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Comment by snow_mac | Hacker News Reader

This is something I've seen at places like Whole Foods. In the bathroom they have a digital card scanner. One day I saw an employee scan their ID, they said that they have to check on certain things every hour and scanning a badge in the bathroom tells their minders that "Hey, the bathroom was checked in on by an employee and thus should be in of good condition".

I think something like that is fine and reasonable if your job is to move about a building.

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Watchclocks have been used for over a century. Guards or watchmen on patrol had to be at a specific spot at a certain time to prove they were not asleep. They had to prove via the clock that they were at that location.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchclock

LOL. Just noticed we posted the same link ;-)

I wrote it at noon and never clicked reply until I was off work. I see another link too even earlier.

To solve the problem, Burger-G contracted with a software consultant and commissioned a piece of software. The goal of the software was to replace the managers and tell the employees what to do in a more controllable way. Manna version 1.0 was born.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

I honestly hate that story with a passion. Not because it's bad, it's actually very compelling. But it presents two very dystopian futures which I perceive to be antithetical to human and individual dignity, one which is as miserable as it is likely, and one that I find far more disturbing and undesirable which it presents as a Utopia, which I hope never has a chance to come to pass.

I'm curious: would I be wrong to assume you're not of fan of the Culture, either? In case you haven't the series ignore me :)

I'm not familiar with the series. But after skimming a few articles on it, I don't think my distaste for Manna transfers.

The Culture series seems to create a platonic ideal of a post-scarcity pseudo-anarchistic liberal society under technocratic governance, and explores its interactions with the outside world.

Though the details of that society's implementation may be somewhat distasteful to me personally, it seems the author is more than willing to critique the society and its behavior from as good a faith a position as he took to create it.

Manna doesn't do the same.

SPOILERS FOR MANNA AHEAD

Brain constructed the Australia Project as a desirable alternative to the corporatist dystopia of the United States - where the majority of the population has been rendered technologically obsolete, and are held in cheap public housing where they wait to die. Despite what he may claim, he writes the Australia Project less as an exploration, and more as a sales brochure.

Brain breathlessly and uncritically describes the Australia Project as heaven on earth, or a 'luxury cruise'. In the process of doing so, he leaves little nuggets of text that suggest a much grimmer reality than he lets on at surface level.

Luxury Cruise is an apt description. You may be there to relax, but the experience is purposeless without the contrast of your real life. The ship may be stocked to the gills, but when things go belly up it quickly becomes clear how constrained the ship's resources truly are. You may be free to have fun now, but upset the wrong person on staff or become even a minor nuisance, and you'll soon learn how autocratically the ship is actually ran.

It's made quite clear that Australia cannot truly be considered a post-scarcity society. In AP, no individual's activities may exceed their allotment of resources (and certainly, there must be an allotment because one's resource consumption cannot come at the expense of another's)

In AP, anyone may be free to create, make, or do whatever they want, but whatever they want is tightly constrained. No individual's activities may make anyone uncomfortable. This is reflected in Brain's description of the criminal justice system, where he describes automated 'referees' detaining or potentially pre-empting citizen's control over their own bodies in response to an emotional outburst in public, "mainly because no one wants to be around when it happens". He describes this as if it were desirable. If this is seen as a proportional response, I would be terrified for anyone who sought to do or say anything of real consequence.

Finally, as evinced by my previous two examples: everything in Brain's world is on lease, down to your body. Once you're inside of the AP's network every sensation, sight, smell and action is recorded, analyzed, and mediated through it.

Your permission to use your body may be revoked at the leisure of an algorithm perfectly enforcing complex rules of indeterminate (if ostensibly democratic) origin. This happens so often it seems, that it's regard as "sort of like a lifeguard yelling at you at the pool for something you thought was OK".

Your privacy is forfeit, and it's quite clear that the closes thing one can come to owning anything in the AP is inside a virtual space.

Somehow Brain treats this as an ideal future. If this is the best we can hope for, I would sooner be drafted into WWIII than experience it.

I share your attitude towards the (meant to be) utopia world described in Marshall Brain's novel, but I presume that this may be just a shared cultural thing. Next generations seem to value less their privacy, or at least are less willing to resist privacy encroachments, and it shouldn't be that far-fetched to assume cultural leaning/conditioning to a more "integrated world" in the future. Also, there is another aspect that we conveniently leaving out, namely how the society deals with threats. For discussion's sake, let's pick on only the most uncontroversial ones like crime and sanity. We confine and restrict individuals in prisons and mental asylums respectively because that's the level of control that we currently have to avoid them affecting the society at large. The moment that level of control improves, like something closer to the brain, the aforementioned facility-based confinement becomes unnecessary and we may even get to feel good for letting at least some part of the otherwise problematic people be active in society. Will that brain control practice spill out to something less justifiable? Maybe. However, that's tomorrow's politics, and most likely tomorrow's world too, for better or worse.

I do agree that it's a cultural thing. American, European, and East-Asian lockdown policies have been massively instructive on the spectrum of humanity's willingness to submit to state and cultural authority.

But I wouldn't go so far as to say that the next generation values its privacy less than the previous. If anything, my observations would suggest it's the opposite.

The amount of energy and expertise required to function in society while avoiding the excesses of corporate surveillance has simply expanded past the point where people can realistically fight it. Younger people know that the war is lost.

No significant segment of the population truly appreciates the scale, and the precision with-which they're being tracked. But among my younger friends and family, there seems to be a persistent appreciation that privacy is a precious commodity in very short supply. They may not always be cognizant of it, of course. They grew up in this world, and it's impractical to think about the air you breath all the time, even if it's thick with smog. It's simply not realistic. They do intuitively know which battles are lost, moreso than 'older' folk past their late 20s who vividly remember the advent of Facebook, who like to grouse about the tracking of social media while aggressively ignoring the fact that the little spy in their pocket would be just as insidious in its violations with or without any apps installed.

But you need a phone to function in the modern world. You'll never be able to truly escape the panopticon without a great deal of money, and if you could you would have to leave everyone you ever knew behind, and many of your prospects to do so. And after all, it's not bit you yet. Better to resign yourself to what's already lost.

The Europeans I've known have generally been less reticent in their acceptance of the state of the world, FWIW.

To your second point...

My instincts, and my morality tells me we'd be better off with the prisons, and possibly the sanitariums. Not because of the potential downstream consequences, but because to psychologically muzzle anyone like that without their active and continuous consent would be an atrocity of the first order. Our criminal justice system in America is often abysmal. But at least our prisoners are not lobotomized for the comfort of those of us who find the idea of prisons offensive. They're granted at the very least, the dignity to resent those who locked them up.

I believe you're right, these are for the time hypotheticals. Tomorrow is a foreign land, but it's a foreign land in-which many of us will live. Regardless, it's incumbent on each and every one of us to ensure that that land shares in what virtues we consider right, and just.

  But at least our prisoners are not lobotomized for the
  comfort of those of us who find the idea of prisons
  offensive. They're granted at the very least, the
  dignity to resent those who locked them up.

I have good reason to dispute this, and yet I also have good reason to not do so very publicly. It's amazing what you can accomplish with modern pharmaceuticals.

Corporate security has something like this as well - there are little button shaped things on the wall everywhere they scan with their device as they make their rounds.

I have a NFC app on my phone, read one of those buttons ... they left it unlocked, so I posted a message. Not sure anyone will read it, presumably they just pick up the location ID in an app. I guess someone could just clone the locations and sit in a chair and spoof it.

Library books in my area use NFC, the tags weren't locked on the last book I checked.

Probably not a security problem (ha!?), but you'd think the possibility of vandalism would cause them to be locked.

I've seen buildings where the buttons are 'burried' in a few mm 'deep' the wall, and painted over so that you don't notice them at all, the wall looks really smooth. The guards know where exactly the spots are, you see them waving their devices in a seemingly flat/blank wall, then the beep sounds, and they walk towards their next 'random' spot.

I've often wondered how often NFC is unlocked like that.

Yep, those have been in retail stores forever. In the grocery store I worked in it was specifically for making sure there weren't hazards on the floor (like a broken jar that fell from a shelf) that someone could slip on and break their neck. It was required by their insurance.

Generally anywhere with security patrols, even outside some residential buildings and townhouses in San Francisco.

It is called "iButton"

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R3GRBD8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_...

That’s a temperature sensor.

Back at home I used to see a schedule on a wall in most toilets(shopping centres, some public buildings) where rows with time slots were filled with names and signatures to ensure constant cleaning every 15-30 min.

Carrying a phone with a tracker is a complete BS.

I worked retail in highschool during the 90s. It was exactly like this. Just because something is possible with modern tech doesn't mean it should be done or is better than bog simple stuff like a log book.

As Meja sang some years back: it's all about the money (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcXMhwF4EtQ)(cute song)

Logbooks: someone needs to distribute them, collect them, read them, transfer the (many many many) written lines to a computer, validate the signature samples/writing style, etc. etc. An app that automates that in 2 mins is so much better.

A solution could be: 1) give each employee a (corporate) cheap $100 android phone, 2) configure these to allow only 1-2 apps to 'escape' to the internet so the bandwidth is not wasted on updates or browsing, 3) provide a 1GB per year data plan, 4) ask them to switch on right before entering the 'site' and switch off right when they leave the 'site' 5) give them a monthly $5 subsidy to keep it charged.

They don’t need to do anything but distribute and maybe collect them. Typically they simply look at them periodically and make sure they’re being filled out, and only closely looked at if there’s some kind of incident.

Yes and no.

This would cover some of the functions. How about overtime? How about 'less time'? How about an extra Sudnay because game/football/concert/office-party?

The HR of each company would need this data to adjust salaries.

I am not discussing incidents and/or user-access-management (apologies if my above comment was misunderstood). I meant it for time-tracking purposes. An app where one can add an exception note "I had to pop to X shop to buy Y material" would also help document and approve. Geofencing requirement makes sense in some lines of work and a work-phone (switched on only the work-hours) is a reasonably 'invasive' tool.

Maybe I just don't know how this industry works. Do people get paid based on the actual number of bathrooms cleaned and such? To be clear I'm talking about places where one of the regular employees just has 'bathroom duty'.

I've seen these logs and to me it always seemed that the point was for customers to see that the place was actually maintained. A customer can't tell whether a bathroom is cleaned only once a month and that's why it looks the way it does or whether the last guy just trashed the place after the last cleaning, which was an hour ago and based on the previous logs you can see, it will be cleaned again soon. Or that the cleaners didn't clean and just wrote on the paper. Which technology doesn't solve. You just wave the badge or whatever but don't do anything. And no, location tracking doesn't help with that. A dedicated slacker can listen to music or watch YouTube in different locations.

I always wondered what prevented an employee from skipping several check-ins, then filling in the missing signatures/timestamps at one time.

Random checks at random time.

This is also how Environmental Health and Safety ensures lab safety checks were done on things like the eye wash station.

That’s something Whole Foods uses for the subcontracted cleaning crews, not the directly-hired employees. They laid off all their maintenance crews a year before Amazon bought them.

It’s also not on the workers’ personal phones, they have some old phones that they keep at the store with the app already installed.

I think it's okay to track employees while on the clock for certain circumstances but that tracking should cease as soon as they are not on the clock.

An app on a personal phone can violate this way too easily. The tagging system is a good way to do it and limit it to only being on the clock.

I'd rephrase: it's ok to monitor that the jobs are being performed, and sometimes this involves an employee doing something in a certain place at a certain time.

Though highly-overlapping, this is not a 1:1 correspondence with "tracking employees."

You may need to know that a security guard visited this station at 1:00 and this station at 1:30. You do not need to track whether he was in the bathroom five minutes longer today that yesterday.

A real guard needs to run a somewhat random schedule, otherwise attackers will figure out the pattern. I don't need to know how long you spend in the bathroom (unless it is excessive), that is just data that I happen to get by tracking to ensure there is enough randomness in your patterns. It should go without saying that guards need sufficient time to handle biology needs, and this varies a bit.

If you are so high profile that attackers are trying to profile guard movement patterns, you need more than 1 guard, and they can take turns using the bathroom.

I think most grocery stores have something similar. When I worked at Giant about 15 years ago, I used a self-contained scan gun (basically an overpriced Windows Mobile 5 PDA stapled onto a barcode scanner) when I had to do "the walk," which was the hourly store inspection. Decidedly lower-tech than even a badge reader, but it got the job done and my boss didn't have to know where I was during my time off.

Stuff like this has also been around for decades. Detex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchclock) was a manufacturer of Watch clocks that used a key at the inspection stations to verify that someone had been to inspect that location at a certain point in time.

This is partially due to liability: if someone slips on a wet spill and hurts themselves, Whole Foods is liable if they haven't been taking reasonable measures to clean up such spills in a timely fashion (1/hour). Scanning is a way to later prove that such cleaning was happening.

At my company, there are these black sensors on the walls around all the buildings. Security is supposed to patrol the buildings and they have to scan their badge at each sensor to show they were there.

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