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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

For any given website, if you can log in and chat with an employee, the conversation is logged. This is normal.

If you call a corporation and chat with them, the conversation is recorded and used for quality purposes. This is normal.

If you grab some groceries and ask to return one of the items you thought was on sale but wasn't, and this fact is noted by an audio recording system, suddenly this isn't normal.

I don't have feelings about this either way, but it's interesting to contrast the situations.

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Microphones and cameras don't just pick up "what you want". A key press is more than appropriate to gather the desired "this isn't on sale" metric.

This device is also not intended for that use case. It's meant to generate metrics to "ensure employees are actually greeting." If you are SO FLUSH WITH CASH and in such a dearth of things to do with it that you are quite literally trying to optimize your greeter metrics, there is a bloody problem.

Then there is the case that the very idea borders on abusive micromanagement. The kind that can only be plausibly skated under the radar through copious use of passive voice when describing it.

Life worked JUST FINE not being recorded audio/video or otherwise.

If profit hounding is reaching such high levels, a Wal-Mart greeter can't be trusted to make a decision whether or not a customer is in the mood for a greeting, then it is quite obvious that someone further up the chain has completely lost touch with the idea of "Professional Courtesy".

Never mind that half of this metrics gathering wouldn't be necessary if the company weren't trying to out grow the problem it's trying to solve by hemorrhaging labor in favor of machines.

The modern community is rife with distrust. More and more, people drift farther and farther away from each other. Mental and physical illness become more and more serious problems as humans are increasingly expected to behave as mass-produced cogs, interchangeable, and undeviating in how they carry out their job. The human psyche doesn't cope well with that. Humans are DYNAMIC. They are creative creatures, with difference being built into every decision.

The kind of control that industry keeps pushing for illustrates that leadership has little, or deprioritizes any semblance of human respect and dignity in how they engage with labor in favor of a more attractive bottom line to attract investers.

It isn't innovation. It isn't improvement. It certainly isn't engaging with and being a fundamental positive force within a community.

It's about plopping a pump down into a puddle of untapped value and sucking it dry, to hell with the consequences for society, the community, or those we leave behind to emulate the values we clearly espoused by letting it happen unchallenged.

I don't know about anyone else, but this is disgusting behavior of a sort that deserves more than mild degree of censure.

Well said.

What kills me is we hear about this w/ regards to lower waged workers. I make many times more than a Walmart worker and I don't have near the pressure on me to perform. I put it on myself, because I know I'm privileged to be doing something I enjoy, but I don't have to put up with anything near what they do. I think it's just another example of the haves hating on the have nots. They don't trust them to do their jobs well so they have to poke and pry at them. It's disgusting.

Don’t fool yourself. If an analyst could find a way to squeeze additional value out of you in excess of the cost of squeezing, they would. The profit macro-optimization is done already, in most industries. Workers are all in for a constant series of micro-optimizations, forever.

Agreed. This is insane at every level.

Let's play this out - imagine they implement this. They spend millions (realistically tens/hundreds of millions) putting up sensor systems, spinning up data center capacity, hiring analysts and all the auxiliary work that goes along with this sort of program, all for what - to further dehumanize some poor middle age single mother who's making $9 an hour? And for what -to optimize some stupid metric?

Walmart would be far better off putting that money into the wages of their lowest paid employees, or investing that money into manager training and giving people on the ground help.

In my mind this is where inequality really starts to bite - this level of surveillance at work is disproportionately aimed towards those with the least power and agency.

It's like a game of chicken. Those in control of society make things worse and the people at the bottom either suck it up or upend the table in response to this new social contract.

People naturally want a stable peaceful life and will suck it up.

But one day this bluff will be called.

When you're having a conversation through an industrialized medium, you may or may not like the fact that your conversation is preserved, but it isn't a surprise if it is, because you have the sense of it taking place through just such a medium (even if it's something you've never articulated).

If you're talking to a checker (or anyone) face-to-face, there's an absence of any explicit industrial medium. You're going to have the sense that whatever industrialized processes are in place, the face-to-face conversation is out-of-band. Of course it's going to be a surprise when it's not, short of explicitly notifying people otherwise.

It's about going too far, and yes--there is a line.

I don't find it "interesting" in the slightest.

People, even at work, should have some privacy rights.

I don't think a Worker's Privacy Bill will get passed in the near future. The corporations have won for now. It's too bad.

We are so conditioned to being abused by corporations they have us arguing over where the line is.

These corporations know hiring will never be a problem for most positions, so why not get cute?

In any organization, when you don't have any team spirit; your employees/widgets will find ways to screw you over.

I find Amazon's hand monitor patent appalling.

(I'm dropping you again Amazon--thanks for another reason. I was going to drop them because they changed the way to drop the monthly Prime plan, but this news was the last straw.)

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