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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

Is this article a joke?

"Last year an employee at an IT services company sent a private chat message to a friend at work worried that he had just shared his sexual identity with his manager in a meeting and fearing he’d face career reprisal. Wiretap detected the employee’s concern and alerted a senior company exec who was then able to intervene, talk to the manager and defuse the situation."

What. the. fuck.

thanks "senior exec" for reading my messages, stepping in and "defusing the situation" whatever that means.

it gets worse:

"Or if you usually touch 10 documents a day and print two and suddenly you are touching 500 and printing 200 that may mean you’re stealing documents in preparation of leaving the company."

of course, that's the only possible logical conclusion.

What a waste of time, if I ever saw this in place as an employee or manager I would immediately leave and possibly sue.

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I lost it at "[...] when an All State Insurance franchise did a live demonstration of Interguard’s software to other dealers. The technology started scanning the network and almost immediately found an email with the words “client list” and “résumé”. The demonstrator opened the email in front of a room full of peers to discover his best employee was plotting to move to another company."

What is wrong with people?

When you optimize for profit at any cost as a company, that kind of mindset carries over into you employee/leadership culture.

I wonder why he/she wants to leave?

The scary thing is that as companies get bigger and more powerful and there are fewer small companies who can compete with them, this will only get worse. Surveillance will become the norm; once all the big companies are doing it, employees will be forced to accept it as normal. That's basically the trend.

Soon we'll have slavery again; except instead of your status being determined by your race, it will be determined by how much empathy you have. People who have empathy for others will be slaves of narcissistic, greedy corporate assholes.

For an obviously paid article / regurgitated press release, they sure do a good job of making this software sound totally unreasonable and ridiculous. I'm an employer and I wouldn't dream of touching anything like this. Not only are employees' personal communications absolutely none of my business but I'd also potentially be leaving myself wide open to a lawsuit with this kind of monitoring.

...And I say that as someone who has had problems with remote workers in the past.

I feel like this is a part of UK's ongoing effort to make ubiquitous surveillance a completely normal thing and have the citizens accept it as such. It's not creepy and disturbing, it's actually normal and should be celebrated!

I think this would only be legal in the UK if it was made clear that the communications were subject to monitoring; see https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1066/em... pp58 onwards.

I can see it being argued both ways; transcripts of Bloomberg chat were a key part of the LIBOR scandal, for example. And I can also see there being some need to monitor internal chat in case it's used for unacceptable purposes such as sexual harassment.

Something about the automatedness of a very private situation gives me the creeps, though.

> And I can also see there being some need to monitor internal chat in case it's used for unacceptable purposes such as sexual harassment.

You don't want simple monitoring. You want data stored in a way it can be checked after a complaint has been filed but only then. Encrypt it with something which requires one or multiple keys so random IT people don't have access to it. Log every access so an audit can be done.

Treat it like medical data should be treated.

Any communications where the user has an expectation of privacy (this includes company chat programs) should be securely stored (encrypted), and require a court order to access, that goes through normal legal proceedings (e.g. in a criminal or civil case). It should not be legal for a random manager or company to access this data.

The key here is expectation of privacy. If you're posting on a JIRA ticket, you have no expectation of privacy within those with access to the board, nor if you send an email as it can easily be forwarded (although that could be contentious). If you send a message through a DM on slack though, you can expect that to remain private indefinitely.

Like, I'm ok with my employer reading my work emails - that's obviously in my contract. But there's something really creepy about automated software that automatically flags messages/actions for review because they are "suspicious". Same with using my webcam to take pictures of me while I work.

There's a common pattern of suggesting that if an employer (or state, or university, or...) can access data, there's no problem when they do. I think it's a pretty serious error.

Broadly, automated surveillance creates illusory offenses. It raises issues based on some imperfect set of rules, and does so independent of any report of harm. (Add to that the likelihood of unethical flagging - which happened right in the article!)

And that creates an obligation to act for employers. Ignoring alerts, no matter how silly, is the sort of thing that might get cited as negligence when a real problem does come down the pike. At best, the result is time-consuming investigations of fake issues. At worst, corporate makes a decision that summary firings are an easier bet than proper investigations.

That's not just a hypothetical fear - we already hear about things like Amazon warehouse employees being laid off on vague suspicion of theft, because investigations are harder than replacing staff. Expanding always-active surveillance will predictably hurt innocents who already lack job security.

MY manager actually warned me about this when I gave him notice that I was leaving my last job. "Don't suddenly download a whole lot of stuff because they have some tool that tracks it and it looks like you're stealing IP to take with you."

Sure, he agreed it was stupid, but nothing he could do about it.

Look at this from a company perspective.

If it seems like someone is stealing documents, but you then discover they actually aren't, then no harm done.

If someone actually was stealing documents however, and you don't have the surveillance to realize this, your best salesman might have just took off with a bunch of client information to go work at a competitor. You might never find out, and if you did, you might have no way to prove it.

Workplace surveillance doesn't really have downsides, other than "workplace culture might be affected". However your culture can still be shitty even without surveillance, and just because you don't monitor employees doesn't mean they will become shining examples of company loyalty.

There's plenty of upsides though. Having data on what employees do, and when, and for how long, provides opportunities to discover where improvements can be made, as long as you collect the right data and use it for the right purposes.

> If it seems like someone is stealing documents, but you then discover they actually aren't, then no harm done.

If my company accused me of that I think I'd run a mile, so there's some harm.

There would be rampant abuse with this kind tool in place, as it give cause to fire anyone at any time, it would not be hard to find a reason to fire someone with this level of surveillance

You don’t have to accuse someone to investigate their activity. Hell, the person doesn’t even need to know they were investigated.

If a company really wants to fire you they will find a way with or without surveillance.

A huge part of me hates the Big Brother aspect but then there's another part of me that thinks that if used properly having data is never really a bad thing and could possibly be used to make the company more efficient run better and address concerns of employees. Human nature really makes it difficult to trust that the data will be used positively though

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