6 ms·
Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy. I work at a tech firm in India, and we
by PradeetPatel 6mo ago
Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.
I work at a tech firm in India, and we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues, with the intention of reducing key personnel risk. A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
I wonder if this is where they are going.
- Hamuko 6mo ago>we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues Like that "Scott is an asswipe who never agrees to any idea that isn't his" or what?
- downrightmike 6mo ago"Unless I suggest it and then he will throw hands against anyone who is against me"
- piker 6mo ago> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code. Feel like I'm reading a Gibson novel here.
- lazide 6mo agoHint: it’s also fiction
- PradeetPatel 6mo agoI wish. Check out colleagues.ai as the Chinese equivalent of the programme.
- jaapz 6mo agoThere shouldn't be any expectation of privacy? There absolutely should!
- satvikpendem 6mo agoOn a work computer? No there shouldn't and isn't.
- whateverboat 6mo agoThis is Stockholm syndrome. Sure, you can enforce zero privacy on work computers, it will just lead to shitty work culture and lowered productivity.
- satvikpendem 6mo ago[flagged]
- cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago> employee communications are already monitored everywhere proof? > Turns out people actually don't really care about privacy at work lol, won't ask for proof, because it's trivially falsifiable
- satvikpendem 6mo agoAsk your IT department what they're tracking and they'll tell you. And yet I assume you still continue to go to work or do not actively seek out non-surveiling companies. By "everybody," maybe iI should clarify that it’s "majority" instead.
- Liskni_si 6mo agoWhat if "the IT department" is just this one guy who asks me to Cc him an invoice when I buy a laptop and that's the end of it? (yes that's a real story from my career, and the company was 100+ employees at the time)
- euroderf 6mo ago> the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy. A bogus argument, methinks. Consider that the company also owns the phones, but can or do they listen to every phone call ?
- mulmen 6mo agoYes? And by law so can all US phone companies.
- seanp2k2 6mo agoAnd thanks to a secret interpretation of Section 702 by FISA courts, so can the FBI https://www.cato.org/blog/fisa-reauthorization-fear-mongering-kicks-overdrive https://www.cato.org/blog/fisa-reauthorization-fear-mongerin... https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/think-before-you-post-psa.mp4/view https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/think-before-you-post-p... https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/fbi-can-neither-confirm-nor-deny-it-monitors-your-social-media https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/fbi-can-neither-confir... https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/2/headlines/trump_directive_classifies_anti_capitalism_and_anti_american_views_as_domestic_terrorism https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/2/headlines/trump_direc... https://www.levernews.com/are-you-on-the-fbis-new-watch-list/ https://www.levernews.com/are-you-on-the-fbis-new-watch-list... https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-12-11/justice-department-drafting-list-of-domestic-terrorists https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2025-12-11/justice-de...
- cyclopeanutopia 6mo agoOr toilets.
- satvikpendem 6mo agoIf it's a work phone, yes they can.
- IAmGraydon 6mo ago>A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code. This is exactly what they're doing, and they aren't the only ones.
- nickvec 6mo agoJust speculating, but the intention wasn't reducing key personnel risk. It was so that your employer could fire them and replace them with an agent running off of their associated skills.md.
- lazide 6mo agoAlso, the agent doesn’t really work - but that doesn’t matter.
- futuraperdita 6mo ago> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code. I know you’re in India, but in the US, could this not be considered intellectual property theft on “right of publicity”? Your persona and working style is one of your core values you bring to market; building a simulacrum of that is not something I expect to be part of the “your output is the company’s IP” in an existing contract. I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.
- vinni2 6mo agoFor what it’s worth I heard from a manager in Meta that they are doing this too.
- seanp2k2 6mo ago>I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No. You don't need to "give" them anything -- they already have everything they need due to basically anything you do, especially at work, especially while using company equipment, being legally considered "works made for hire" https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html + https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf Here's how a refusal to them doing whatever they think would maximize shareholder value with any of your output or data they collect from your company computer would actually go down: the company would do something you didn't like, you'd try to complain about it, HR would listen and document everything. In the best-possible case, they'd let you personally opt out. More likely, since you're likely very easy to replace in their minds, they'd refer you to their data privacy clauses in their acceptable usage policy section of the employee handbook, maybe reference the notice sent out to everyone about how they're doing this, then fire you for performance reasons a few months later. You'd be given an NDA and a very average severance, then you could choose to try to hire a lawyer (who would take at least a third of any pre-tax settlement amount) and fight them, in which case they'd settle for more or less the same as the severance package (and keep in mind both that and any court settlement are both taxable income, so you're not getting a windfall in any case), or you'd just sign the NDA and take the severance with no admission of wrongdoing on their part and no legal recourse. Large companies employ entire orgs of lawyers who specialize in these matters, and it is literally their job to protect the company, not the employees, from lawsuits like this. Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course. Welcome to America, land of the free for corporations which are legally people, just ones with infinite lives who cannot be arrested / imprisoned but can make legal decisions but cannot be subpoenaed. See eg https://www.theverge.com/policy/886348/meta-glasses-ice-doxxing-privacy https://www.theverge.com/policy/886348/meta-glasses-ice-doxx... for how the C-suite thinks about this type of thing. Follow eg https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-75-organizations-sound-alarm-on-metas-plans-to-add-facial-recognition-technology-to-ray-ban-and-oakley-eyeglasses https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-and-75-organization... to see what actually happens. More on how "work for hire" applies in a legal sense: https://www.brookskushman.com/insights/innovations-at-work-who-really-owns-employee-created-inventions/ https://www.brookskushman.com/insights/innovations-at-work-w... https://outsidegc.com/blog/common-misconceptions-about-the-work-for-hire-doctrine/ https://outsidegc.com/blog/common-misconceptions-about-the-w... https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/work_made_for_hire https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/work_made_for_hire https://crownllp.com/blog/what-is-a-work-for-hire/ https://crownllp.com/blog/what-is-a-work-for-hire/
- reaperducer 6mo agoTbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy. There remains a thing called human dignity. If a company can't trust the people it hires, that's a fault in the hiring process, not the employees.
- trinsic2 6mo agoNo to disagree with you here because I wholly support this position. But I can see the problem from both angles. The problem, it seems to me, is that, and Im not sure which came first, employees started being reckless at work, probably because employers stopped caring about the treatment of their workers, which ramped up the viscous cycle to where we are now. I can see an argument for companies not trusting there employee's because most employees harbor borderline corrupt thinking in their work place and have terrible work ethics, of course all of this is brought on by corporate culture so its there fault in the first place, but im not exactly sure what started where.
- saghm 6mo agoIf "most" employees are corrupt and have terrible ethics, why is the company hiring them in the first place? I don't think I've ever worked anywhere I thought that a majority of my coworkers fit this description. This sounds pretty much identical to what the parent commentee said: it's a hiring problem. Either the company is bad at hiring people who don't have these traits or they're actively selecting for it.
- Lihh27 6mo agoskills.md heh they serialized you into a config file and used it to boot your replacement. could've at least picked a better extension.
- JoshTriplett 6mo ago[dead]
- Reisen 6mo agoWait so the engineers doing novel work are ousted; you fire the engineer that had the skill set to produce the work in the first place? Surely this is creating a Stasi-like neighbour snitching environment with chilling effect where the better you do the faster you become a target for replacement by engineer's incentivized to win points by replacing you. Even being very charitable where the scenario is the code was so poor that the code the employee is working on is so entrenched in domain knowledge they've become a huge bus factor, an LLM is going to make that kind of code worse. I'm struggling to imagine the subset of people this replaces that is not a long term detriment to everyone working there. Those people became "key personnel" for a reason no?
- jedbrown 6mo agoStrong disagree (especially under US law). Consider what this means for union organizing in the context of this 2022 NLRB memo. > Under settled Board law, numerous practices employers may engage in using new surveillance and management technologies are already unlawful. In cases involving employer observation of open protected concerted activity and public union activity like picketing or handbilling, the Board has recognized that “pictorial recordkeeping tends to create fear among employees of future reprisals.”10 The Board accordingly balances an employer’s justification for surveillance “against the tendency of that conduct to interfere with employees’ right to engage in concerted activity.”11 In that context, “the Board has long held that absent proper justification, the photographing of employees engaged in protected concerted activities violates the Act because it has a tendency to intimidate.”12 https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-general-counsel-issues-memo-on-unlawful-electronic-surveillance-and https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-general-c...
- lazide 6mo agoSure, and then DOGE exfiltrated their whistleblower database - which is 10x as intimidating.
- rimliu 6mo agoa bathroom stall is also a company property. Does the note about not expecting privacy extend there too?
- throw-the-towel 6mo agoAt the risk of sounding like an LLM, a laptop is not just "something you get at work", it's literally your work tool. If you were hired at Shit Producers Inc as a defecator, you'd damn bet they would surveil the bathroom stalls there.
- izacus 6mo agoThat doesn't mean it's suddenly ok to monitor every second of your life while you work.
- Saline9515 6mo agoWe had the AI = Actually Indians meme, now we have Actually Indians = AI. The loop has been completed!
- Frieren 6mo ago> Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy. > I work at a tech firm in India First I wondered how can you have such a low expectation on privacy, then you answered my question. What you need in India is more unionization and fight against corruption. It is becoming worse here in Europe but in India you do not have the protections that we have. Without that you will have no rights. You will have to fights to get rights at your job. In the same way that Europeans are going to have to fight to keep them.
- sebtron 6mo agoI am a European in Europe and I expect the same. Why would I assume otherwise? The company laptop is full of spyware, starting from the OS. I have no reason to consider it "mine", and no desire to do so. If I want to do anything private (including things that my company would not like) I can do so from my private devices.
- ForHackernews 6mo agoI've never worked a software development job where I didn't have a company-provided machine that I installed Linux on. I installed the OS, I have root on the machine, I wiped it and returned it empty when I was leaving the job.
- sebtron 6mo agoLucky you, I guess. In all the companies I worked for I have had a company-provided Windows laptop where the OS was managed by IT. The degree of freedom (e.g. what software could I install, what websites were blocksd) varied.
- eertami 6mo agoEurope is a big place, but in my area of Europe it is very illegal to monitor employees this way. If you were to be fired for something that illegal surveillance turned up, I would consider it a good thing - with the settlement money you could take a couple years of vacation.
- duskdozer 6mo agoWell, no, there should be an expectation of privacy; an employer shouldn't just be able to have a palantír for their employees. >I work at a tech firm in India, and we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues, with the intention of reducing key personnel risk. A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code. Okay, now this sounds like satire. But I suppose that's the way the world is going.
- jmorenoamor 6mo agoThat's incredibly creepy tbh