ago
        https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/15/you-wont-believe-what-gets-an-email-flagged-at-goldman-cnbc-has-the-list.html https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/15/you-wont-believe-what-gets-a... expletives naturally, but also champagne ended up being a naughty word for us as well
- benjaminwootton 3y ago
  I dont want to be a corporate shill, but I do see it from the banks side to a degree. They have a trillion regulations and laws they have to follow and more than 100k employees. Surely you have to turn to automation to meet your legal responsibilities.
ritzaco 3y ago
I think the most interesting part is > I think everyone expects their employer to track them to some extent. It is pretty standard practice for employers to monitor and run analysis on things like building badge swipes and the amount of time spent connected when working from home. It has also become very common place for employers to record audio and video at the office. That sounds dystopian to me already (maybe because I'm not in the US? Or haven't spend much time at BigCorp? But is that really the default minimum these days?) If you asked someone 10-20 years ago if that description sounded dystopian, would you be more likely to get a "yes definitely" than you are today? I'm way more worried by the dystopia society accepts as "normal" than one that is forced on us and that we could potentially fight against.
- gamesbrainiac 3y ago
  This is dystopian. Something like this would be illegal in the EU.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Any workers council, and union, I onow woupd slap managers backsidesnfrom here to Mars and bavknforbthat. Before, during and after suing said employer to death. With basically a guaranteed win at any labour court. Since everybody knows that, only the most sketchy employers consider something along these lines. Again one ofnthe reasons I am really happy with my job and the country I have it in.
    - brightstep 3y ago
      This is a perfect example (finally) of why even white collar workers need unions. Yes, even you in finance. Yes, even you in software engineering. It’s not just about pay!
      - lucozade 3y ago
        There are perfectly good reasons for having unions in finance. This is definitely not one of them. The heavy monitoring of communications, access etc is mandated by regulators primarily for the protection of customers. There's zero chance a union, or any other body below government, will get them to change that. I doubt they'd even try and nor should they.
robertlagrant 3y ago
@dang should be dystopian.
osigurdson 3y ago
Companies should be required to disclose what they are tracking. This way they can compete against each other for employees on knowable metrics.
kunley 3y ago
That's funny. Why to waste so much money on obvious things? I mean, a regular, moderately emphatic, non-narcistic boss just goes by a desk of the guy to see if he's stressed, or notices it during a meeting. It can be also seen via teams/zoom, just requires a bit more attention. Why to build big and costly tech around simple things that sane humans are doing all the time subconsciously within seconds?
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > Why to build big and costly tech around simple things that sane humans are doing all the time subconsciously within seconds? Cynical take: because if it works, then they'll be able to fire all the low-to-mid-level managers, and replace them with WADU and ChatGPT.
  - kunley 3y ago
    Except that the tasks of low-to-mid-managers are far beyond reading the moods of employees, and many/most of these tasks are still far beyond what "AI" can do. Then, the econo argument does not hold :D
NotYourLawyer 3y ago
This is every bit as well-sourced and plausible as the average qanon post.
thrrowawayjpm 3y ago
I’ve always been curious what the true boundaries of Citrix are when WFH. Can an employer see what other apps are doing outside the Citrix view if running on one’s own hardware? Could they monitor web browser usage?
- irusensei 3y ago
  AFAIK no. It might collect some telemetry data but those can be generated and viewed by yourself anyway. Things like username, computer name, OS etc. There is this utterly annoying thing called App Protection that injects a driver into your OS low level functions that aims to prevent things like keyloggers, screenshots and recordings. The problem here is that it often breaks some OS functionalities doing it. I used to work for company A as a resource for company B. Company B's Citrix literally prevented my computer from using Teams to speak with company A. Also if you have the big galaxy GPU and experiencing 2FPS on your games? Yeap... app protection is at it again. Funny thing is that it blissfully runs on a VM from where you can do whatever you want including the things it should prevent you to. Shrugs.
NVQXE23I 3y ago
From an attacker perspective: If I can get access to these tracking systems full of recorded conversations and video, can I use this information to advance my attack? Maybe I can even set queries on the collected data, like "mark all conversations about domain admins" or "mark all videos containing a clear view of somebody typing in a password on a terminal". This also opens up a new trove of espionage. Imagine getting inside info on big investement.
- moolcool 3y ago
  This is an important perspective. Surveillance capitalism is so often justified with "as long as they don't misuse the data". No, fuck that. The data should not have been collected in the first place.
- hbosch 3y ago
  Yeah, this is a strong counterpoint. Oftentimes companies don't want to know what their employees are doing or saying in private, all of that data is just additional liability. There just isn't a good enough reason. No company is going to fire you because you have bad posture.
bluedino 3y ago
I have a keycard for work, so that means I'm tracked. Every time I go through the campus gate. Every building I enter. Cafeteria scans. Active Directory signons. Computer unlocks/wakes. Someone, or something, is crunching those numbers. Just waiting to flag a discrepancy in my timecard, a missing entry/exit... Part of it is the under the guise of safety, they want to know where people are in case of an emergency, but the information will be used for whatever they deem necessary. In bad economic times, that data has been used to find people in violation of policies in order to let them go. Ironically, I bet the physical sign-in books get archived and never processed anywhere.
anonu 3y ago
On one hand, the engineer/data scientist in me thinks more data is good. On the other hand, having managed teams, this seems like major compensation for lack of performance measurement and goal setting. The reality is probably that from a large white-collar corporations perspective employees are viewed more as factory workers, simply expendable warm bodies designed to fill a seat, rather than dynamic knowledge workers. At some point, these types of jobs will simply be automated away.
catchnear4321 3y ago
RTO, meet WADU
grepfru_it 3y ago
Why would anyone willingly accept these conditions? [0] [0] - https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chase-and-co/documents/suppliers-documents/systems-monitoring.pdf https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chas...
- gvedem 3y ago
  No social safety net, wages that haven't kept pace with inflation, and no unions. Many in America don't have the luxury of turning down an employer.
JackFr 3y ago
It's simply nonsense. Source: I was a VP at JPMorgan.
- MagnumOpus 3y ago
  It is nonsense, but a VP (=very junior individual contributor) would never know.
d883kd8 3y ago
If you know your employer is reading your personal email, linkedin, facebook etc. they are violating CFAA and you can and should sue them
codyb 3y ago
Banking’s super highly regulated for good reason. It’s an inherently risky business built on borrowing short (I.E. your depositors can “call” their deposits at any time (see Silicon Valley Bank for a recent example of depositors calling short)) to lend long (E.G. a 30 year mortgage). Considering 2008, the recent LIBOR scandal, and all the fines levied against large financial institutions for having bankers communicate at all for work purposes outside of captured communication lines (e.g. WhatsApp, Signal, text messages) of course everything a bank employee does on company time is regulated. The SEC is watching as best they can the fundamental liquidity providers of the world’s largest economies. Because when they fail, failures spread, and shit goes chaotic really quick. But if they’re not there in the first place all the money that makes our world go around doesn’t… keep moving and everything slows down. You can argue whether or not we should be slowing down as a species or whatever but that’s a different argument and orthogonal to the conversation. Banking’s highly regulated, and incredibly onerous about tracking all communications for discovery. If you’re a banker, you don’t have the luxury of mixing private and personal communications on the same devices.
jliptzin 3y ago
Workforce Activity Data Utility…sounds like it’s right out of black mirror.
sireat 3y ago
"Y.T.’s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It’s better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they’re careful, not cocky. It’s better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She’s pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It’s a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary."
photochemsyn 3y ago
American corporations are dystopian entities run by shareholder cartels, and the only real fix is the German approach, i.e. give worker organizations the same number of corporate board seats as the shareholder organizations have. This would enable employees to place limits on practices like invasive monitoring, stock buybacks, etc., and lead to better decision making as well.
- judge2020 3y ago
  If this happened the pendulum might just swing the other way, with workers effectively siphoning all profits instead of reinvesting it into the company for continued growth or paying out anything to the shareholders. Maybe not the worst situation to be in from a humanity and workers' rights perspective, but the US is powerful because of its economic position, so such regulation allowing/forcing this would need impeccable checks and balances to ensure the U.S. doesn't lose its foothold as the largest world power that other countries have to cater to.
- wil421 3y ago
  If the workers are empowered why does Germany lag behind the US, most Nordics, and other Northern European neighbors in PPP per capita? I assume work organizations would be able to get more share of profits.
saos 3y ago
This can’t be true. Now I’m wondering. Can my boss read my Slack messages?
youreincorrect 3y ago
So disgusting. Imagine being stressed at work because of personal reasons (e.g., you find out a family member is sick, your SO just dumped you, etc.) and your manager comes over to ask you why you're stressed out. Maybe the intentions are good, but to me, this sort of behavior clearly crosses a line. This wasn't inevitable, but blurring the line between work and personal, especially the whole work-as-family bullshit meme, has always made this outcome more possible.
- 1827163 3y ago
  I had the same problem in the open plan office at a former employer. A vicious circle sparked by me getting upset from a family related issue, and amplified by the manager opposite. The more he would start interfering and observing me, the more upset I would get. It became a matter of getting him to leave me alone, so that I could calm down. Once I did that, it all went away. Yes, his actions, presumably 'for my own good' caused me to get severely distressed. Open plan offices are a surveillance and privacy nightmare already, without the need for any cameras at all.
elzbardico 3y ago
O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't.
hackernoteng 3y ago
I worked as consultant at several of these big banks, and a few top end private equity firms. And what I learned was I would never want to work there full time. The whole culture of these places is really awful. And it comes from the top.
- bigthymer 3y ago
  Care to expound on the "what I learned"?
antondd 3y ago
Who needs China's Social Credit system if we can build a better one ourselves?
- jchook 3y ago
  "What are we? A bunch of ASIANS?!?!???"[1] China's "Social Credit System" is exaggerated by the media[2]. Meanwhile in the US, "credit scores" materially affect the lives of every resident, determining who can own a house for example[3]. In the US, only 23% of people own their home outright[4]. In China 90% own their home with no mortgage and no property tax[5]. 1. https://twitter.com/hermit_hwarang/status/1404535670765408256?lang=en https://twitter.com/hermit_hwarang/status/140453567076540825... 2. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/china-social-credit-system-authoritarian/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/china-social-credit-sys... 3. https://www.demos.org/research/discrediting-america-urgent-need-reform-nations-credit-reporting-industry https://www.demos.org/research/discrediting-america-urgent-n... 4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwake/2023/03/31/us-has-3rd-lowest-percentage-of-households-that-own-their-homes-without-mortgages/?sh=2d1c357e3124 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwake/2023/03/31/us-has-3rd-... 5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7546956/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7546956/
sturza 3y ago
what is the difference between this and an authoritarian state? honest question
ChaseMeAway 3y ago
I think that software engineers need to start strongly considering a professional organization/association akin to Drs and Lawyers. Do you think that other professionals would put up with this shit? Absolutely not. There’s also the matter of an association binding its members by a professional code of ethics. The software engineers who are tasked with building systems like these need to stand up and say no when asked to do. These systems will make life worse for you, your coworkers, and society. Stop trading your conscience for cash.
- AlwaysRock 3y ago
  > Do you think that other professionals would put up with this shit? Absolutely not. Lots of them do? >> very employee at JPMC has a profile in the WADU database. This, allegedly, isnt just for swes. JPMC has legal staff who would be, "putting up with this shit" as well as other countless employees in other orgs who would have the same type of monitoring. If anything engineers are technical enough to at least know their work computer is being monitored. Many employees dont even know that IT can likely access their computer at any time.
  - ChaseMeAway 3y ago
    I guess I should have clarified, not put up with being monitored but, more to my second paragraph, be so willing and eager (maybe even write a fun technical blog about it) to construct cages for themselves and others.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
This is not for productivity measurements. Banks are regularly paying billions in fines for various infractions, like money laundering, insider trading, trader collusion, sanction violations, workplace harassment etc. This is their attempt to reduce those fines.
mountainofdeath 3y ago
FWIW, I learned the startup I was at was doing this when I was fired after not even 60 days (as a Senior SWE mind you) for "browsing personal internet too much" in addition to a bunch of other stupid reasons. Like how much time did InfoSec have on their hands?
ff317 3y ago
I have yet to see any convincing argument for monitoring employee behavior/attentiveness/time, for any job role or level, really. The whole world needs to hurry up and learn that what matters is what your employees really accomplished. You don't need to track hours, or clicks, or chat lines, or documents opened. You need to track that they're producing the accomplishments they were hired to accomplish. Did they fix the software bugs you asked them to fix this week? Did they sign up 10 new customers today? Did they write that research report yesterday? Did they flip all the burger patties they were supposed to flip today? As a manager, if you can't define productivity in real terms like that, and manage employee performance based on real work outputs, you're just doing it wrong. Someone else that does it right at a competing team or org is going to eat your lunch eventually.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  >As a manager, if you can't define productivity in real terms like that, and manage employee performance based on real work outputs, you're just doing it wrong. That's easier said than done for white collar work. It is hard to detect liars, cheats, and saboteurs in workplaces with a baseline expectation of trust and low micromanagement. The problem IMHO is not people who do a great job on time, but people who inflate timelines, and derail projects. If you give someone a novel problem, and they say it is difficult and will take 80 hours instead of 20, the only way to catch them in the act is to duplicate the work yourself or with another employee. Similarly, if they raise lots of questions and involve other people, it is difficult to determine if these are valid complications, or manufactured complexity, without replicating the work. Humans are pretty good at deceit. Opportunities for deceit increase radically once you have tasks that are more complex than pushing buttons or punching tickets
  - ff317 3y ago
    My retort would be: If you have a singular employee doing a certain unique job, or a very small handful, then it's pretty trivial to instead manage them directly on a human level. You don't need Orwellian tech tools to have conversations with them and make a one-off evaluation as to whether they're giving it the effort and authenticity it should, and again: results matter. What were your expectations (in terms of accomplishments) in hiring this role, and are they being approximately met? But if you have a lot of employees doing a similar job, then it just gets increasingly easier to be objective about it. Look at their actual outputs statistically, and find the outliers and focus effort on those cases. Does Joe's output sit two standard deviations below the median? Why? Maybe there's a good reason and you document it and move on, or maybe they're just being deceitful. I still don't think mouse/eyeball tracking or virtual timecards are going to help much.
brundolf 3y ago
Add this to my very long list of reasons for not working at a BigCorp
repeekad 3y ago
Just another voice in the shouting match, but my old roommate in college works directly on WADU in Columbus and this post is dramatically blown out of proportion. It’s fueled by a lot of genuine anti RTO sentiment, but the HD video feed that measures changes in stress etc are completely made up. Just for one thing, managers can only see aggregate data for say their team, and there must be 10+ people in aggregate to have access.
- xyst 3y ago
  so you are saying JPM does keep a log of video, audio, and monitor screens. Today, they are just too incompetent to process all of the data. The fact that they even have this productivity measuring program is the real problem. Give this bank and others like it billions of dollars during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis that they helped to create, and these mofos do shit like this.
  - brushfoot 3y ago
    > so you are saying JPM does keep a log of video, audio, and monitor screens. Today, they are just too incompetent to process all of the data. GP said the opposite of that: > this post is dramatically blown out of proportion > the HD video feed that measures changes in stress etc are completely made up.
  - PragmaticPulp 3y ago
    > so you are saying JPM does keep a log of video, audio, and monitor screens. What? The parent comment didn’t say that at all.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
shepardrtc 3y ago
I worked for JPMC from 2016 to 2019 and they had nothing like this. Not saying they couldn't have rolled it out in the past 4 years... oh wait, there's no way they're competent enough to roll ANYTHING this complicated out in 4 years. There's probably some internal system called WADU that the poster is dramatically exaggerating. They have lots and lots of useless internal systems.
asdajksah2123 3y ago
Banks are highly regulated entities. Post 2009 they are almost required to track their employees by law. The government wants to know whether their employees are breaking the firewall between the sell and buy sides, it wants to know whether they are doing insider trading, etc. Even if JP Morgan did not want to track their employees at all, they would still be tracking them because they're legally required to (most regulation isn't "track your employees"...it's more like "you must ensure your employees in these 2 divisions are not communicating with each other"). And since they've setup the infrastructure anyways it's inevitable they will also use it for their own uses and try and use some of the cost for their benefit.
pfoof 3y ago
What if every employee was talking totally random nonsense during the day, like singing songs and such, and playing some noises into the microphone?
sn_master 3y ago
Every time I read things like this I wonder what the managers themselves are thinking since they themselves are employees and have their own managers. And in a company of that size there's A LOT of managers.
ACV001 3y ago
BS written by a maniac. Probably written using chatgpt as it is too creative.
TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
A lot of people are arguing that the particulars are overblown, but you can bet these things are already being done in China, and they will eventually all be done in companies like Chase.
fez_da_dev 3y ago
This whole WADU system and secrete "employee scorecards" that can only be viewed by management is total bs. JPMC can get away with it now that they employ so many people but nothing lasts forever and the bigger they are, the harder they fall eventually.
fez_da_dev 3y ago
I was recently let go by JPMC last month b/c I was doing a javaScript tutorial on w3schools.com when I had no other work to do and the alternative was being on my phone the rest of the day. It's completely oppressive and management is extremely toxic. Constantly going behind each-others back to HR -__-.

734 points by notRobot 3y ago

Actual article: https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-is-tracking-zoom-calls-workplace-activity-using-wadu-2022-5?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-is-tracking-z...

king_magic 3y ago
Much more helpful. Only initially seeing this through the lens of the Reddit thread immediately made me question if it was legit or some clever GPT-4 disinformation.
- cmilton 3y ago
  looks like its from 2022
tyingq 3y ago
https://archive.is/Qr3lk https://archive.is/Qr3lk and related https://archive.is/iBiG2 https://archive.is/iBiG2

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gamesbrainiac 3y ago

This seems like something out of a Dystopia novel. For some reason, it reminded me of severance.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

ipunchghosts 3y ago

Reddit in a nutshell... Hi everyone! Just jumping in to make a comment on this. The post initially got caught in our spam filter for low karma, approved by us, then gaining tens of thousands of upvotes and tons of awards, and then removed because the OP had their account shadowbanned due to being perceived as 'spam' Screenshot of post being approved here: https://you.banned.today/6FE6X2f.png https://you.banned.today/6FE6X2f.png

draw_down 3y ago
[dead]

andrewclunn 3y ago

Worked there (in Chase tower downtown Chicago) last year. The oddest thing is that it was hybrid work (where we were onsite 3 days out of the week). So good luck tracking things the other two days. I took to listening to midi files of old VG music as my "background tunes" during work, so as to not use bandwidth that would be tracked for streaming music while coding. The tracking didn't really get to me (after all, it is "their time" that they're paying for). The tough part is that it makes "Oh I need to do a personal thing for 5 / 10 minutes." a near impossibility, and a change in my personal life drove me to switch jobs for better work life balance. So no, I don't think that this tracking is the dystopian nightmare it's being portrayed as, but it does have consequences, which make the post-covid work / life intermingling schedule impossible to maintain. The real dangers of such a policy are who they will lose as a result of it. EDIT - I feel the need to add, that the tracking at the time of my departure was not as extensive as some of the claims being made here, which I am a bit... skeptical of.

Zeyka 3y ago
You say that, yet I'm sure you would be against a system like china's social credit score.
- andrewclunn 3y ago
  Changing jobs is something very different from escaping a country.
largepeepee 3y ago
You do realize once this is normalized, it wouldn't even come as a surprise to have them eventually mandating company devices to be on when at home and so on.
Frost1x 3y ago
>after all, it is "their time" that they're paying for On so many levels, it is not. Even if you're being paid for time, people don't "own" your time or shouldn't be allowed to "own" your time. Ultimately you own your time, they should pay for the privilege to nudge or direct your agency during that time. You should always have agency within that time to refuse to work or do whatever, otherwise we're on paths back toward slavery. On another level, most employees these days are salaried. Businesses adopted this for several reasons but the primary reason is its a beneficial reduction of labor costs in most cases. Paying employees salary not only makes labor costs more predictable (one argument) it sets a cap on the labor expense to try and maximize work within. Under a salary model, you're really paid for function not time, even though employers want to conveniently, to their advantage, choose when they want to view you as a functional or time based cost within that salaried definition. If you're salaried, there's almost no argument for your "time" which is why most salaried employees have infinite queues of uncompletable tasks stacked on them whilst hourly employees are often scrambling just to find tasks to do, depending again on the context.

nologic01 3y ago

Does anybody know if the tracking extends all the way to top? As we are now deep into a digital surveillance society an interesting (if abstract) question is if privacy will be somehow a luxury product, stratified according to socio-economic status. Will there be a partially private middle class, a fully tracked underclass and a mostly private upper class etc. The correlation of privacy with wealth in paper-based infromation societies is clearly there (e.g., offshore financial centers) but it is interesting to think how all this might mutate in the digital era.

eternalban 3y ago
OP:> "I know there was this 10-minute period where I totally look like I'm a bad employee — but really, I'm a good employee." > Will there be a partially private middle class, a fully tracked underclass and a mostly private upper class etc. Almost 3 decades ago I was doing a consulting gig for a telecomm in Austin. It was a call center and turned out that the operators were on a strict bathroom regiment, timed down to the seconds. After the shock was over, realization of the just how disjoint is the life experience for even contempories in the same society hit me. It was clear to me that this sort of micromanagement and assertion of control is directly correlated with socio-economic standing. 30 years later and we have JPMorgan employees -- that woman quoted likely went to an ivy league -- pleading for understanding for a "10 minute" activity. (!) This commoditization of the 'educated but financially dependent class' is relatively new and imo reflects the economic-technical paradigm shift. The battle lines are already drawn and blows are already being exchanged over at WFH and BigBrother@Work frontlines. > a mostly private upper class As for WFH, we hear that execs at these companies still wfh. We don't know to what extent they are also surveilled but it would be surprising if c-suite was being monitored by IT security. A bifurcated humanity is imho a very likely future unless there are major global events that disrupt the current (aggregate trends) curve.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  At the end of the day, it's power that stratifies life experience. Wealth is just the most obvious summary of power in capitalist societies. Controlling the means of production (or, say, housing) is also power. Historically, the worst excesses were prevented by labor having its own inherent power: farms didn't get harvested without labor. As we've moved further away from inherent power in every human (i.e. to industrialization, then knowledge work), that leaves a lot of people with little to no power. And when you have none, people can exploit the hell out of you. Personally, that's why I think UBI is going to be a required bandaid on the system -- you're going to have to afford people some level of "I will not willfully enslave myself to you, even if I don't have any skills / education." Otherwise Amazon warehouses are going to seem free and quaint.

Havoc 3y ago

Does sound like there is at least a bit of speculation in there though. Stuff like automatic reporting when you say something bad about coworkers seems a bit far fetched

shmatt 3y ago

Kind of terrifying to see all the comments just believing it as is Line managers, even managers of managers, would have 0 loyalty to the company and could easily prove this is all true. The thousands of employees could prove the webcam flash every laptop login. Things like this would be VP+ (who would have an org of 1000 or more, why would they even look if one of their reports body language is different this morning?) if it even existed under such a secretive blanket. Plus banks are literally known in the tech world as having the absolute oldest and crumbling tech And lastly, as someone who works in the CV world, even having all those cameras up, successfully streaming, uploading, and inferencing as described in that post would be a technological marvel

hardware2win 3y ago
>why would they even look if one of their reports body language is different this morning?) Ineeed
ethbr0 3y ago
This is on r/antiwork... which isn't a particularly objective source when it comes to employers.
- KyeRussell 3y ago
  I’m a staunch unionist and whenever I happen across this subreddit it makes my blood boil. I wouldn’t take anything there seriously.
  - CapstanRoller 3y ago
    [dead]
- aerhardt 3y ago
  I don’t have trouble believing that working conditions in the US are sometimes dire, but I also suspect that r/antiwork and other associated subreddits are heavily influenced by foreign actors. I mean, why wouldn’t they?

DoneWithAllThat 3y ago

This is /r/antiwork, which is basically equal parts socialism advocacy, creative writing, and unfocused gen-z frustrations that the world doesn’t operate like they wish. It is not a source of accurate or useful information.

unpopularopp 3y ago

That sub is +95% made up posts though. Like frustrated fanfiction + attention seeking at the same time. Maybe there is some truth to this post but there are so many fake stories and made up iMessage conversations posted there that it's hard to take anything seriously anymore.

phantomathkg 3y ago
Maybe it is up to JPMorgan Chase and the manufacturer come out to "clarify"?
sledgehammers 3y ago
Surveillance and monopolies are out of control regardless of whatever content is in a subreddit.
- KyeRussell 3y ago
  Okay, but “Surveillance and monopolies are out of control” isn’t what are talking about. Some kid’s complaint about The Man is not HN-worthy. And that’s all that you’re posing.
  - sledgehammers 3y ago
    I hear you, though you don't get to decide what's HN-worthy and what's not. I guess my brain felt compelled to remind about the important underlying message of the post, because the comment felt like it was undermining it. The main motivation is probably fear of a shitty dystopian future, because I cannot remember the last time I read any positive news.
luma 3y ago
Business Insider ran essentially the same story last year: https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-employees-describe-fear-mass-workplace-data-surveillance-wadu-2022-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-employees-des... If you Google "JPM WADU" you'll find communications to employees about the system: https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chase-and-co/documents/suppliers-documents/systems-monitoring.pdf https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chas... Job listings: https://www.disabledperson.com/jobs/33566500-wadu-tech-and-tools-stream-lead-vice-president https://www.disabledperson.com/jobs/33566500-wadu-tech-and-t... Even patent filings: https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-7668849-B1 https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-7668849-... This isn't "made up" and it's easily verified with a couple seconds of google.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago

There is always a question of what is acceptable. My current employer seems to employ wide range of scanning, but it seems to mostly targeted at ensuring there is no 'data leakage'. All I can tell you for sure is that JPM is off my potential employer list although admittedly that is partly because compared to other peers its pay does not even begin to offset that level of intrusion.

tomatocracy 3y ago

What's often missed when people get upset about this type of thing is how few distinct types of information you need to build up a pretty good picture of someone's life to the point of working out quite private details - it's more about getting a long time series. Simply tracking things like badge swipe times (in/out and within areas etc), time logged in/out of computers, and company email metadata could easily be enough to deduce quite a lot of private details about someone's personal life. In that sense, 1984/Orwell gives a false sense of security because you don't need some all-seeing "big brother" style panopticon to lose a lot of privacy you think you have.

asah 3y ago
WADU tracks you in the office, but most JPM staff are 9-5 and WADU has no data on what staff do outside of work. For other reasons, JPM staff are on best behavior in the office. There are orgs & jobs that require staff be on-call outside the office and require them to carry a "work phone" which tracks your location, etc.
- tomatocracy 3y ago
  It can reveal a lot more than you might at first think. For example, just with badge swipe timings for the whole cohort (and email/internal office chat metadata - even if people are careful with message content) you could see who might be likely having an affair with someone at work.
  - alchemist1e9 3y ago
    > could see who might be likely having an affair with someone at work. This is your example? privacy needed at work to protect employee freedom to have affairs on company time? I don’t get it
    - tomatocracy 3y ago
      Not on company time - that's the point. In this example, you can look at eg who arrives together or leaves together, then perhaps restrict that to times which are out of the norm, and correlate with when and how often they message each other as well. And that's a fairly straightforward one.

chadash 3y ago

> Upper management wants to see everyone at all levels back in the office five days a week. They have invested millions into the WADU system, and they want to get a return on that investment. That only happens whenever people are in the office as much as possible. Lol. Millions to JP Morgan would be like dollars to the average person. Upper management there is not making any big decisions over anything involving less than 9, and maybe 10 zeros.

cebert 3y ago

I am not sure how much more Business Insider is than Reddit, but this article seems relevant: https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-employees-describe-fear-mass-workplace-data-surveillance-wadu-2022-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-employees-des...

joezydeco 3y ago

I'd start to question any company that's using Office365 corporate wide. There's ML-based sentiment analysis on email, and it doesn't seem out of reach to apply it to Teams chats and video calls as well. And if they can observe your LinkedIn activity? Maybe you replied to that recruiter last week. Maybe your boss knows that now?

urthor 3y ago

For the record, working for these companies. JPMorgan Chase is a bank. Insider trading/financial fraud is a concern. For companies where insider trading is a serious issue. As an employee, you will be key-logged, tracked, spied upon. That's the deal, same as working for the Pentagon. Every employee understands this. It's not in any way, shape or form unethical. It's just the deal.

pclmulqdq 3y ago
Most of the surveillance is because of banking compliance. I'm not convinced they actually use that data for managerial purposes. The last time I worked for a financial company, they were reasonably open about all the tracking, but never really looked at the data.
- blitzar 3y ago
  If one of many keywords got dropped in a written communication or on a recorded line my boss would get a call within 5 minutes to explain, and an incident report would get filed.
  - aceofspades19 3y ago
    What sort of keywords? Surely there would be a lot of false positives if it was just 1 word being matched with no context.
    - blitzar 3y ago
      https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/15/you-wont-believe-what-gets-an-email-flagged-at-goldman-cnbc-has-the-list.html https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/15/you-wont-believe-what-gets-a... expletives naturally, but also champagne ended up being a naughty word for us as well
benjaminwootton 3y ago
I dont want to be a corporate shill, but I do see it from the banks side to a degree. They have a trillion regulations and laws they have to follow and more than 100k employees. Surely you have to turn to automation to meet your legal responsibilities.

ritzaco 3y ago

I think the most interesting part is > I think everyone expects their employer to track them to some extent. It is pretty standard practice for employers to monitor and run analysis on things like building badge swipes and the amount of time spent connected when working from home. It has also become very common place for employers to record audio and video at the office. That sounds dystopian to me already (maybe because I'm not in the US? Or haven't spend much time at BigCorp? But is that really the default minimum these days?) If you asked someone 10-20 years ago if that description sounded dystopian, would you be more likely to get a "yes definitely" than you are today? I'm way more worried by the dystopia society accepts as "normal" than one that is forced on us and that we could potentially fight against.

gamesbrainiac 3y ago
This is dystopian. Something like this would be illegal in the EU.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Any workers council, and union, I onow woupd slap managers backsidesnfrom here to Mars and bavknforbthat. Before, during and after suing said employer to death. With basically a guaranteed win at any labour court. Since everybody knows that, only the most sketchy employers consider something along these lines. Again one ofnthe reasons I am really happy with my job and the country I have it in.
  - brightstep 3y ago
    This is a perfect example (finally) of why even white collar workers need unions. Yes, even you in finance. Yes, even you in software engineering. It’s not just about pay!
    - lucozade 3y ago
      There are perfectly good reasons for having unions in finance. This is definitely not one of them. The heavy monitoring of communications, access etc is mandated by regulators primarily for the protection of customers. There's zero chance a union, or any other body below government, will get them to change that. I doubt they'd even try and nor should they.

robertlagrant 3y ago

@dang should be dystopian.

osigurdson 3y ago

Companies should be required to disclose what they are tracking. This way they can compete against each other for employees on knowable metrics.

kunley 3y ago

That's funny. Why to waste so much money on obvious things? I mean, a regular, moderately emphatic, non-narcistic boss just goes by a desk of the guy to see if he's stressed, or notices it during a meeting. It can be also seen via teams/zoom, just requires a bit more attention. Why to build big and costly tech around simple things that sane humans are doing all the time subconsciously within seconds?

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> Why to build big and costly tech around simple things that sane humans are doing all the time subconsciously within seconds? Cynical take: because if it works, then they'll be able to fire all the low-to-mid-level managers, and replace them with WADU and ChatGPT.
- kunley 3y ago
  Except that the tasks of low-to-mid-managers are far beyond reading the moods of employees, and many/most of these tasks are still far beyond what "AI" can do. Then, the econo argument does not hold :D

NotYourLawyer 3y ago

This is every bit as well-sourced and plausible as the average qanon post.

thrrowawayjpm 3y ago

I’ve always been curious what the true boundaries of Citrix are when WFH. Can an employer see what other apps are doing outside the Citrix view if running on one’s own hardware? Could they monitor web browser usage?

irusensei 3y ago
AFAIK no. It might collect some telemetry data but those can be generated and viewed by yourself anyway. Things like username, computer name, OS etc. There is this utterly annoying thing called App Protection that injects a driver into your OS low level functions that aims to prevent things like keyloggers, screenshots and recordings. The problem here is that it often breaks some OS functionalities doing it. I used to work for company A as a resource for company B. Company B's Citrix literally prevented my computer from using Teams to speak with company A. Also if you have the big galaxy GPU and experiencing 2FPS on your games? Yeap... app protection is at it again. Funny thing is that it blissfully runs on a VM from where you can do whatever you want including the things it should prevent you to. Shrugs.

NVQXE23I 3y ago

From an attacker perspective: If I can get access to these tracking systems full of recorded conversations and video, can I use this information to advance my attack? Maybe I can even set queries on the collected data, like "mark all conversations about domain admins" or "mark all videos containing a clear view of somebody typing in a password on a terminal". This also opens up a new trove of espionage. Imagine getting inside info on big investement.

moolcool 3y ago
This is an important perspective. Surveillance capitalism is so often justified with "as long as they don't misuse the data". No, fuck that. The data should not have been collected in the first place.
hbosch 3y ago
Yeah, this is a strong counterpoint. Oftentimes companies don't want to know what their employees are doing or saying in private, all of that data is just additional liability. There just isn't a good enough reason. No company is going to fire you because you have bad posture.

bluedino 3y ago

I have a keycard for work, so that means I'm tracked. Every time I go through the campus gate. Every building I enter. Cafeteria scans. Active Directory signons. Computer unlocks/wakes. Someone, or something, is crunching those numbers. Just waiting to flag a discrepancy in my timecard, a missing entry/exit... Part of it is the under the guise of safety, they want to know where people are in case of an emergency, but the information will be used for whatever they deem necessary. In bad economic times, that data has been used to find people in violation of policies in order to let them go. Ironically, I bet the physical sign-in books get archived and never processed anywhere.

anonu 3y ago

On one hand, the engineer/data scientist in me thinks more data is good. On the other hand, having managed teams, this seems like major compensation for lack of performance measurement and goal setting. The reality is probably that from a large white-collar corporations perspective employees are viewed more as factory workers, simply expendable warm bodies designed to fill a seat, rather than dynamic knowledge workers. At some point, these types of jobs will simply be automated away.

catchnear4321 3y ago

RTO, meet WADU

grepfru_it 3y ago

Why would anyone willingly accept these conditions? [0] [0] - https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chase-and-co/documents/suppliers-documents/systems-monitoring.pdf https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chas...

gvedem 3y ago
No social safety net, wages that haven't kept pace with inflation, and no unions. Many in America don't have the luxury of turning down an employer.

JackFr 3y ago

It's simply nonsense. Source: I was a VP at JPMorgan.

MagnumOpus 3y ago
It is nonsense, but a VP (=very junior individual contributor) would never know.

d883kd8 3y ago

If you know your employer is reading your personal email, linkedin, facebook etc. they are violating CFAA and you can and should sue them

codyb 3y ago

Banking’s super highly regulated for good reason. It’s an inherently risky business built on borrowing short (I.E. your depositors can “call” their deposits at any time (see Silicon Valley Bank for a recent example of depositors calling short)) to lend long (E.G. a 30 year mortgage). Considering 2008, the recent LIBOR scandal, and all the fines levied against large financial institutions for having bankers communicate at all for work purposes outside of captured communication lines (e.g. WhatsApp, Signal, text messages) of course everything a bank employee does on company time is regulated. The SEC is watching as best they can the fundamental liquidity providers of the world’s largest economies. Because when they fail, failures spread, and shit goes chaotic really quick. But if they’re not there in the first place all the money that makes our world go around doesn’t… keep moving and everything slows down. You can argue whether or not we should be slowing down as a species or whatever but that’s a different argument and orthogonal to the conversation. Banking’s highly regulated, and incredibly onerous about tracking all communications for discovery. If you’re a banker, you don’t have the luxury of mixing private and personal communications on the same devices.

jliptzin 3y ago

Workforce Activity Data Utility…sounds like it’s right out of black mirror.

sireat 3y ago

"Y.T.’s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It’s better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they’re careful, not cocky. It’s better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She’s pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It’s a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary."

photochemsyn 3y ago

American corporations are dystopian entities run by shareholder cartels, and the only real fix is the German approach, i.e. give worker organizations the same number of corporate board seats as the shareholder organizations have. This would enable employees to place limits on practices like invasive monitoring, stock buybacks, etc., and lead to better decision making as well.

judge2020 3y ago
If this happened the pendulum might just swing the other way, with workers effectively siphoning all profits instead of reinvesting it into the company for continued growth or paying out anything to the shareholders. Maybe not the worst situation to be in from a humanity and workers' rights perspective, but the US is powerful because of its economic position, so such regulation allowing/forcing this would need impeccable checks and balances to ensure the U.S. doesn't lose its foothold as the largest world power that other countries have to cater to.
wil421 3y ago
If the workers are empowered why does Germany lag behind the US, most Nordics, and other Northern European neighbors in PPP per capita? I assume work organizations would be able to get more share of profits.

saos 3y ago

This can’t be true. Now I’m wondering. Can my boss read my Slack messages?

youreincorrect 3y ago

So disgusting. Imagine being stressed at work because of personal reasons (e.g., you find out a family member is sick, your SO just dumped you, etc.) and your manager comes over to ask you why you're stressed out. Maybe the intentions are good, but to me, this sort of behavior clearly crosses a line. This wasn't inevitable, but blurring the line between work and personal, especially the whole work-as-family bullshit meme, has always made this outcome more possible.

1827163 3y ago
I had the same problem in the open plan office at a former employer. A vicious circle sparked by me getting upset from a family related issue, and amplified by the manager opposite. The more he would start interfering and observing me, the more upset I would get. It became a matter of getting him to leave me alone, so that I could calm down. Once I did that, it all went away. Yes, his actions, presumably 'for my own good' caused me to get severely distressed. Open plan offices are a surveillance and privacy nightmare already, without the need for any cameras at all.

elzbardico 3y ago

O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't.

hackernoteng 3y ago

I worked as consultant at several of these big banks, and a few top end private equity firms. And what I learned was I would never want to work there full time. The whole culture of these places is really awful. And it comes from the top.

bigthymer 3y ago
Care to expound on the "what I learned"?

antondd 3y ago

Who needs China's Social Credit system if we can build a better one ourselves?

jchook 3y ago
"What are we? A bunch of ASIANS?!?!???"[1] China's "Social Credit System" is exaggerated by the media[2]. Meanwhile in the US, "credit scores" materially affect the lives of every resident, determining who can own a house for example[3]. In the US, only 23% of people own their home outright[4]. In China 90% own their home with no mortgage and no property tax[5]. 1. https://twitter.com/hermit_hwarang/status/1404535670765408256?lang=en https://twitter.com/hermit_hwarang/status/140453567076540825... 2. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/china-social-credit-system-authoritarian/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/china-social-credit-sys... 3. https://www.demos.org/research/discrediting-america-urgent-need-reform-nations-credit-reporting-industry https://www.demos.org/research/discrediting-america-urgent-n... 4. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwake/2023/03/31/us-has-3rd-lowest-percentage-of-households-that-own-their-homes-without-mortgages/?sh=2d1c357e3124 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwake/2023/03/31/us-has-3rd-... 5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7546956/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7546956/

sturza 3y ago

what is the difference between this and an authoritarian state? honest question

ChaseMeAway 3y ago

I think that software engineers need to start strongly considering a professional organization/association akin to Drs and Lawyers. Do you think that other professionals would put up with this shit? Absolutely not. There’s also the matter of an association binding its members by a professional code of ethics. The software engineers who are tasked with building systems like these need to stand up and say no when asked to do. These systems will make life worse for you, your coworkers, and society. Stop trading your conscience for cash.

AlwaysRock 3y ago
> Do you think that other professionals would put up with this shit? Absolutely not. Lots of them do? >> very employee at JPMC has a profile in the WADU database. This, allegedly, isnt just for swes. JPMC has legal staff who would be, "putting up with this shit" as well as other countless employees in other orgs who would have the same type of monitoring. If anything engineers are technical enough to at least know their work computer is being monitored. Many employees dont even know that IT can likely access their computer at any time.
- ChaseMeAway 3y ago
  I guess I should have clarified, not put up with being monitored but, more to my second paragraph, be so willing and eager (maybe even write a fun technical blog about it) to construct cages for themselves and others.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

This is not for productivity measurements. Banks are regularly paying billions in fines for various infractions, like money laundering, insider trading, trader collusion, sanction violations, workplace harassment etc. This is their attempt to reduce those fines.

mountainofdeath 3y ago

FWIW, I learned the startup I was at was doing this when I was fired after not even 60 days (as a Senior SWE mind you) for "browsing personal internet too much" in addition to a bunch of other stupid reasons. Like how much time did InfoSec have on their hands?

ff317 3y ago

I have yet to see any convincing argument for monitoring employee behavior/attentiveness/time, for any job role or level, really. The whole world needs to hurry up and learn that what matters is what your employees really accomplished. You don't need to track hours, or clicks, or chat lines, or documents opened. You need to track that they're producing the accomplishments they were hired to accomplish. Did they fix the software bugs you asked them to fix this week? Did they sign up 10 new customers today? Did they write that research report yesterday? Did they flip all the burger patties they were supposed to flip today? As a manager, if you can't define productivity in real terms like that, and manage employee performance based on real work outputs, you're just doing it wrong. Someone else that does it right at a competing team or org is going to eat your lunch eventually.

s1artibartfast 3y ago
>As a manager, if you can't define productivity in real terms like that, and manage employee performance based on real work outputs, you're just doing it wrong. That's easier said than done for white collar work. It is hard to detect liars, cheats, and saboteurs in workplaces with a baseline expectation of trust and low micromanagement. The problem IMHO is not people who do a great job on time, but people who inflate timelines, and derail projects. If you give someone a novel problem, and they say it is difficult and will take 80 hours instead of 20, the only way to catch them in the act is to duplicate the work yourself or with another employee. Similarly, if they raise lots of questions and involve other people, it is difficult to determine if these are valid complications, or manufactured complexity, without replicating the work. Humans are pretty good at deceit. Opportunities for deceit increase radically once you have tasks that are more complex than pushing buttons or punching tickets
- ff317 3y ago
  My retort would be: If you have a singular employee doing a certain unique job, or a very small handful, then it's pretty trivial to instead manage them directly on a human level. You don't need Orwellian tech tools to have conversations with them and make a one-off evaluation as to whether they're giving it the effort and authenticity it should, and again: results matter. What were your expectations (in terms of accomplishments) in hiring this role, and are they being approximately met? But if you have a lot of employees doing a similar job, then it just gets increasingly easier to be objective about it. Look at their actual outputs statistically, and find the outliers and focus effort on those cases. Does Joe's output sit two standard deviations below the median? Why? Maybe there's a good reason and you document it and move on, or maybe they're just being deceitful. I still don't think mouse/eyeball tracking or virtual timecards are going to help much.

brundolf 3y ago

Add this to my very long list of reasons for not working at a BigCorp

repeekad 3y ago

Just another voice in the shouting match, but my old roommate in college works directly on WADU in Columbus and this post is dramatically blown out of proportion. It’s fueled by a lot of genuine anti RTO sentiment, but the HD video feed that measures changes in stress etc are completely made up. Just for one thing, managers can only see aggregate data for say their team, and there must be 10+ people in aggregate to have access.

xyst 3y ago
so you are saying JPM does keep a log of video, audio, and monitor screens. Today, they are just too incompetent to process all of the data. The fact that they even have this productivity measuring program is the real problem. Give this bank and others like it billions of dollars during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis that they helped to create, and these mofos do shit like this.
- brushfoot 3y ago
  > so you are saying JPM does keep a log of video, audio, and monitor screens. Today, they are just too incompetent to process all of the data. GP said the opposite of that: > this post is dramatically blown out of proportion > the HD video feed that measures changes in stress etc are completely made up.
- PragmaticPulp 3y ago
  > so you are saying JPM does keep a log of video, audio, and monitor screens. What? The parent comment didn’t say that at all.
deleted 3y ago
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shepardrtc 3y ago

I worked for JPMC from 2016 to 2019 and they had nothing like this. Not saying they couldn't have rolled it out in the past 4 years... oh wait, there's no way they're competent enough to roll ANYTHING this complicated out in 4 years. There's probably some internal system called WADU that the poster is dramatically exaggerating. They have lots and lots of useless internal systems.

asdajksah2123 3y ago

Banks are highly regulated entities. Post 2009 they are almost required to track their employees by law. The government wants to know whether their employees are breaking the firewall between the sell and buy sides, it wants to know whether they are doing insider trading, etc. Even if JP Morgan did not want to track their employees at all, they would still be tracking them because they're legally required to (most regulation isn't "track your employees"...it's more like "you must ensure your employees in these 2 divisions are not communicating with each other"). And since they've setup the infrastructure anyways it's inevitable they will also use it for their own uses and try and use some of the cost for their benefit.

pfoof 3y ago

What if every employee was talking totally random nonsense during the day, like singing songs and such, and playing some noises into the microphone?

sn_master 3y ago

Every time I read things like this I wonder what the managers themselves are thinking since they themselves are employees and have their own managers. And in a company of that size there's A LOT of managers.

ACV001 3y ago

BS written by a maniac. Probably written using chatgpt as it is too creative.

TheRealDunkirk 3y ago

A lot of people are arguing that the particulars are overblown, but you can bet these things are already being done in China, and they will eventually all be done in companies like Chase.

fez_da_dev 3y ago

This whole WADU system and secrete "employee scorecards" that can only be viewed by management is total bs. JPMC can get away with it now that they employ so many people but nothing lasts forever and the bigger they are, the harder they fall eventually.

fez_da_dev 3y ago

I was recently let go by JPMC last month b/c I was doing a javaScript tutorial on w3schools.com when I had no other work to do and the alternative was being on my phone the rest of the day. It's completely oppressive and management is extremely toxic. Constantly going behind each-others back to HR -__-.