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Voice recording is a big privacy concern for the crew. This is our workplace, so you would be recording every conversation, also any idle chat of which there is
by t0mas88 3y ago
Voice recording is a big privacy concern for the crew. This is our workplace, so you would be recording every conversation, also any idle chat of which there is quite a lot in cruise flight. The current voice recording is only accepted by the crew with the agreement that it is not stored, and can only be pulled after a serious incident in which case there will be a no-blame investigation.
But what you're trying to solve, already exists without the voice recording part. It's called FOQA or Flight Operations Quality Assurance. Mandatory for airlines in Europe, not yet mandatory in the US but may be in the future.
It records hundreds of parameters from engine indications to touchdown speed, G-loading, control inputs etc. Automatically uploaded to the operator and tracked for the whole fleet. That data is de-identified and used for safety analysis and improvement.
- mvdtnz 3y agoRespectfully, it is your workplace in which you're responsible for the lives of thousands of people each week. I don't think it's unreasonable to keep proper tabs.
- eitland 3y agoRespectfully: the pilots have been doing an absolutely excellent job with it for decades without us having to destroy their privacy. An argument can easily be made that this extra stress will make flying less safe. Edit: my next car will probably have mandatory spyware and unlike pilots there won't be a guaranteed no blame process if something happens. It is pretty easy to see how this will be abused by insurance companies and data harvesters. I think I kind of understand the processes that lead to this. But I seriously wish tech people wouldn't be accepting it and even argue for it.
- wholelotta 3y agoRespectfully, history is a terrible measure for carrying on as we have. Tech people are arguing for accountability in a life/death scenario. That there is no privacy in public spaces is a longstanding social/legal tradition. A cockpit is physically private for physical security reasons but the pilots in the cockpit are acting on behalf of public trust. Their social norms in that physical context are not their own to define. If pilots want privacy they can quit and sit at home.
- t0mas88 3y agoFree market at play, no airline can afford to say "well then quit and sit at home". There is a huge pilot shortage. No airline in their right mind is about to do things their workforce doesn't want. Just to illustrate, 5 years ago a first officer on year 2 pay would make on average 40-50k per year. In 2023 that has increased to 143k per year for all three American Airlines owned regionals (plus a 165k retention bonus). Similar for Spirit, increased to 142k standard and 145k on the Airbus. And JetBlue to 160k for the A320 and 153k for the A220. In this market, the first airline CEO to say "well then quit and sit at home" to their union will have half their workforce walk out within months.
- xeornet 3y agoPrecisely why the FAA should implement this and not leave it up to the airlines.
- eitland 3y agoSo far I can't see anyone coming up with any cases were this would have made life safer or even solved a previously unsolved case. The law of diminishing returns very much exist, and as one of my teachers in engineering once pointed out: if you really want to use surveillance to put a dent in the crime statistics you should put it in people's living rooms and in their bedrooms.
- thfuran 3y agoDo you feel the same way about surveillance of the inside of your car while it's on public roadways?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lotsofpulp 3y ago> Edit: my next car will probably have mandatory spyware and unlike pilots there won't be a guaranteed no blame process if something happens. It is pretty easy to see how this will be abused by insurance companies and data harvesters. If anything, the proliferation of dash cams will (and have) lead to bad drivers being appropriately charged more for insurance than good drivers. Previously, if you were cut off and collided with someone, you were always assumed to be at fault if you were behind the other driver.
- wolverine876 3y agoYou can't imagine bad things that mass surveillance will lead to?
- zarzavat 3y agoPeople have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their workplace. But expecting safety measures that could potentially prevent hundreds of deaths to be limited to preserve employee privacy is not reasonable.
- KolmogorovComp 3y agoCouldn’t you say about population mass surveillance too?
- eitland 3y agoAs I argue above pilots already have an excellent safety record. Have you considered what the extra stress of considering ones every word during a long and stressful day can do to someones concentration? I mean many, the thoughts about what they said earlier this morning is bad enough even if it wasn't recorded. We already record a couple of hours or so. If you want to record more, it is up to you to come up with data for how many more air traffic accidents we can solve and also to explain how we can know that it won't make air traffic more dangerous.
- Aeolun 3y ago> how we can know that it won't make air traffic more dangerous. This is an argument against any change that involves unknowns. I see it often, and I absolutely hate it.
- tga_d 3y agoAir travel is an industry with high risk yet a good safety track record. It seems like exactly the sort of place you wouldn't want to experiment. You can argue that this incident is a blemish in that track record, but it's not obvious to me how "add every word uttered by flight crews to a permanent record" would meaningfully address this incident (at least, any more than doing the same for every other job in the supply chain, from factory workers all the way up to the executives at Boeing), and it is obvious to me how it could be harmful.
- mcculley 3y agoIt is reasonable that passengers know that the desires for the crew to have "idle chat" are less important than safety. But t0mas88 made clear that what is reasonable is less important than what is "accepted by the crew". The crew apparently makes the decisions on safety matters.
- t0mas88 3y agoThe crew makes a lot of decisions on safety matters, that's basically the most important part of the job :-) But joking aside, in most places there are checks and balances between privacy impact and benefit. We all accept that some government agencies know some of our data, because the net benefit to society is bigger than the loss of privacy. And you would normally try to do such things in the least invasive way possible while achieving the benefit. Where you go wrong in your passenger rant, is in assuming there is a big safety benefit in more recording of pilots. There were a total of 2 fatalities on US airlines in the last 10 years [1], while billions of passengers were transported. The safety record of airline transport is stellar, without more recording. So yes, I believe it is very reasonable to consider what is and isn't acceptable to the crew being recorded. [1] https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-carriers/ https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...
- mcculley 3y agoPassenger rant? If ICAO can require keeping 25 hours why should a crew get to choose 2?
- CaptainZapp 3y agoI mostly agree with your take. Alas, I think it's ridiculous to fight a 25 hour recording requirement with the privacy argument. The recording should anyway only be retrieved under specific conditions and in a controlled environment. In this specific case the longer recording duration may have actually aided the investigation and thus further improve airline safety.
- t0mas88 3y ago
- consumer451 3y ago> Respectfully, it is your workplace in which you're responsible for the lives of thousands of people each week. I don't think it's unreasonable to keep proper tabs. Should all medical device software developers have the entirety of their working lives be archived in a similar manner?
- saalweachter 3y agoEh, as a software engineer, every piece of text I produce -- from chat to email to memes -- is sitting around, archived and backed up, for years if not longer, waiting to be combed through and potentially taken out of context. A great deal of that is social, idle chat, or complaining about my employer, or outright gossip. First they came for, etc, but they came for me a long time ago.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoBut they're not archiving your chit-chat with your coworkers over the water cooler. For pilots, they are (in the cockpit). So I can halfway see the pilots' point. [Edit: I mean, voice chit-chat. Just talking to each other. That gets recorded for pilots, and not for software engineers, no matter how long they keep our (text) chats for. Stuff gets said in person, by voice, that would never get typed out in a chat.]
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoI would be shocked if most companies are not maintaining long duration archives of employee emails, Slack, Teams, whatever medium. Chat logs are tiny.
- mulmen 3y agoI’d be shocked if most companies are retaining these logs longer than the legally mandated minimum. This kind of information is radioactive from a legal perspective. Slack and Teams even advertise automated deletion as a feature.
- 3y ago
- streb-lo 3y agoSocial media has a way higher impact on human well being than aviation safety; maybe we should record all idle chatter and boardroom meetings of people working at these companies to ascertain liability when we finally realize they're akin to tobacco companies.
- t0mas88 3y agoWhy do you think it's needed to record all conversations to "keep proper tabs"? That's purely a gut feeling based on no data at all. Aviation is by far the safest form of transportation. In the last 10 years of data (2012-2021) there were a total of 2 passenger fatalities on US airlines across several billion passengers for that time period [1]. If you want to start recording workplaces to improve safety, there are a lot of industries to look at before aviation. [1]. https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-carriers/ https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-ca...
- lotsofpulp 3y ago> If you want to start recording workplaces to improve safety, there are a lot of industries to look at before aviation. This is irrelevant to the discussion about recording pilots.
- lttlrck 3y agoWe already looked at policing. Police unions have a similar stance about body-cams? They are more invasive because they follow officers to the bathroom, and I am sure they're are safety/effectivenes stats that argue those are unnecessary. Most civilians don't seem to have much sympathy.
- t0mas88 3y agoPolice unions indeed have similar objections. That's why police officers can turn their cameras on and off themselves, so they are not recorded when talking to a colleague or going to the bathroom: https://www.engadget.com/police-reform-bill-body-cameras-215036775.html https://www.engadget.com/police-reform-bill-body-cameras-215...
- int_19h 3y agoCoincidentally, this is also why those cameras get "accidentally" turned off quite a lot whenever a use of force is about to occur.
- queuebert 3y agoI've often thought we should record all surgeries so that the patient can view them later. Wouldn't you want to know what is done to your body while you're under anesthesia? Of course surgeons will fight this, but aren't we entitled to know what happens to our bodies?
- lotsofpulp 3y agoEven just regular doctor appointments. People are paying hundreds of dollars for 5 minutes of a doctors’ time, and they have no way to have someone double check if a doctor did or did not check something they should have. I have looked at my kids’ pediatrician visit summaries, and they will state “doctor did this and that”, when I know for a fact the doctor did not. So I have to send a mychart message to document that the doctor did not do those things. Now, I understand that excessive liability is probably driving doctors to do unnecessary things and so 95% of the time, there is no ill intent, but rather shrewd judgment of not wasting time, however writing (or copy pasting) a false visit summary is not the answer.
- mulmen 3y agoI have never tried recording a doctor visit. Is that something a doctor would would resist?
- xp84 3y agoWithout a doubt they would object, based just on signage I've seen at the doctor's office. Also I think it would run the risk of appearing like you're a litigious nut. Note: All of this is U.S. perspective, I have no idea about healthcare anywhere else. Given how hard it is to even find half-decent doctors even taking new patients, or having appointments available this quarter let alone soon, the doctor likely doesn't need you nearly as much as you probably need a doctor. They're going to be fully booked even if they ask you to leave and decline to be filmed, so they don't have any reason to consent to it. This is one place where the "try to make the customer happy" conventional wisdom about transactional relationships seems to not apply one iota.
- 3y ago
- salawat 3y agoThen every software company should have every software engineer recorded at all times, as everything we work on is composed together in ways that hold dramatic sway over others lives. I'd like to point out that one thing the tech industry is bad about is figuring out which technology to definitely not build. In fact, we've collectively resisted any attempt at so doing.
- vimax 3y agoAnd what are your thoughts on police body cams?
- skinkestek 3y agoNot th0mas88, but my thoughts: police body cams are a whole different story. For one police officers are often able to turn on and off recording themselves, so it becomes as much of a protection for them as for everyone else. That is: if they are good police officers. Secondly, unlike pilots, the police force in many countries does not have a stellar track record. Edit: I do have some concerns. Yes, police brutality absolutely exists. But there also seems to exist a subset of the population - also represented here - who think police can be like superman and whenever they aren't that's because they are evil and enjoy harming innocents.
- t0mas88 3y agoPolice body cams are not "always on", the officer turns the camera on when they're interacting with the public and turn it off when they're in their car talking to a colleague: https://www.engadget.com/police-reform-bill-body-cameras-215036775.html https://www.engadget.com/police-reform-bill-body-cameras-215... So I guess they had similar objections to being recorded 24x7 and that was accommodated in the rules around body cams.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
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- Dah00n 3y agoI can't follow the logic of how a recording is not stressful in the two hours it is stored, but then suddenly becomes stressful when it has been stored for 2+ hours?
- mulmen 3y agoThen you lack imagination. Perpetual recording has a chilling effect on communication.
- ghaff 3y agoImagine you knew every on-the-clock interaction you had with a colleague was being stored away someplace that an unspecified number of people had access to as "needed." I'm pretty sure most developers here would object pretty strongly to such an arrangement (and would probably get onto ways to circumvent it).
- Dah00n 3y ago>Imagine you knew every on-the-clock interaction you had with a colleague was being stored away someplace Storing something for two hours is still storing it. The point was why is it bad if it is listen to for X minutes in a month, but okay if it is listen to for X minutes today? I can see no reason at all why two hours is okay if five isn't. I could understand if the argument was that nothing should be stored at all.
- mulmen 3y agoThe issue is the difference between 2 hours on board the airplane and forever with corporate access. > The point was why is it bad if it is listen to for X minutes in a month, but okay if it is listen to for X minutes today? That wasn't the point and the problem is who is listening, why, and what they may do with the information.
- Dah00n 3y agoThat wasn't the point. What can you say that I can hear on a recording that would stress you out if I listen in 3 hours but not if I listen after 1 hour? Is 2 hours okay but 2,5 is perpetual suddenly? That's a strange hill to die on. Zero hours make sense. 2 and no more or less seems ... strange. Why 2 and not 3? 33? 0,3?
- robertoandred 3y agoDoes anyone have privacy at work outside the restrooms?
- ghaff 3y agoAssuming you're talking about a physical workplace? Yes... most places. When I go into the office to meet with customers or whatever, there aren't cameras and microphones everywhere. I can use a personal cell phone (which is all I have these days anyway). And, honestly, for something personal but not in any way getting into legal issues, I have no problem communicating over chat or a video call.
- thomastjeffery 3y agoIf the concern is privacy, then access should be the focus, not time. So long as the recording is properly encrypted, and the access is properly managed, privacy will be preserved. If those things aren't true, then there is a privacy violation, regardless of the 2 hour time constraint.
- Aeolun 3y ago> This is our workplace, so you would be recording every conversation, also any idle chat of which there is quite a lot in cruise flight. My workplace is my laptop, and I’m fairly certain that it records more than the airplane does. I certainly have no expectation of privacy while using it. Any meeting is recorded regardless of what is being said. I’m sure my casual conversations would be if anyone felt I said anything valuable while muttering at my screen. Not saying that’s great. Just saying that airline staff may currently have more privacy than most.