9 ms·

Walmart, Delta, and Starbucks are using AI to monitor employee messages

159 points by cebert 3y ago

voidhorse 3y ago
Do we just call all of statistics "AI" now? I fail to see how or why applying basic machine learning techniques for data analysis is "artificial intelligence". This idea that intellection is nothing more than pattern matching is silly and needs to die. Conceptual understanding entails more than just pattern matching.
- csa 3y ago
  AI is one of many headline buzzwords these days that get an outsized number of clicks relative to the content, right along with Tesla, Trump, Taylor Swift and probably a few others.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/ Sentiment analysis may ultimately just be "statistics" but IMHO it goes way beyond what most people consider statistics, which is collecting, organizing, graphing data. Sentiment analysis draws conclusions from the data, assigning things like "level of negativity" and "level of positivity" among other things. It definitely feels like an artificial type of thing that humans do, so artificial intelligence seems like a reasonable category to me.
- vrc 3y ago
  Historically ML is a sub field within the study of AI. So are a lot of even more mundane techniques. So, if the hit word to describe things is AI, and the shoe fits, wear it!
- electroly 3y ago
  The AI part is the sentiment analysis of the chat message text and pictures. They're using statistics on the resulting aggregate data. This seems pretty reasonable to me. ML is roughly a gazillion times better than traditional NLP techniques for sentiment analysis. If you're doing sentiment analysis without ML in 2024 then you need to stop and reevaluate what you're doing. If you simply wanted to complain that they're using "AI" to describe something that uses ML, please tell me so I can move along. Nothing interesting there to discuss.
  - jmknoll 3y ago
    Did you mean to write LLMs instead of ML? Aren't traditional NLP techniques a subfield of ML?
    - jeffnappi 3y ago
      There's overlap, but many traditional NLP techniques are heuristics based. Here's an example: https://github.com/cjhutto/vaderSentiment https://github.com/cjhutto/vaderSentiment
  - sigsegv420 3y ago
    [dead]
- horacemorace 3y ago
  Do you call all of LLMs “statistics”? I fail to see how anyone who has studied and worked with these systems could fail to see how they exhibit behavior of conceptual understanding.
- delfinom 3y ago
  It's a mandatory buzzword for investment in 2024 since everything else has been milked to death already. I've seen companies go back and slap "AI" on things that have been out for 15 years.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sambull 3y ago
  If you want to close your funding round.. yes
jairuhme 3y ago
The headline is implying that each individual is being tracked as if for performance reasons, but its a bit different. And is it really that different than the data that companies already keep on individual messaging? The only thing really different from what I can see is that they now have a tool to try and understand the vast amounts of data vs. combing through message logs more manually.
mistrial9 3y ago
IIR one of a NeurIPS papers (or similar) was a Walmart Labs paper on "Purpose driven AI Guide for Employees" or similar. Multiple mentions of psychological health in the same paper that describes an AI assistant that is hypothetically required for every employee of a certain stripe, that does give instructions and answer questions. As a skeptic, the one-sided description of mental health, and the obvious parallel to a "always-on slave collar" jumped out. Is there legitimate use for this kind of employment technology? As is so common, those most incentivized to produce and deploy such a thing, are the exact character that is not to be trusted with such an invasive machine. It just screams of a need to regulate, to my western culture eye.
- dpflan 3y ago
  Can you locate the paper you're alluding to?
- kj4211cash 3y ago
  I work in Tech at Walmart and the funny thing is that of all the places I've worked they do the least in terms of surveying employee satisfaction. If they just asked, I and many of my colleagues would be happy to tell them which people and policies are toxic and which are wonderful. There's broad agreement in the rank and file on much of this. There are some truly awful and some truly wonderful things about the way Walmart manages tech. When I mentioned this to my VP, the response was basically that Walmart top level management didn't want to know some things because they might be compelled to act. Maybe all this "AI" rigamarole is just a way for Walmart top level management to get information without being legally or morally obligated to do anything?
baybal2 3y ago
[dead]
sandworm101 3y ago
Ok, exactly which communications does this AI monitor? This seems to be internal corporate coms (corporate email, internal chats) which are not subject to privacy. But the article is very unclear, leaving the reader to assume that they are monitoring social media or something else external to the organization. Internal company communcation channels are open to inspection by the company. Whether that company wants to use AI or pay for agents to read ever internal email is up to them. Want your bosses not to hear you rant about a new corporate policy? Don't sent such comments via company email.
- brvsft 3y ago
  > Depending on where you work, there’s a significant chance that artificial intelligence is analyzing your messages on Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other popular apps. I don't think it's so unclear, and it sounds like you understand too, internal comms. I know it seems obvious, but a lot of people wouldn't even immediately guess. (My first guess before RTA was Slack or anything like Slack. I always think, when I use Slack, that it cannot be truly private unless I start manually encrypting my messages with coworkers.) I'd guess anything that the business has control over might be a candidate. Even easier if the platform allows for apps to be added on at the company level.
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    I still call that unclear as many people use Slack and Teams for non-work stuff, or at multiple jobs. The tone of the article leaves a big open door by not directly stating that this is about monitoring employer-controlled channels rather than all slack or teams traffic.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Tell that to any subject the media deems newsworthy. Celebrities are mobbed with photographs or murderers/victims the same. If that's acceptable where does this fit in your worldview
freedomben 3y ago
As much as this turns my stomach, this is neither new nor unexpected, and honestly this is fairly benign to many of the things that companies do such as precision location tracking throughout the building, using company-issued phones, and using normal security surveillance to monitor "watercooler" talk and things like that. We had our chance to push back against company surveillance well over a decade ago, and nobody except privacy advocates like me seemed to give a shit. Some very close friends actually told (after the company for "saftey reasons" started using RFID tracking to track our movements throughout the building using our ID cards) that I was being "paranoid" by suggesting that at some point it would be openly surveiling employee activities like bathroom breaks, watercooler conversation, etc. Please don't misunderstand, I'm not saying that it's too late, that we've lost, and that we get what we deserve (although such might be true), but I am pessimistic that we could ever reverse this at this late stage point. The cancer has long metastasized and buried itself deeply into every nook and cranny. I don't know if it will work, but this is what I think we should do: 1. Refuse to work at companies that do the most invasive surveillance. This means a lot more of your options are gonna be to work for yourself or for a startup. 2. Spread the word in conversations and stuff (when appropriate. Don't be obnoxious and shove people's face in it cause that won't serve any purpose except alienating them). Seek to educate and inform, not to evangelize or argue (though such things do have their place, but use discretion). 3. Shame the companies who do surveillance. I'm not saying be obnoxious or in-your-face about it because that won't do anything other than make you an asshole, but it's absolutely worth bringing it up in a reasonable, fact-based way when appropriate. I've told recruiters that I won't work for <big tech co> because of this. 4. Live your values and try not to do business with these companies, though such can be hard when many have near-monopoly status or a hard-to-avoid position. A full boycott is admirable, but you gotta live your life too. Just try to continually re-evaluate alternatives and vote with your $. Anticipating someone dismissing me as an "r/antiwork" person (yes, people on the internet and even Hacker News do routinely make ridiculous assumptions about people based on zero knowledge other than one comment they just read), I actually think ignoring this helps the antiwork people by giving them valid points about the abuse. If you don't think they're right, then you should be very much on my side here because if nothing happens, they will eventually be right.
- 3y ago
analog31 3y ago
>>>> Using the anonymized data in Aware’s analytics product, clients can see how employees of a certain age group or in a particular geography are responding to a new corporate policy or marketing campaign >>>> “It won’t have names of people, to protect the privacy,” Schumann said. Rather, he said, clients will see that “maybe the workforce over the age of 40 in this part of the United States is seeing the changes to [a] policy very negatively because of the cost, but everybody else outside of that age group and location sees it positively because it impacts them in a different way.” QFT. It's always the over-40 who are under suspicion. Disclosure: Old.
- jSully24 3y ago
  >>> It's always the over-40 who are under suspicion. Because of our (over 40s) years of watching bad policy after bad policy destroying our work places, and speaking up.
  - babyshake 3y ago
    There is a reason companies love hiring young college grads.
- throwup238 3y ago
  If that's the intention everyone who uses this software opens themselves up to age discrimination lawsuits (40 years of age is the cutoff). This is either a really dumb way to market a product or it's actually meant to detect those discriminatory policies so employers can undo them before someone decides to sue.
  - IncreasePosts 3y ago
    I think you're assuming the software would be used to punish people who don't like the policies...but what if it's just used to help accommodate groups who don't like the policies?
    - kevin_b_er 3y ago
bagels 3y ago
Will it be used to find union organizers? Walmart and Starbucks have been in the news for suppressing labor organization.
- Erratic6576 3y ago
  And Tesla, and Apple, and Amazon “There’s a class warfare and mine is winning” WB
  - bruckie 3y ago
    WB = Warren Buffett, for those wondering (like I was) https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26ever...
  - __loam 3y ago
    The games industry meanwhile is going through massive layoffs and demonstrating the need for union power.
- nijave 3y ago
  Yes
- nielsbot 3y ago
  I’d bet serious money on yes. Amazon and Starbucks are incredibly anti-union. Unions scare them—unions mean shareholders and execs would be forced to share more profits with their workers. (The horror!) Just one example: Even though workers have won unions at Amazon and Starbucks shops, the companies are plain refusing to negotiate contracts with them as is right.
- bart_spoon 3y ago
  I guarantee it. My first impression when seeing this list of companies is that is likely the primary purpose.
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
This, the Gem AI revelation from last week; a bunch of companies are going to get clobbered by the massive fines. The question is if the fines will ever be worse than the benefit of the misdeed. Probably not.
prdonahue 3y ago
If Delta's "AI" support they force you through (even as Diamond Medallion) before you can chat with a representative is an indication of their competency, this monitoring is doomed.
happytiger 3y ago
The real value if removing encryption is access for AI. If we don’t have a comprehensive privacy legislation, something like a bill of rights for privacy, tied to individuals, AI will become a tool of totalitarianism and total information thought control. Full stop. You can look at it though todays lens and argue this is just another application of machine learning, but it isn’t just a slippery slope but becomes a landslide as soon as you apply more sophisticated future digital intelligences to it.
- devsda 3y ago
  Slowly Privacy is being redefined by many tech companies as "Your data is completely private and will never be viewed by any human". That's corporate speak for "we will analyze your data by all other available means" and AI is the perfect tool for that.
  - al_borland 3y ago
    I’d almost rather have the human. At least humans can forget.
none_to_remain 3y ago
Yes, the boss can see the company Slack.
laurex 3y ago
People often underestimate the effects of losing privacy. A lot of comments here seem to reflect the idea that “If I’m employed by CompanyY then I’m owned by them.” We are spending a majority of our waking hours working, often, and being trained to believe that an authority’s ownership of technical systems means that not only everything we do with other people via those systems belongs to an employer, but that our inadvertent inclusion of ourselves as humans and not simply task performers is “our own fault.” As humans, our psychological wellbeing rests on a sense of autonomy and these systems directly suppress that.
- sleight42 3y ago
  In some ways, these businesses are akin to the CCCP: they want to own our hearts and minds. They want our whole selves. They want every drop of what they can get out of us. This is so often what they mean when they say that they want people who are "passionate" about the work. They want us obsessed and fixated. So they want to more than own us. This isn't all businesses but increasingly this is becoming normalized.
  - infamouscow 3y ago
    This only happens because people allow it. If these same businesses all decided they were going to take your first born as collateral, I suspect a lot of CEOs and chairmen would be swinging from lamp posts (as they should) within a week. Personally, I would do far worse to such scumbags -- things that are not only (somehow) illegal to describe, but would likely get plenty of downvotes by the most milquetoast and pathetic. Things that up until the last 100 years, would have been regarded as normal for the entirety of recorded human history.
    - sleight42 3y ago
      Sure. Now. It's an Overton Window. Business executives and their big investors are the feudal overlords who are decreasingly benevolent liege lords. What is abhorrent now slowly becomes normalized. Look at CEOs who said, shortly after some of the more brutal start opining about how everyone needs to RTO or GTFO At least one of those CEOs said they needed a bit more Elon in them. They meant his ruthlessness with his employees. And the window moves.
xyst 3y ago
US PATRIOT Act essentially normalized domestic spying with FISA courts rubber stamping warrants in the name of “war on terror”. Privacy advocates lost once those towers fell on 2001-09-11. Millennials pushed the aging fossils into the digital world (e-banking/mobile banking, almost everything is digitalized today). Social media changed the way we interact with people. The concept of privacy continues to erode. Gen Z and future generations continuing the trend. Often just giving away their information for likes/impressions/views. Everything has been recorded in one way or another. Relationships also built on “no privacy” (couples often know their phone passcodes …). Children raised in dystopian households where privacy does not exist (parents have access to everything). Future generations conditioned to obey. Now it’s bleeding from private life into the work with invasive AI models deployed to determine seditious activity as deemed by Karen in HR or Jeff from C-level exec suite because he gets a nice kickback (via speaker fees) after getting approached by AI company. Next level is totalitarian, surveillance state monitoring as depicted in 1984. Skip the middleman (private companies vacuuming up all the data and selling to govt). Data. DNA. No stone unturned.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >Skip the middleman (private companies vacuuming up all the data and selling to govt). Why skip it? Keep it and enlarge it. Then you get to have your cake (total surveilance) and eat it too (it's not the government doing it! we're just buying those private sector data). Same way you can censor as a government and still be all about "free speech"! You just let the private sector do the censoring - with a little carrot and stick encouragement from you, they know what they have to do and will even jump at the chance without you having to explicitly ask them.
  - respectmysoa 3y ago
    [dead]
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  You're making it sound like there's some kind of plan behind it. There is no conspiracy. There won't be a direct "skip the middleman" totalitarian level, because governments are too busy chasing their own tails and smelling the farts in a 4-year election cycle to consider anything of a broader scope. Meanwhile, private companies are chasing easy money at the expense of anything that's good, honest or nice, like they always do. We walked into this situation through decades of individual selfishness, aggregated.
stupidog 3y ago
My company (healthcare) has started doing the same thing, at least with phone calls.
kilolima 3y ago
Corporate workplace spying on employee communication became prevalent in the 90s to prevent discrimination lawsuits. This predates what we think of as our contemporary "surveilance capitalism". There were a series of court decisions that enshrined this practice in law and since then the limits of proscribed speech have expanded. "The Unwanted Gaze" is a good read on this subject. <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/157389/the-unwanted-gaze-by-jeffrey-rosen/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/157389/the-unwanted...>
tackypenguin 3y ago
I can only speak to one of the mentioned companies as I worked in this vertical, this has been happening for years across every communication platform. Companies like Symantec, ForcePoint and ProofPoint offer these features out of the box. Setting up rules is as easy as creating a list of keywords or phrases. It is all done under the guise of “treat protection,” meaning if you send a message on teams saying “I’m about to kill this presentation” know a analyst is going look through everything you’ve done in the last 3 months. This includes file movement, internet history, sent messages, emails, screen recordings, and lots of other things. IMO these products are legal corporate malware. In my experience they are mostly used to track people who are about to be laid off.
- linehedonist 3y ago
  *threat protection, I think. I at least was confused for a second
  - tackypenguin 3y ago
    Yep, my bad.
Terr_ 3y ago
A notion submitted for consideration: "Privacy concerns happen when people get abruptly reminded of a power-imbalance they previously tolerated or ignored."
Vinaas 3y ago
[dead]
Vinaas 3y ago
[dead]
voldacar 3y ago
It seems like over the past several years the words "risk" and "harm" have been redefined to mean almost anything. Am I crazy? If not, what's driving this?
mutant 3y ago
How do they spy on private devices?

159 points by cebert 3y ago

Do we just call all of statistics "AI" now? I fail to see how or why applying basic machine learning techniques for data analysis is "artificial intelligence". This idea that intellection is nothing more than pattern matching is silly and needs to die. Conceptual understanding entails more than just pattern matching.

csa 3y ago
AI is one of many headline buzzwords these days that get an outsized number of clicks relative to the content, right along with Tesla, Trump, Taylor Swift and probably a few others.
freedomben 3y ago
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/ Sentiment analysis may ultimately just be "statistics" but IMHO it goes way beyond what most people consider statistics, which is collecting, organizing, graphing data. Sentiment analysis draws conclusions from the data, assigning things like "level of negativity" and "level of positivity" among other things. It definitely feels like an artificial type of thing that humans do, so artificial intelligence seems like a reasonable category to me.
vrc 3y ago
Historically ML is a sub field within the study of AI. So are a lot of even more mundane techniques. So, if the hit word to describe things is AI, and the shoe fits, wear it!
electroly 3y ago
The AI part is the sentiment analysis of the chat message text and pictures. They're using statistics on the resulting aggregate data. This seems pretty reasonable to me. ML is roughly a gazillion times better than traditional NLP techniques for sentiment analysis. If you're doing sentiment analysis without ML in 2024 then you need to stop and reevaluate what you're doing. If you simply wanted to complain that they're using "AI" to describe something that uses ML, please tell me so I can move along. Nothing interesting there to discuss.
- jmknoll 3y ago
  Did you mean to write LLMs instead of ML? Aren't traditional NLP techniques a subfield of ML?
  - jeffnappi 3y ago
    There's overlap, but many traditional NLP techniques are heuristics based. Here's an example: https://github.com/cjhutto/vaderSentiment https://github.com/cjhutto/vaderSentiment
- sigsegv420 3y ago
  [dead]
horacemorace 3y ago
Do you call all of LLMs “statistics”? I fail to see how anyone who has studied and worked with these systems could fail to see how they exhibit behavior of conceptual understanding.
delfinom 3y ago
It's a mandatory buzzword for investment in 2024 since everything else has been milked to death already. I've seen companies go back and slap "AI" on things that have been out for 15 years.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sambull 3y ago
If you want to close your funding round.. yes

jairuhme 3y ago

The headline is implying that each individual is being tracked as if for performance reasons, but its a bit different. And is it really that different than the data that companies already keep on individual messaging? The only thing really different from what I can see is that they now have a tool to try and understand the vast amounts of data vs. combing through message logs more manually.

mistrial9 3y ago

IIR one of a NeurIPS papers (or similar) was a Walmart Labs paper on "Purpose driven AI Guide for Employees" or similar. Multiple mentions of psychological health in the same paper that describes an AI assistant that is hypothetically required for every employee of a certain stripe, that does give instructions and answer questions. As a skeptic, the one-sided description of mental health, and the obvious parallel to a "always-on slave collar" jumped out. Is there legitimate use for this kind of employment technology? As is so common, those most incentivized to produce and deploy such a thing, are the exact character that is not to be trusted with such an invasive machine. It just screams of a need to regulate, to my western culture eye.

dpflan 3y ago
Can you locate the paper you're alluding to?
kj4211cash 3y ago
I work in Tech at Walmart and the funny thing is that of all the places I've worked they do the least in terms of surveying employee satisfaction. If they just asked, I and many of my colleagues would be happy to tell them which people and policies are toxic and which are wonderful. There's broad agreement in the rank and file on much of this. There are some truly awful and some truly wonderful things about the way Walmart manages tech. When I mentioned this to my VP, the response was basically that Walmart top level management didn't want to know some things because they might be compelled to act. Maybe all this "AI" rigamarole is just a way for Walmart top level management to get information without being legally or morally obligated to do anything?

baybal2 3y ago

[dead]

sandworm101 3y ago

Ok, exactly which communications does this AI monitor? This seems to be internal corporate coms (corporate email, internal chats) which are not subject to privacy. But the article is very unclear, leaving the reader to assume that they are monitoring social media or something else external to the organization. Internal company communcation channels are open to inspection by the company. Whether that company wants to use AI or pay for agents to read ever internal email is up to them. Want your bosses not to hear you rant about a new corporate policy? Don't sent such comments via company email.

brvsft 3y ago
> Depending on where you work, there’s a significant chance that artificial intelligence is analyzing your messages on Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other popular apps. I don't think it's so unclear, and it sounds like you understand too, internal comms. I know it seems obvious, but a lot of people wouldn't even immediately guess. (My first guess before RTA was Slack or anything like Slack. I always think, when I use Slack, that it cannot be truly private unless I start manually encrypting my messages with coworkers.) I'd guess anything that the business has control over might be a candidate. Even easier if the platform allows for apps to be added on at the company level.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  I still call that unclear as many people use Slack and Teams for non-work stuff, or at multiple jobs. The tone of the article leaves a big open door by not directly stating that this is about monitoring employer-controlled channels rather than all slack or teams traffic.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Tell that to any subject the media deems newsworthy. Celebrities are mobbed with photographs or murderers/victims the same. If that's acceptable where does this fit in your worldview

freedomben 3y ago

As much as this turns my stomach, this is neither new nor unexpected, and honestly this is fairly benign to many of the things that companies do such as precision location tracking throughout the building, using company-issued phones, and using normal security surveillance to monitor "watercooler" talk and things like that. We had our chance to push back against company surveillance well over a decade ago, and nobody except privacy advocates like me seemed to give a shit. Some very close friends actually told (after the company for "saftey reasons" started using RFID tracking to track our movements throughout the building using our ID cards) that I was being "paranoid" by suggesting that at some point it would be openly surveiling employee activities like bathroom breaks, watercooler conversation, etc. Please don't misunderstand, I'm not saying that it's too late, that we've lost, and that we get what we deserve (although such might be true), but I am pessimistic that we could ever reverse this at this late stage point. The cancer has long metastasized and buried itself deeply into every nook and cranny. I don't know if it will work, but this is what I think we should do: 1. Refuse to work at companies that do the most invasive surveillance. This means a lot more of your options are gonna be to work for yourself or for a startup. 2. Spread the word in conversations and stuff (when appropriate. Don't be obnoxious and shove people's face in it cause that won't serve any purpose except alienating them). Seek to educate and inform, not to evangelize or argue (though such things do have their place, but use discretion). 3. Shame the companies who do surveillance. I'm not saying be obnoxious or in-your-face about it because that won't do anything other than make you an asshole, but it's absolutely worth bringing it up in a reasonable, fact-based way when appropriate. I've told recruiters that I won't work for <big tech co> because of this. 4. Live your values and try not to do business with these companies, though such can be hard when many have near-monopoly status or a hard-to-avoid position. A full boycott is admirable, but you gotta live your life too. Just try to continually re-evaluate alternatives and vote with your $. Anticipating someone dismissing me as an "r/antiwork" person (yes, people on the internet and even Hacker News do routinely make ridiculous assumptions about people based on zero knowledge other than one comment they just read), I actually think ignoring this helps the antiwork people by giving them valid points about the abuse. If you don't think they're right, then you should be very much on my side here because if nothing happens, they will eventually be right.

3y ago

analog31 3y ago

>>>> Using the anonymized data in Aware’s analytics product, clients can see how employees of a certain age group or in a particular geography are responding to a new corporate policy or marketing campaign >>>> “It won’t have names of people, to protect the privacy,” Schumann said. Rather, he said, clients will see that “maybe the workforce over the age of 40 in this part of the United States is seeing the changes to [a] policy very negatively because of the cost, but everybody else outside of that age group and location sees it positively because it impacts them in a different way.” QFT. It's always the over-40 who are under suspicion. Disclosure: Old.

jSully24 3y ago
>>> It's always the over-40 who are under suspicion. Because of our (over 40s) years of watching bad policy after bad policy destroying our work places, and speaking up.
- babyshake 3y ago
  There is a reason companies love hiring young college grads.
throwup238 3y ago
If that's the intention everyone who uses this software opens themselves up to age discrimination lawsuits (40 years of age is the cutoff). This is either a really dumb way to market a product or it's actually meant to detect those discriminatory policies so employers can undo them before someone decides to sue.
- IncreasePosts 3y ago
  I think you're assuming the software would be used to punish people who don't like the policies...but what if it's just used to help accommodate groups who don't like the policies?
  - kevin_b_er 3y ago

bagels 3y ago

Will it be used to find union organizers? Walmart and Starbucks have been in the news for suppressing labor organization.

Erratic6576 3y ago
And Tesla, and Apple, and Amazon “There’s a class warfare and mine is winning” WB
- bruckie 3y ago
  WB = Warren Buffett, for those wondering (like I was) https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26ever...
- __loam 3y ago
  The games industry meanwhile is going through massive layoffs and demonstrating the need for union power.
nijave 3y ago
Yes
nielsbot 3y ago
I’d bet serious money on yes. Amazon and Starbucks are incredibly anti-union. Unions scare them—unions mean shareholders and execs would be forced to share more profits with their workers. (The horror!) Just one example: Even though workers have won unions at Amazon and Starbucks shops, the companies are plain refusing to negotiate contracts with them as is right.
bart_spoon 3y ago
I guarantee it. My first impression when seeing this list of companies is that is likely the primary purpose.

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

This, the Gem AI revelation from last week; a bunch of companies are going to get clobbered by the massive fines. The question is if the fines will ever be worse than the benefit of the misdeed. Probably not.

prdonahue 3y ago

If Delta's "AI" support they force you through (even as Diamond Medallion) before you can chat with a representative is an indication of their competency, this monitoring is doomed.

happytiger 3y ago

The real value if removing encryption is access for AI. If we don’t have a comprehensive privacy legislation, something like a bill of rights for privacy, tied to individuals, AI will become a tool of totalitarianism and total information thought control. Full stop. You can look at it though todays lens and argue this is just another application of machine learning, but it isn’t just a slippery slope but becomes a landslide as soon as you apply more sophisticated future digital intelligences to it.

devsda 3y ago
Slowly Privacy is being redefined by many tech companies as "Your data is completely private and will never be viewed by any human". That's corporate speak for "we will analyze your data by all other available means" and AI is the perfect tool for that.
- al_borland 3y ago
  I’d almost rather have the human. At least humans can forget.

none_to_remain 3y ago

Yes, the boss can see the company Slack.

laurex 3y ago

People often underestimate the effects of losing privacy. A lot of comments here seem to reflect the idea that “If I’m employed by CompanyY then I’m owned by them.” We are spending a majority of our waking hours working, often, and being trained to believe that an authority’s ownership of technical systems means that not only everything we do with other people via those systems belongs to an employer, but that our inadvertent inclusion of ourselves as humans and not simply task performers is “our own fault.” As humans, our psychological wellbeing rests on a sense of autonomy and these systems directly suppress that.

sleight42 3y ago
In some ways, these businesses are akin to the CCCP: they want to own our hearts and minds. They want our whole selves. They want every drop of what they can get out of us. This is so often what they mean when they say that they want people who are "passionate" about the work. They want us obsessed and fixated. So they want to more than own us. This isn't all businesses but increasingly this is becoming normalized.
- infamouscow 3y ago
  This only happens because people allow it. If these same businesses all decided they were going to take your first born as collateral, I suspect a lot of CEOs and chairmen would be swinging from lamp posts (as they should) within a week. Personally, I would do far worse to such scumbags -- things that are not only (somehow) illegal to describe, but would likely get plenty of downvotes by the most milquetoast and pathetic. Things that up until the last 100 years, would have been regarded as normal for the entirety of recorded human history.
  - sleight42 3y ago
    Sure. Now. It's an Overton Window. Business executives and their big investors are the feudal overlords who are decreasingly benevolent liege lords. What is abhorrent now slowly becomes normalized. Look at CEOs who said, shortly after some of the more brutal start opining about how everyone needs to RTO or GTFO At least one of those CEOs said they needed a bit more Elon in them. They meant his ruthlessness with his employees. And the window moves.

xyst 3y ago

US PATRIOT Act essentially normalized domestic spying with FISA courts rubber stamping warrants in the name of “war on terror”. Privacy advocates lost once those towers fell on 2001-09-11. Millennials pushed the aging fossils into the digital world (e-banking/mobile banking, almost everything is digitalized today). Social media changed the way we interact with people. The concept of privacy continues to erode. Gen Z and future generations continuing the trend. Often just giving away their information for likes/impressions/views. Everything has been recorded in one way or another. Relationships also built on “no privacy” (couples often know their phone passcodes …). Children raised in dystopian households where privacy does not exist (parents have access to everything). Future generations conditioned to obey. Now it’s bleeding from private life into the work with invasive AI models deployed to determine seditious activity as deemed by Karen in HR or Jeff from C-level exec suite because he gets a nice kickback (via speaker fees) after getting approached by AI company. Next level is totalitarian, surveillance state monitoring as depicted in 1984. Skip the middleman (private companies vacuuming up all the data and selling to govt). Data. DNA. No stone unturned.

coldtea 3y ago
>Skip the middleman (private companies vacuuming up all the data and selling to govt). Why skip it? Keep it and enlarge it. Then you get to have your cake (total surveilance) and eat it too (it's not the government doing it! we're just buying those private sector data). Same way you can censor as a government and still be all about "free speech"! You just let the private sector do the censoring - with a little carrot and stick encouragement from you, they know what they have to do and will even jump at the chance without you having to explicitly ask them.
- respectmysoa 3y ago
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TeMPOraL 3y ago
You're making it sound like there's some kind of plan behind it. There is no conspiracy. There won't be a direct "skip the middleman" totalitarian level, because governments are too busy chasing their own tails and smelling the farts in a 4-year election cycle to consider anything of a broader scope. Meanwhile, private companies are chasing easy money at the expense of anything that's good, honest or nice, like they always do. We walked into this situation through decades of individual selfishness, aggregated.

stupidog 3y ago

My company (healthcare) has started doing the same thing, at least with phone calls.

kilolima 3y ago

Corporate workplace spying on employee communication became prevalent in the 90s to prevent discrimination lawsuits. This predates what we think of as our contemporary "surveilance capitalism". There were a series of court decisions that enshrined this practice in law and since then the limits of proscribed speech have expanded. "The Unwanted Gaze" is a good read on this subject. <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/157389/the-unwanted-gaze-by-jeffrey-rosen/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/157389/the-unwanted...>

tackypenguin 3y ago

I can only speak to one of the mentioned companies as I worked in this vertical, this has been happening for years across every communication platform. Companies like Symantec, ForcePoint and ProofPoint offer these features out of the box. Setting up rules is as easy as creating a list of keywords or phrases. It is all done under the guise of “treat protection,” meaning if you send a message on teams saying “I’m about to kill this presentation” know a analyst is going look through everything you’ve done in the last 3 months. This includes file movement, internet history, sent messages, emails, screen recordings, and lots of other things. IMO these products are legal corporate malware. In my experience they are mostly used to track people who are about to be laid off.

linehedonist 3y ago
*threat protection, I think. I at least was confused for a second
- tackypenguin 3y ago
  Yep, my bad.

Terr_ 3y ago

A notion submitted for consideration: "Privacy concerns happen when people get abruptly reminded of a power-imbalance they previously tolerated or ignored."

Vinaas 3y ago

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Vinaas 3y ago

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voldacar 3y ago

It seems like over the past several years the words "risk" and "harm" have been redefined to mean almost anything. Am I crazy? If not, what's driving this?

mutant 3y ago

How do they spy on private devices?