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Comment by boogies | Hacker News Reader

> hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section

How long does simple key logging last before they add eye tracking?

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…or Apple Watch-like pulse tracking, etc., and then who knows if/when Neuralink becomes practically, widely deployable and useful. I think we’re just a bit beyond the technical capabilities of the Thought Police right now in terms of sensing — their telescreens could hear breathing in quiet rooms, but on the other hand Orwell didn’t seem to foresee people buying their own pocketable ones with GPS & cell triangulation, etc. (they didn’t necessarily know everyone’s exact location all the time) — but perhaps we’re quickly surpassing their analytics abilities (particularly bandwidth — finite human staff are less of a bottleneck) with AI.

If this happens, two^W three can play this game. If this ever becomes a thing, I'm definitely going to open a business, selling 3D printed heads with animated eyes.

Elevator pitch for VCs would be about machine learning - neural networks generating consumer head nodding behaviors that match the read phrases, as well as rising simulated body temperature in righteous awe or anger upon "reading" certain pieces of spam. And how all that behavioral data is somehow valuable (lol).

You'll need that fake head to be vascularized too. Photoplethysmography is a thing. >smile<

Okay so now I'm just meant to hire someone who looks like me to read my e-mails for me? Definitely going to have to try to expense that.

You can outsource it. Better yet, set up a startup to offshore it. Or - ding ding! - AI it, providing Virtual Work as a Service.

You can have virtual cubicles full of imaginary AI-generated people automating bureaucratic busywork being generated by AI management algorithms.

Maybe I should write a novel about this. (Or am I too late?)

> selling 3D printed heads with animated eyes

I figure it's an arms race that will play out in the software space. More generally, it's deep-fakes vs deep-fake-detectors.

Eye tracking is already live in production.

Had the joy to see some contractors at work. The webcam is recording 24/7 to ensure their face is in front of the screen.

If the employee looks away for a second, the screen flashes something about no user being present.

If somebody else shows up in the field of view, for example me walking by, the screen flashes something about an unauthorized user.

The session is locked out after a few notifications.

Wow I would hate to work there.

Unless this is some kind of top-secret government consultancy thing that is totally unappropriate.

The work involves reading and reviewing some documents. Some confidential documents but nothing fancy.

It's minimum wage, hourly contracting with no benefits.

So in other words, easily swapped out for something far more humane. Sounds like the best path.

Please tell us where this is happening, so that we can avoid ever working there. Pretty sure this would be illegal in most European countries.

The software is made by a US software company.

You have to onboard user accounts to them, install the authentication software on a laptop, and it will open a remote desktop to an AWS workspace. The session is constantly tracking the user's face and gets terminated if they look away for a minute.

Contractors are disconnected regularly because their face stopped being recognized, or they can't login in the first place after 5 tries.

Recall one contractor that contacted support because they couldn't login, support told him that their face was too dark.

>The session is constantly tracking the user's face and gets terminated if they look away for a minute

The hell did I just read?! Can't tell if this is satire or real at his point but anyway let me just beat your employee tracking system by propping up a photo of my face in front of the webcam.

Wait, is your fancy system looking for features of life like facial twitches and eye movement to not be fooled by a photo?

Fine, here's a deepfaked avatar of my face acting alive powered by nvidia's latest deep learning magic.

See where this is going?

Had the pleasure of applying to reddit earlier this year.

Was sent a link for an online test (hackerrank if I remember right) for which I needed to keep my camera ON.

Higher education 'anti-cheating' technology is just like that.

They're trash.

This is what it looks like for students: use your laptop webcam to scan the room with your webcam, remove anything deemed suspicious; provide proof of identity (student id), wait for the software to register your face, name, and identity; test opens take test, do not look down or it locks, do not look away or it locks, do not refer to your notes or it locks, do not have people walk behind you or it locks, do not have pets walk behind you or it locks, do not have posters of movies behind you or it registers as a person and locks, do not accidentally click another tab or window or it locks, do not use any of the built-in windows accessibility tools or certain 3rd party accessibility tools (dragon software) or it locks, do not use a mac or it locks; fail test.

Single parents, individuals living with many people in the home, and anyone who does not have access to an isolated quiet, alone work space is screwed.

And it's completely asinine. Just ridiculous.

which country was that? and what work did the contractors do?

Not long. Software as an industry feels particularly devoid of ethics these days. If Bloggins doesn't build this for his employer the guy in the next co-working space will.

There is no coherent "software industry" as a unitary entity with shared norms and standards. There never was.

Since all you really need to get started is a laptop, there are rather millions of more or less atomized software shops and developers attached to other industries, other streams of revenue and capital, other entirely disconnected cultures and social norms.

Given that its already deployed in academic contexts, I suspect that the more invasive employers are already using it. Finance, defense, etc.

That would be illegal in EU

Are you sure. The EU mandates much MORE monitoring in most cases. Self driving cars may need to have camera's on occupants to monitor them during driving etc. A lot of the safety stuff in EU is MUCH more nanny state and CCTV is much more widespread it seems. Also very power data collection and centralized databases about everyone in the EU (ie, I don't think "states" or localities issue local ID's).

I think the point was that while the various governments in the EU deploy surveillance systems en masse, private companies can not.

Spying on employees is very restricted. Anything that would even come close to it would be strongly rejected by the unions.

"May"

And no - CCTV is not widespread at all. There's far more CCTV in the UK than there is in the EU where I live now.

States do indeed issue local IDs. There is no common EU ID card and no common EU passport.

There isn't even a common immigration database for Schengen - although that's planned for 2023. (It was supposed to be 2022, but it's been delayed by a year.)

Having worked extensively in both finance and defense, your assumptions are way off base. This kind of monitoring is the purview of corporations like Amazon, Walmart, McDonald's, and others who treat employees like machines. Defense and finance have highly skilled brain workers and they aren't micromanaging performance metrics like this. They are tracking information access for security reasons where appropriate, and in the case of finance, tracking results insofar as it relates to risk and profit, but they're not monitoring grunt-level input metrics the way you imply.

"Former JPMorgan colleagues describe the environment as Wall Street meets Apocalypse Now, with Cavicchia as Colonel Kurtz, ensconced upriver in his office suite eight floors above the rest of the bank’s security team." [0]

What really scares me is the number of people that adopt this strange Panglossian view dismissing every abuse of power as a one-off that cannot possibly reveal widespread systemic failures.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel...

Seems very feasible: https://webgazer.cs.brown.edu/

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