7 ms·

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 ta

by mvdtnz 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.

eitland 3y ago
Respectfully: 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 ago
  Respectfully, 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 ago
    Free 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 ago
      Precisely why the FAA should implement this and not leave it up to the airlines.
      - eitland 3y ago
        So 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 ago
    Do you feel the same way about surveillance of the inside of your car while it's on public roadways?
    - xeornet 3y ago
      If I’m a taxi driver or school bus driver, yes!
      - thfuran 3y ago
        You're just a able to crash into oncoming traffic as any cabbie. Why should you not be subject to the same intrusive surveillance? What are you hiding?
        xeornet 3y ago
        There's a key distinction between operating a vehicle for commercial purposes and a private operation, not just the ability to harm others. There's a reason why commercial pilots licences are in a completely different league in terms of training and responsibility to PPLs.
- 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 ago
    You can't imagine bad things that mass surveillance will lead to?
- zarzavat 3y ago
  People 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 ago
    Couldn’t you say about population mass surveillance too?
  - eitland 3y ago
    As 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 ago
        Air 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 ago
It 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 ago
  The 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 ago
    Passenger rant? If ICAO can require keeping 25 hours why should a crew get to choose 2?
  - CaptainZapp 3y ago
    I 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 ago
  Eh, 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 ago
    But 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 ago
      I 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 ago
        I’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 ago
Social 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 ago
Why 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 ago
  We 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 ago
    Police 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 ago
      Coincidentally, this is also why those cameras get "accidentally" turned off quite a lot whenever a use of force is about to occur.
queuebert 3y ago
I'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 ago
  Even 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 ago
    I have never tried recording a doctor visit. Is that something a doctor would would resist?
    - xp84 3y ago
      Without 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 ago
Then 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.

by mvdtnz 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.

eitland 3y ago

Respectfully: 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 ago
Respectfully, 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 ago
  Free 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 ago
    Precisely why the FAA should implement this and not leave it up to the airlines.
    - eitland 3y ago
      So 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 ago
  Do you feel the same way about surveillance of the inside of your car while it's on public roadways?
  - xeornet 3y ago
    If I’m a taxi driver or school bus driver, yes!
    - thfuran 3y ago
      You're just a able to crash into oncoming traffic as any cabbie. Why should you not be subject to the same intrusive surveillance? What are you hiding?
      - xeornet 3y ago
        There's a key distinction between operating a vehicle for commercial purposes and a private operation, not just the ability to harm others. There's a reason why commercial pilots licences are in a completely different league in terms of training and responsibility to PPLs.
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 ago
  You can't imagine bad things that mass surveillance will lead to?
zarzavat 3y ago
People 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 ago
  Couldn’t you say about population mass surveillance too?
- eitland 3y ago
  As 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 ago
      Air 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 ago

It 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Passenger rant? If ICAO can require keeping 25 hours why should a crew get to choose 2?
- CaptainZapp 3y ago
  I 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 ago
Eh, 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 ago
  But 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      I’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 ago

Social 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 ago

Why 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 ago
We 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 ago
  Police 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 ago
    Coincidentally, this is also why those cameras get "accidentally" turned off quite a lot whenever a use of force is about to occur.

queuebert 3y ago

I'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 ago
Even 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 ago
  I have never tried recording a doctor visit. Is that something a doctor would would resist?
  - xp84 3y ago
    Without 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 ago

Then 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.