Employee ID badge monitors you at work – except in bathroom | Hacker News Reader

Employee ID badge monitors you at work – except in bathroom

washingtonpost.com

39 pointsgregholmberg50 comments

>“Within three or four years, every single ID badge is going to have these sensors,” predicted Ben Waber, chief executive of Humanyze, a Boston-based employee analytics company.

>Those concerned about their privacy might be alarmed by the arrival of such badges. But Humanyze says it doesn’t record the content of what people say, just how they say it. And the boss doesn’t get to look at individuals’ personal data. It is also up to the employee to decide whether they want to participate.

Employees can choose whether they would like to participate, but it will be in every ID badge in 3-4 years?

I'm not really well informed about the science of speech analysis, but I'm going to assume raw audio is recorded at some stage, and since the device is the size of a credit card, I'll also assume it's not being processed on the device.

I don't see how this could possibly be as anonymized as they claim. You're also painting a target for rival enterprises or states who would like to carry out espionage against you, which seems like a legitimate concern in the financial industry.

You're on company time, why not just have a huge physical neck collar, with a chain, to ensure your paid time is spent productively at your desk. 9-5 you're a company resource after all

I always thought the necktie bore a striking resemblance to a noose.

I've thought this for a long time as well. Always seemed silly to me.

I just wanted to write the same content and express my disgust! I totally agree! What a shame! But I guess If they need to monitor their employees to make them work, they have bigger problems!

How about a small drone, with a camera, that follows you around at all times? That would be perfect.

> The beacons tracking your movements are omitted from bathroom locations, to give you some privacy.

Oh why even bother. Just do it in the bathroom as well. I like how it tracks everything and then throws that little -- but look, we are concerned for your privacy, we are not creepy at all.

> If you don’t give people choice, if you don’t aggregate instead of showing individual data,

Yes, let's aggregate data in some obscure way, while hand waving about "anonymizing" stuff. People will totally buy that, and trust us.

> Their bodies swiftly respond to stressful situations and relax when calm returns, leaving them primed for the next challenge,”

Lovely.

-"Steve, I think that patch froze the kernel".

-"Sorry, I am doing my daily hyperventilating and then calming down thing, to get my stats up for upcoming reviews. Ask the intern to restart everything. I'll be there in 30 min".

I don't understand how anyone can say something like "It is also up to the employee to decide whether they want to participate." with a straight face. All historical evidence points to the fact that people will be "encouraged" to the point where this becomes mandatory.

I totally understand how they can say it. They are being machiavellian and know that saying that is a form of propaganda that allows them to slide in something unsavory.

Engineers who help create stuff like this are assholes. How could you see this being used for good in any way?

At least the micro-position-tracking ability makes sense in high(est)-security environments, be them military or private (Apple's secret labs come to my mind, given the rumors of secrecy?).

The voice analyzation stuff is really, really weird though.

That's not the half of it. The article makes an offhand mention of analyzing stress by way of cortisol production. In order to determine cortisol levels, you need to sample body fluids. Most commonly the fluid in question is blood, although I gather urine and saliva can be used as well.

In entire fairness, I get the impression that was part of a protocol used to develop data to inform the design of this device rather than something the device itself does, but I think it's nonetheless quite a telling example of the degree of invasiveness which the people behind it appear willing to contemplate.

> At least the micro-position-tracking ability makes sense in high(est)-security environments

I think a solution that can't be defeated by removing a lanyard would be better.

Eh, some people just want to put food on the table and pay their debts. They aren't as responsible as you or me.

It looks like a startup created to make exactly this, not some peons in a mega corporation doing exactly as they're told.

I'm sure they really believe in what they're doing.

If they really believed, Humanyze's own employees would be using it. I saw no such mention in the article.

I would be amazed to learn they aren't using it, if only for dogfood. But you're right that it's odd not to see it mentioned.

So the Yuppie Nuremberg Defense, then?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427944/quotes?item=qt0418062

Engineers who help create stuff like this are assholes.

Asshole is s pretty strong word. There's a somewhat different explanation; it posits that engineers are ignorant rather than evil. Cory Doctorow said it better than I ever could:

   Engineers are all basically high-functioning
   autistics who have no idea how normal people
   do stuff.

I got a lot of flack last time I posted that quip; I'll grant that it isn't strictly accurate in a medical sense. But it gets the point across. Engineers simply don't think the same way that muggles think, and in addition they're unable or unwilling to view the world from that different perspective.

Some engineers perhaps. All engineers, don´t be silly.

And the capacity for deliberate evil exists, is out there, and is used. Sometimes the engineer is just a tool.

Cory Doctorow says a lot of things. I think he enjoys it. But their correspondence with reality is in my experience questionable. I've worked with many more engineers than he has, and of the lot of them, there's been exactly one who fits that description. And even he'd scruple at designing something like this.

If you got flack before, you should get more now.

Engineers are able to think that way, but it gets blindsided because the potential of the ideas in front of them are far too powerful and luminescent for anything else to be visible.

We aren't as dumb as people think we are.

No, they are definitely assholes. Additionally, dismissing engineers as "high functioning autistics" or "ignorant" is cheap stereotyping.

Thinking in a less than common way isn't an excuse or reason for doing something evil. To suggest it shows a lack of understanding of engineers, people with autism, and how things are designed and used.

Fortunately, the way normal people do stuff is possible to analyze.

I'd turn my notice in immediately. We are people not machines. This would not encourage good culture. In fact, it would sink moral.

In ways, this is interesting. This is analyzing one's performance skill based on their behavior and physical clues. There should most definitely be a correlation, and I personally believe that one's mental state is most crucial indication for productivity at a deskjob. At the moment, it's demoralizing since there are very few known solutions to improve those that are naturally not talented in that department (including me). But, as more research in those areas happen, this might become a standard. It's kind of like if you are an athlete, you show your condition via your scores/times. To improve, you practice and workout. As a deskjob, you show your condition via new mental checking technology, and to improve you do things that come out of these research

You have the athlete judged by results, and the knowledge worker by some kind of proprietary algorithm that attempts to derive mental state from somatic clues. These are in no way parallel cases.

I remember the PARC smart badge system, had a similar sort of push back. Sure there were "good" things like quick attendance count at meetings and an easy to use "where is Bob?" sort of service, but on balance it was a net negative on the employee.

I've never been at a single company that took attendance at meetings. If you have to take attendance at a meeting, it is probably a worthless meeting.

I think it's part of ISO 9000 recommendations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_9000

Generally in the notes of a meeting there is a list of attendees, that helps someone reading the notes to understand who was present and should presumably already be aware of the subject matter, and who wasn't and may need background on the meeting if the subject came up.

I'm guessing you are talking about small meetings and not 20+ person meetings where it would be hard to tell who needed catching up from a long list of attendees.

NOPE.

Quitting the second someone asks me to wear one. End of story.

The second anyone in the office is asked to wear one, voluntarily or not.

They're pushing that it's mainly for the benefit of the employee, not the employer. Or at least they're trying to make it seem that way.

If so, why not just make it a consumer-targeted product? Something only the badge holder can view data for?

> In an interview with The Washington Post, Waber said one financial services client plans to use the badges to increase productivity.

Not even out the gate and it's already about monitoring.

Take a look at their website. It's all about monitoring.

Companies that do this should stop saying 'employees' and use 'meat robots'.

This is certainly one way to run a business. But I'd rather work for a company that trusts me enough that they don't need to micromanage me.

Er, this is basically just a puff piece for a startup. Why are people reading it like it indicates the world is moving in a particular direction? There's no more reason this idea is going to succeed than any other. In fact it seems kind of doomed to fail.

Because it's fucking creepy, that's why. Excuse my language, but I find no less profane adjective to suffice.

And 'puff piece' doesn't seem to me to suffice, either. This isn't TechCrunch or PR Newswire; this is the Washington Post. And the article's pretty laudatory, too, with privacy concerns dismissed out of hand - politely, to be sure, but dismissed out of hand nonetheless. Granted, it's still something of a stretch to say 'this is the way the world is going'. But it's a lot less so than it might be, and that's creepy in itself.

Are you kidding? This is the wet dream of upper management everywhere.

Despite the claim that data will be aggregated and opt-in collection, it doesn't change the fact that the next company to produce something similar will offer any of those features. So the privacy concerns are very valid. Not least of all because most people take their employee badge home! I don't even see how it will be legitimately helpful to a manager to see how people speak in aggregate. And no doubt people will game the system, etc, etc.

It sounds like I will have to charge my ID. Nope.

Haha! Hadn't thought of that. It's officially dead guys.

Once every bunch of years if they use latest low power electronics and a good battery.

Wet dream for insecure control-freak managers

Your efficiency has dropped 10%, so we're cutting your wage.

As measured by time spent at the desk?

Had these inventors concentrated on providing value to the employee, they would not get so much privacy concerns.

Instead they focused on the corporate overlord to make it mainstream.

Are they aiming for as many enemies as possible?

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