3 ms·

Ok, exactly which communications does this AI monitor? This seems to be internal corporate coms (corporate email, internal chats) which are not subject to priv

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
arrrg 3y ago
Any kind of communication surveillance that goes beyond monitoring for malware and data exhilaration, especially for monitoring performance, would be completely unthinkable at my (German) employer. The employee council would never ever agree to that. It‘s not at all obvious that the moral perspective you present as obvious actually is.
- analog31 3y ago
  I'll make sure to include at least one German colleague in all of my Teams chats. ;-)
  - arrrg 3y ago
    Well it‘s not automatic. You need workers/employees to care and take action for this to be something about which I can then say “this would never fly where I work”. And you need the legal framework and cultural norms that support something like that. So not to say it‘s easy. My point here is that sometimes in theses discussions there seems to be a sort of first principles view of the employee-employer relationship where it is taken as axiomatic that anything you do as an employee (and sometimes even beyond) is for the employer to take and do with whatever they want unconditionally. My point is that that doesn’t need to be the obviously true axiom it sometimes seems to be.
wolverine876 3y ago
> Internal company communcation channels are open to inspection by the company. That is the current rule (at least in some places), but we're conflating the issue of 'is it legal?' with 'is it right?'. > Whether that company wants to use AI or pay for agents to read ever internal email is up to them. IMHO this argument needs to be buried once and for all, especially on HN. Automation by computer transforms the power of otherwise manual functions. For example, government could always surveil people on the street, but they had to do it manually. With computers, using cameras and facial recognition, they can automatically track the entire population (theoretically, and later if not now). It's not the same thing as manual surveillance of a suspect. > Want your bosses not to hear you rant about a new corporate policy? Don't sent such comments via company email. All that said, I think there are legitimate questions. The mass surveillance enables management to stay ahead of any employee organizing or other political (as in office politics) moves - management knows before the employees themselves realize that lots of people agree with each other. That includes unionization, for example. Yes, if the company allows it then you can communicate through outside channels, but can you reach the whole company there? That is certainly a hinderance to any mass activity.
alwa 3y ago
There’s also the Goodhart-flavored line of argument here: at the moment, part of the sales pitch is that these internal conversation channels provide a meaningful view into staff’s reactions, dynamics, and states of mind. Fire the first few folks for their AI-detected “toxicity,” and one imagines the wiser of their “toxic” friends will find other avenues for their bad behavior. Use sentiment analysis to sound out and reward the true believers in the corporate party line, and suddenly everyone will be Slacking effusive praise for the policies of the dear leaders. The usefulness of this tech would seem to depend a lot on how the place is managed. The obvious worry is that the powers that be will smoke out dissenters, reward toadyism, and punish harmless individual differences. But I can also imagine a constructive management environment, where the “mothership” worries that their feedback from the line staff is getting distorted through layers of management sucking-up and bureaucracy; and imagining this type of analysis as some kind of independent finger on the pulse of the workforce. That seems like it might be useful for making genuinely good decisions. Knowing a lot of true stuff and using it to rule out bad guesses we made based on false impressions, that doesn’t seem so bad to me. Using what you know about an underling to punish them, police them, dehumanize them into nothing more than a pile of scores—that’s neither a new strategy nor one that leads to success. History seems to show that, while that kind of excess may enforce ideological consistency in the near term, it’s intrinsically costly to the health of the [corporation|country|institution]. Over-condition on these signals, like any others, and you just produce a culture of performative compliance and doublespeak-you make the signal useless. And that leaves you in the same anemic information environment that you started in, the sort that tends to conceals problems until they become overwhelming.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > imagine a constructive management environment, where the “mothership” worries I think this is limited to the realm of imagination. It will never happen. There is nothing maternal or caring about modern enterprise. Caring is an act of sacrifice-- giving more than you take. Even charities don't "care," the leaders make bank through arbitrage/exploitation of other people's empathy. Introspection does not generate revenue. At best it generates goodwill, until the next CEO cashes out on it a decade later and screws everyone anyway. > part of the sales pitch is that these internal conversation channels provide a meaningful view into staff’s reactions, dynamics, and states of mind. This really isn't a good thing, at all. It's that social media paradigm where you figure out how to keep the audience maximally-engaged without driving them away. It sounds like a beneficial thing but only ever amounts to assessing "what can I get away with before they mutiny?" It's not a sign of good leadership, it's the playbook of a carnival worker. I do internal investigations. Half of me wishes we had this visibility for obvious reason. The other half dreads the implications of actually having it.
sangnoir 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 Expectation of privacy doesn't mean automation of surveillance is reasonable or acceptable. If you're out in public, there is no expectation of privacy, and I (a human) may take a picture of you without breaking any social contract. If someone sets up thousands of facial-recognition cameras in public space you use, that changes the calculus by a lot, despite no change in the underlying lack of expectation of privacy. Quantity has a quality of its own.

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

arrrg 3y ago

Any kind of communication surveillance that goes beyond monitoring for malware and data exhilaration, especially for monitoring performance, would be completely unthinkable at my (German) employer. The employee council would never ever agree to that. It‘s not at all obvious that the moral perspective you present as obvious actually is.

analog31 3y ago
I'll make sure to include at least one German colleague in all of my Teams chats. ;-)
- arrrg 3y ago
  Well it‘s not automatic. You need workers/employees to care and take action for this to be something about which I can then say “this would never fly where I work”. And you need the legal framework and cultural norms that support something like that. So not to say it‘s easy. My point here is that sometimes in theses discussions there seems to be a sort of first principles view of the employee-employer relationship where it is taken as axiomatic that anything you do as an employee (and sometimes even beyond) is for the employer to take and do with whatever they want unconditionally. My point is that that doesn’t need to be the obviously true axiom it sometimes seems to be.

wolverine876 3y ago

> Internal company communcation channels are open to inspection by the company. That is the current rule (at least in some places), but we're conflating the issue of 'is it legal?' with 'is it right?'. > Whether that company wants to use AI or pay for agents to read ever internal email is up to them. IMHO this argument needs to be buried once and for all, especially on HN. Automation by computer transforms the power of otherwise manual functions. For example, government could always surveil people on the street, but they had to do it manually. With computers, using cameras and facial recognition, they can automatically track the entire population (theoretically, and later if not now). It's not the same thing as manual surveillance of a suspect. > Want your bosses not to hear you rant about a new corporate policy? Don't sent such comments via company email. All that said, I think there are legitimate questions. The mass surveillance enables management to stay ahead of any employee organizing or other political (as in office politics) moves - management knows before the employees themselves realize that lots of people agree with each other. That includes unionization, for example. Yes, if the company allows it then you can communicate through outside channels, but can you reach the whole company there? That is certainly a hinderance to any mass activity.

alwa 3y ago

There’s also the Goodhart-flavored line of argument here: at the moment, part of the sales pitch is that these internal conversation channels provide a meaningful view into staff’s reactions, dynamics, and states of mind. Fire the first few folks for their AI-detected “toxicity,” and one imagines the wiser of their “toxic” friends will find other avenues for their bad behavior. Use sentiment analysis to sound out and reward the true believers in the corporate party line, and suddenly everyone will be Slacking effusive praise for the policies of the dear leaders. The usefulness of this tech would seem to depend a lot on how the place is managed. The obvious worry is that the powers that be will smoke out dissenters, reward toadyism, and punish harmless individual differences. But I can also imagine a constructive management environment, where the “mothership” worries that their feedback from the line staff is getting distorted through layers of management sucking-up and bureaucracy; and imagining this type of analysis as some kind of independent finger on the pulse of the workforce. That seems like it might be useful for making genuinely good decisions. Knowing a lot of true stuff and using it to rule out bad guesses we made based on false impressions, that doesn’t seem so bad to me. Using what you know about an underling to punish them, police them, dehumanize them into nothing more than a pile of scores—that’s neither a new strategy nor one that leads to success. History seems to show that, while that kind of excess may enforce ideological consistency in the near term, it’s intrinsically costly to the health of the [corporation|country|institution]. Over-condition on these signals, like any others, and you just produce a culture of performative compliance and doublespeak-you make the signal useless. And that leaves you in the same anemic information environment that you started in, the sort that tends to conceals problems until they become overwhelming.

jstarfish 3y ago
> imagine a constructive management environment, where the “mothership” worries I think this is limited to the realm of imagination. It will never happen. There is nothing maternal or caring about modern enterprise. Caring is an act of sacrifice-- giving more than you take. Even charities don't "care," the leaders make bank through arbitrage/exploitation of other people's empathy. Introspection does not generate revenue. At best it generates goodwill, until the next CEO cashes out on it a decade later and screws everyone anyway. > part of the sales pitch is that these internal conversation channels provide a meaningful view into staff’s reactions, dynamics, and states of mind. This really isn't a good thing, at all. It's that social media paradigm where you figure out how to keep the audience maximally-engaged without driving them away. It sounds like a beneficial thing but only ever amounts to assessing "what can I get away with before they mutiny?" It's not a sign of good leadership, it's the playbook of a carnival worker. I do internal investigations. Half of me wishes we had this visibility for obvious reason. The other half dreads the implications of actually having it.

sangnoir 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 Expectation of privacy doesn't mean automation of surveillance is reasonable or acceptable. If you're out in public, there is no expectation of privacy, and I (a human) may take a picture of you without breaking any social contract. If someone sets up thousands of facial-recognition cameras in public space you use, that changes the calculus by a lot, despite no change in the underlying lack of expectation of privacy. Quantity has a quality of its own.