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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Why the heck is this still legal anyway? Bosses should not be allowed to spy on people. If I actually fail to do the job in time repeatedly - ok, go ahead and fire me, that would be fair (I won't even resist if I see that's even partially my fault), but don't freaking spy!

Anyway, I would prefer to be unaware I'm being watched - I get kind of paralyzed with anxiety and can't think when somebody's watching over my shoulder and I know they do.

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I am pretty sure that the individual-level data would be illegal to collect on employees in Norway under labor law. According to the linked Twitter stream, author says it would be illegal in Germany and Austria. Probably for many other European countries as well.

Sure it is illegal in Germany or at least the Workers' council needs to approve it :)

But in other countries the laws are different. Managing a VPN solution you can't imagine how easy it is to get a data protection officer in the US approve a manager request for remote working data of an employee, reasoning being "to check if he worked from home as he told me and not from another place"

Different tenants per geographic regions have different standards.

Why would it be illegal?

The employee is doing work for a employer on a platform provided by the employer.

Because then less people would want to be employed and would rather stay on unemployment benefits burdening the state and the other employers? Or maybe because slavery was abolished 200 years ago?

I knew a guy who worked night shifts because he wasn't getting notoced by the shift supervisors when he went out for a smoke. There were less shift supervisors on night shifts.

Because being an employer doesn't give you carte blanche to do whatever you want to an employee.

In the USA, it seems like it might as well. And somehow most employees have been convinced this is suitable. Whether it should is another question.

Good point! Said platform should also electrocute an employee lagging behind. You know, for motivation.

See how broken your logic is?

Your counterexample is a straw man argument where the example approaches abuse.

My reasoning of why employee surveillance is fine is that there's a genuine purpose/need (measuring employee productivity) while personal privacy is retained (e.g. don't import personal information into the corporate 365 environment and personal privacy is retained). I'm not saying the metrics provided by 365 are correct, but I don't see the legal argument against it.

Read the GDPR or national equivalents in the EU and that will show the legal argument - literally that there are a group of laws defining that this isn't allowed in those jurisdictions. Whether or not you're convinced or not is of no consequence to the laws.

Can you point to a particular clause or section that indicates this wouldn't be a compelling usage (e.g. performance management of employees) of personal data?

You along with all of the other commenters have just responded with the generic assertion of "European privacy rights aka GDPR, duh." But then you don't actually support your assertion whatsoever.

GDPR is not a blanket prohibition on collecting data.

"Why the heck is this still legal anyway?"

Because the bosses run the world, as people seem to like being bossed around.

Workers have achieved a huge lot in outlawing things bosses wanted throughout the history. I would love to participate in a fight against this one if people would organize.

Another thing to fight against are requirements to explain resume gaps and discrimination against people who have them and people already seem starting to raise against this.[1]

The society still has a lot of work to do...

[1] https://www.boredpanda.com/annoying-job-interview-questions-...

Join the IWW and start organizing your workplace!

Developers are sometimes part of it. We have a lot of security companies where FUD means higher sales. They pay well though.

Go ahead start your own company.

I tried a few times. I'll gladly be bossed around for 8 hours when I make this much money..

No, capital runs the world. The people who have little don't want to risk losing it and the people who have a lot have no reason to risk losing it.

> No, capital runs the world. The people who have little don't want to risk losing it and the people who have a lot have no reason to risk losing it.

The 401k was a really clever trick. I wonder if it was intentional.

Bosses pay for lobbyists that fight regulation to keep shit like this in check

those metrics are so useless it probably doesn't even count as spying.

but seriously totally get how you feel.. it's been my first few months with an IT-managed laptop, and even with the creepier stuff off (hurray european laws) i'm nowhere near used to it

I know employee surveillance is useless, that's obvious, but that hardly really matters to the person being watched.

For certain jobs like in finance, compliance has to spy on people to check they aren't manipulating the market.

some track how long you stay in the bathroom using the RFID badge that they gave you

NFC RFID badges have a range of 10-20 cm. Unless an employer is requiring badging in and out of the bathroom or is using UHF RFID badges (is there even such a thing?), your assertion is unlikely to be true.

Leaving and re-entering your office, buzzing the locks on the way?

Although it's plausible, I would think that offices with a layout that requires badging out to reach an external restroom are rare. Seems as if there would be fire or disaster evacuation concerns.

The face recognition cameras catch you on the way out, the camera catches you on the way back in.

Not really, in case of a fire alarm all doors unlock anyway.

When I was a consultant I visited many offices where I needed a badge to go to the loo. It's really common in shared office buildings, the toilets tend to be in the elevator hall outside the badge perimeter. Don't think they were monitoring it though.

My building has the toilets in the fire escape stairs which you can push button out to but badge back in from. You would have some difficulty measuring time since you don't know who pushed the button but you could certainly measure frequency.

It depends upon the office. Where I work, we rent space in a building, and the restrooms are shared by multiple tenants on the floor (each floor has a set of bathrooms), so I (and my fellow coworkers) have to badge out and in to use them.

So you are saying that a sensor on both sides of a doorway frame should be enough to capture all RFIDs passing through? If they dont already ask you for the ID to open doors on the way....

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