4 ms·

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 someon

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.
      - alchemist1e9 3y ago
        And … ? Companies have policies against workplace romantic relationships for reasons that we eventually concluded in the 90s as needed to protect women. I still don’t understand. I’m pretty sure the crowd of outraged people have never been a manager or an employer. Employers realistically need to collect large amounts of information for all sorts of reasons. Especially JPM as the world’s largest bank and custodian. But even the activity level issue. These days employee can try to sue you and claim all sorts of fabricated reasons for their dismissal. By having detailed event logging you insure you have an accurate proof of empirical facts. This whole antiwork fiction story post is a bit embarrassingly childish in my opinion.
        tomatocracy 3y ago
        I agree some of the stuff in the Reddit post seems fanciful at best, but my point was that it doesn't take much data to work out things people think are relatively private - and the analysis of more "mundane" stuff can be very powerful. I thought we'd learned that lesson from Snowden but apparently it's easily forgotten. Also worth bearing in mind that just because the company has good intentions, doesn't mean the people with access to these tools and data are going to be honourable all the time - we see that routinely with those in the police, intelligence services, armed forces, etc. JPM does have regulatory obligations to collect and monitor some data (I work in the financial sector so I'm well aware of this) and I don't think it's fair to single them out here but I do think a debate around whether the privacy protections we have in place for employees are sufficient is warranted. Personally I think it's impossible to stop abuse of this type of data so the right course might well be to simply reconsider the amount of data being collected or retained despite any benefit it might bring. On the topic of workplace relationships - very few companies have policies which outright ban them - certainly none I've ever worked for. In fact I'm not even sure whether that would be legal in much of the world.
- _fat_santa 3y ago
  Reading the comments here, I remember reading this article [1] about JPM traders using iMessage instead of official company comms. The scenario I see happening with WADU in mind is traders/employees know about this tracking and explicitly go outside of the bounds (ie use iMessage) so that WADU doesn't track them. [1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/jpmorgan-in-talks-to-pay-200-million-fine-over-employee-text-messages-11639424537 https://www.wsj.com/articles/jpmorgan-in-talks-to-pay-200-mi...

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.
    - alchemist1e9 3y ago
      And … ? Companies have policies against workplace romantic relationships for reasons that we eventually concluded in the 90s as needed to protect women. I still don’t understand. I’m pretty sure the crowd of outraged people have never been a manager or an employer. Employers realistically need to collect large amounts of information for all sorts of reasons. Especially JPM as the world’s largest bank and custodian. But even the activity level issue. These days employee can try to sue you and claim all sorts of fabricated reasons for their dismissal. By having detailed event logging you insure you have an accurate proof of empirical facts. This whole antiwork fiction story post is a bit embarrassingly childish in my opinion.
      - tomatocracy 3y ago
        I agree some of the stuff in the Reddit post seems fanciful at best, but my point was that it doesn't take much data to work out things people think are relatively private - and the analysis of more "mundane" stuff can be very powerful. I thought we'd learned that lesson from Snowden but apparently it's easily forgotten. Also worth bearing in mind that just because the company has good intentions, doesn't mean the people with access to these tools and data are going to be honourable all the time - we see that routinely with those in the police, intelligence services, armed forces, etc. JPM does have regulatory obligations to collect and monitor some data (I work in the financial sector so I'm well aware of this) and I don't think it's fair to single them out here but I do think a debate around whether the privacy protections we have in place for employees are sufficient is warranted. Personally I think it's impossible to stop abuse of this type of data so the right course might well be to simply reconsider the amount of data being collected or retained despite any benefit it might bring. On the topic of workplace relationships - very few companies have policies which outright ban them - certainly none I've ever worked for. In fact I'm not even sure whether that would be legal in much of the world.
_fat_santa 3y ago
Reading the comments here, I remember reading this article [1] about JPM traders using iMessage instead of official company comms. The scenario I see happening with WADU in mind is traders/employees know about this tracking and explicitly go outside of the bounds (ie use iMessage) so that WADU doesn't track them. [1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/jpmorgan-in-talks-to-pay-200-million-fine-over-employee-text-messages-11639424537 https://www.wsj.com/articles/jpmorgan-in-talks-to-pay-200-mi...