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Comment by n0nc3 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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...

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.)

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