How does the freedom to work remotely make one more prone to being "spied on" than being in an office?
Also, when did tech have any "labor" power? Last time I checked any talk of "unionization" will get you fired at the drop of a dime.
Not sure which rock you’re living under, but tech is probably the last bastion of labor power in the US. Sure, they aren’t well organized, but Google employees recently canned a DoD contract [1]. Saying no to Uncle Sam is a huge flex, and you can bet that pissed off some overlords.
Blue collar workers in the US have lost almost all of their labor power due to offshore workers or immigration (i.e. scabs). Tech has had it easy for a while now, but it’s the next target; the immigration debate is already shifting from “jobs Americans won’t do” to “merit-based”. Gig economy is another false liberation ploy being used to weaken collective bargaining power. Remote-first is yet another.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/01...
The majority of communication is already electronic. I've worked in offices and remote, there is practically no difference on that front. Most discussion takes place in Slack, Jira, GitHub, and email either way. Most companies already have team members distributed across various offices, remote work isn't new. If you want to avoid monitoring, then spin up a Google Hangouts or Zoom meeting, nobody is monitoring that.
The difference is that in an office, 1. your physical presence is also monitored (no joke I worked at a office once where every day an office assistant would secretly record what time everyone showed up to their desks) 2. your internet is also monitored, which is extremely creepy and I'm surprised this doesn't get more attention.
When I work remotely, there are no IT managers able to spy on my internet traffic. Sure there may be some dystopian corporations who try to force their remote workers to log into "company VPNs" and install "monitoring software" - I have absolutely no interest in working for any such companies and have never had to deal with that.
As a software engineer I've been fighting for the freedom to work remotely for ever since I joined this industry, so having the freedom to live wherever I want, and work whenever I want is a huge win. I've already been working remotely since pre-COVID, so I'm happy that other workers will also be able to enjoy this freedom.
I’d also point out, you’re enjoying the luxury of those freedoms (privacy, non-creepy norms) because labor power still exists and you can easily move to a different company or whatever. But fast forward 10 years, everyone is remote, labor pool is much larger, norms of monitoring and policing communication are established, then things start clamping down across the board as standard practice.
It just lives in kernel modules or as a OS config and they do not tell you as an employee, and it's done for 'compliance' or 'security' reasons so it's not obvious what it is when you look at a list of processes on your computer in the task manager.
Some popular ones in the bay area for macOS at startups are crowdstrike, carbon black, jamf, openvpn, umbrella, crashplan, munki, etc. Not mention the OS management configuration stuff like MDM profiles for macOS and active directory configurations for windows. A lot of brand name corps you might think are 'good guys' use this, like lyft or dropbox. Similarly with companies FANG, where it might custom software.
I think this is a super good tool, except for all the privacy implications.
We've always treaded carefully around privacy concerns as a project. This is why you don't see tables that access information such as browser history. If you join our Slack channels you will see open discussion of privacy implications for changes and improvements.
There's a balance to be struck between visibility and privacy. If a security team has no visibility into a system, they can't secure that system. This doesn't mean they need to be able to look at your family photos and read your messages.
I work with folks who care deeply about privacy and trust with their users. These folks ensure that osquery configurations are available to users, so that they can see what exactly is being monitored.
If you are curious what osquery can do, I encourage you to check out https://osquery.io/schema/4.3.0/.
The solution will be legal I think in the end, like in some european countries that don't let you do this kind of surveillance on your employees. And if you want to look at an employee's work emails, you do it in front of them with their lawyer present.
I'm glad you guys are trying to keep some semblance of privacy although.
There is definitely still friction in the entire process (ex send a link to an HN article to a friend that you saw in your work machine web browser) which induces a lot of people to just login directly on their work machines.
Since we are all WFH now I've been meaning to set up some sort of synergy setup so I can keep it really separated, but still have less friction in the 'share a link' scenario.