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Comment by random4369 | Hacker News Reader

There's an infinite space of solutions to your particular problem, but your chosen solution is totalitarian surveillance in the workplace because an intern got offended?

I avoid workplaces which force shit like this. So do all the good developers I know, because they're people who can afford to be choosy.

Bullies are pretty adept at functioning in these environments. Instead of harassing on monitored DMs, they'll make verbal comments with double meanings, use their leverage to put their targets in unpleasant situations, undercut their targets at meetings etc. Totalitarian surveillance doesn't stop bullies. It just makes your workplace a soul-destroying shithole for the employees who are forced to work in it.

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> but your chosen solution is totalitarian surveillance in the workplace because an intern got offended?

Sigh

Totalitarianism is a socio-political paradigm, not a stand-in word to describe things you think constitute surveillance in the context of a business. Companies require the capability to maintain auditable records of employee activity on the information channels they own and manage. Your company is not recording your activity in the privacy of your home or on the street, it's protecting itself and other employees from potentially problematic abuse scenarios. These requirements are also directly imposed by a variety of regulations in various countries.

When you twist the meaning of loaded words like this to describe things you don't like, you make it very difficult for people to get past the hyperbole and take you seriously. You're conflating assaults on personal rights with the routine and mundane business practice of keeping auditable logs.

> I avoid workplaces which force shit like this. So do all the good developers I know, because they're people who can afford to be choosy.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here, because almost all the good developers I know work in environments like this. So where does trading these anecdotes leave us? Do you really believe most competent software engineers don't work in companies that do this? In most cases, that means the company is actively breaking the law, or at best making adherence with the law very difficult and error-prone.

> because almost all the good developers I know work in environments

But they aren't True Good Developers... /s

> socio-political paradigm

Sigh.

And workplaces are socio-political contexts... I didn't find it very difficult to get past his hyperbole, and I frankly find it hard to believe that you did. It isn't hard to argue that monitoring channels that even just imply privacy, regardless of whether they take place in the workplace (or in academia, or at home) is a violation of personal rights - regardless of the fact that you arbitrarily draw the line at "recording your activity in the privacy of your home or on the street."

> And workplaces are socio-political contexts

They're not governments, they're companies.

> monitoring channels that even just imply privacy, regardless of whether they take place in the workplace (or in academia, or at home) is a violation of personal rights

It isn't, unless your definition of "personal rights" includes "things I personally want which are neither codified in, nor protected by, laws."

In what way are companies not trivially compared to states (governments) in this context (surveillance)? You're being intellectually disingenuous.

I mean, you completely (amusingly) misquoted that sentence. I said "it isn't hard to argue that [...]". I did not make an absolute statement that it is (a violation)... Come on now.

> You're being intellectually disingenuous.

Okay...let me see if I understand you correctly. You're defending the other commenter's description of corporate logs as totalitarian surveillance, but you're saying that I'm being intellectually disingenuous because I'm pointing out that companies are not governments?

No, I'm calling you intellectually disingenuous for reading a comment about internal corporate surveillance, and choosing to pontificate on word choice when the meaning is trivial to understand. Blatantly misquoting me also doesn't help.

>They're not governments, they're companies.

You're right, it's important to note they are more powerful and exercise more control over the lives of their employees than many governments, though employees often have the same opportunity to leave their company as they do their government (none).

>It isn't, unless your definition of "personal rights" includes "things I personally want which are neither codified in, nor protected by, laws."

Yes that's literally exactly what personal rights always means. Legal rights are legal rights, personal rights are a conception of what the person who uses the term wants or believes rights to be.

> You're right, it's important to note they are more powerful and exercise more control over the lives of their employees than many governments, though employees often have the same opportunity to leave their company as they do their government (none).

Especially when they're also dependent on their corporation for healthcare and retirement...

This is exactly my point, it's effortless to compare corporations to government, especially in this context. For the other comment to base his argument around the word "totalitarian" seems nothing if not disingenuous, given that the meaning behind the word is clear.

> imply privacy

Workplace provided communication mechanisms do not in any way imply privacy. Best practices are that staff sign an acknowledgement of such, so that there is no such confusion.

So, if an acknowledgement is needed... It's needed because there might be an implication of privacy, right?

Generally speaking it’s easy to argue that employees have no expectation of privacy on the work network for the following reasons:

1. Regulation in most countries requires it to be this way, we’ll most countries any of us is likely to work in. Which is to say: The Law Hath Spoken, which is to say: The People Hath Decided.

2. The employer should have spelled this out to you at time of hire, and had you sign a document to verify you understand.

The problem here isn’t that the direct messages take place in the workplace, it’s that they take place on infrastructure owned by the workplace.

I didn't actually argue that there was an expectation...

I only said that the comment I replied to relied on a purely arbitrary definition for what an invasion of personal privacy was... He argued that because "your company is not recording your activity in the privacy of your home or on the street" it wasn't unreasonable (or totalitarian), because the company was "protecting itself and other employees from potentially problematic abuse scenarios." Even though it's amusingly easy to imagine that a totalitarian regime would make the same argument for its own surveillance practices....

I think the bigger problem that the OP pointed at is that whatever adjectives you attach to this, surveillance is almost always the wrong way to change behavior, unless your desired outcome is to make everyone suspicious of everyone else.

What's stopping these folks from creating an out-of-company channel to do the bullying and attacking in coordination via that means, or tricking the victim into joining them in the new side channel?

The answer to bullying or shitty office behavior is not monitoring. That cover-your-ass because the real answer is hard. Improve your company culture. Fire people who are detrimental to the team. KNOW YOUR TEAM! So often I hear about these things and what you find is a shitty manager who has no idea how to be a manager and says "well they get their work done."

It doesn't make sense to refuse solutions that solve part of the problem, or that make the problem more manageable. Perfect is the enemy of good.

You realize this has far more to do with than workplace harassment, right? Have you never heard of employees using a competitors proprietary information? Or arranging fraudulent financial transactions to cover losses? Or discussing how to mislead investors or watchdog agencies? What do you expect this company to do when they are involved in a legal dispute like this, and have to explain to the court why they have company sanctioned, un-auditable computer systems/applications that helped their employees break serious state and national laws?

I suppose my experience in large corporations is limited. But I'm going to hazard a guess that for all but the biggest corps "company sanctioned" is a not an official term, and that most have given little-to-no thought about all the various ways they need to keep track of the way their employees communicate.

Keeping in context with the OP, Slack allowing admin access to all conversations is a cover-your-ass corporate move, not a solid new tool to combat workplace cultural issues. Perhaps once in a blue moon employee surveillance and bad culture might intersect and prove useful. But that should in no way be used to justify corporate surveillance.

As an elected government official, I understand the importance of papertrails and record-keeping. But the mere fact that so many companies USED SLACK WITHOUT THIS FEATURE, means most had no qualms about side channels being un-auditable before. And now this is just sweet sweet honey to corporate overlords.

Totalitarian surveilance? While you’re at removing that from the workplace don’t forget to instigate democratic revolution in your company as well.

Well yes, this is a good idea, democratization of the workplace and worker co-ops generally promote better quality of life for employees and the surrounding community, less exploitation, less corruption, more justice and similar or better efficiency as the normal dictatorial corporate model.

Well, if you work at Google anyway.

Infinite space of solutions? I think not. If the harassment was in any way sexual, the company had a legal responsibility to investigate. It may have been a timely matter and the best and/or only solution was to read the messages at the offending intern's workstation.

If you've worked anywhere with more than 50 employees, your emails are available for an admin to look at. This is required for legal discovery whenever a company is sued. For companies in regulated industries (healthcare, finance, etc) they may actually be required to keep all your communications for a period of time so that they can track if you leaked sensitive data (PHI, PII, trade secrets, etc)

> totalitarian surveillance

> got offended

> Bullies

> soul-destroying shithole

It's funny how these sort of comments always come from recently created throwaway accounts.

People can only candidly speak their minds on touchy subjects through anonymity. What a shock, if only we came up with a name for this effect a long time ago? If only that very effect wasn't so ironically relevant to the subject at hand?

Why do you think that is?

How would you describe the tenor of the comment?

> I avoid workplaces which force shit like this. So do all the good developers I know, because they're people who can afford to be choosy.

So you and your choosy developer friends work at a place where IT can't access your corporate email?

In Germany (and probably the whole EU) it's illegal for an employer to read an employee's mails without approval of the workers' council for each individual case.

"probably the whole EU" [citation-needed]. German privacy law is very strict. This might be a good thing, don't get me wrong - but extrapolating this to all the other 27 member states is pure nonsense.

The European Court of Human Rights recently ruled that an employee's communication may not be monitored without prior notice and without specific reasons. [1]

This ruling applies not only to the whole EU, but to the 47 member states of the Council of European, including for example Russia and Turkey.

[1] https://www.coe.int/en/web/human-rights-rule-of-law/-/echr-m...

I'm aware of this, yet "prior notice + specific reasons" != "approval of the workers' council for each individual case"

Requiring approval of the worker's council is how an employer's demand to read an employee's mail is usually handled in Germany. I did not mean to imply that it is handled the same way in the whole EU, just that unsubstantiated monitoring is likely illegal in the whole EU.

I think you're mixing up the way businesses run and how society should run. Two different things.

It's getting well OT but why should there be a distinction? Should we forgo morals in favour of profits.

Businesses are society, we are forced to spent the vast majority of our waking life under the thumb of one so we should absolutely decide how we want that life to go.

No, he chose it because a group of interns was harassing other interns.

Words matter.

Reading someone's workplace messages to resolve a workplace investigation into a workplace dispute between co-workers isn't totalitarian.

There is no reasonable expectation of privacy on a corporate slack account.

You may be speaking legally in your final sentence but in natural language terms I'd say there is definitely an expectation of privacy in DMs to a named account; and it's not an unreasonable expectation.

If one DMs "Alex Murdo" then the expectation would be that they alone would read it, or their nominated person. If one DMs "Graphic Design" department then obviously that doesn't stand.

I'd expect contracts and such to contradict this natural expectation however.

Would you provide a small list of solutions as examples?

How about ask the intern being bullied to show the bullying messages?

And the sender deletes the message?

nice nirvana fallacy

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