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Comment by dsyrk | Hacker News Reader

I can see you must be a sharp knife. I conceal my surveillance from my employees but I should tell you the name of my company so you can tell them?

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Are you afraid your employees would leave you if they found out? Good. You should be. And I’ll be here to treat them with respect and scoop up your talent.

People like you ruin planet earth, really, try to put more trust in people. Oh and if you didn't yet, watch Black Mirror.

Exactly. Why employ people you don’t trust? It sounds very tiring. I certainly don’t have time for it running a successful, fast-growing company.

I’ve employed people before who eroded my trust in them. I either fired them or nudged them to find a new job, depending on the severity of the thing they did to make me not trust them.

> Why employ people you don’t trust?

Sometimes the unions/courts require a company to document incompetence for a certain number of months before being able to let a person go.

I don't agree with these requirements, but can see how they could incentivize surveillance apps.

You must be fairly young and idealistic. It’s really hard to know people well enough to be able to trust them. Especially in this new WFH environment are you going to know your employees after a few skype calls? I’ve been in tech for over 25 years now and a manager for last 15, the level of deceit one comes across is mind blowing. In one case we had an employee we all liked and thought well of, did decent work, extremely friendly, and we caught him trying to copy all the company’s code to a USB drive attached to his workstation under his desk. People are crazy you never know what they will do.

You must be a tropey children's story villain who doesn't understand he power of friendship

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThePowerOfFriend...

Your one employee betraying your trust does not justify treating the rest of your employees this way

You must be too cynical and jaded then because at 41 y/o with a family and a fair amount of life struggles under my belt I still can't see your point.

With programmers in particular it's painfully obvious if they work or not. You are expending tons of unnecessary (human) energy to maybe scoop 5-10% more productivity. It's not worth it.

There are also a lot of people who work better (and more!) when they feel free.

I mean, you do you of course, but consider that you're only surrounding yourself with one kind of people and are missing out on everybody else -- and no, they are not slackers.

This is actually illegal, and the information you have provided is enough to get a search warrant in the U.S. I have forwarded this thread to my local FBI field office. Have a nice day :)

If you are doing this on US soil, it is a felony to surveil employees without their express knowledge and consent. Hacker News has your IP address information so unless you are using a proxy or are outside of the US you'll be hearing from the FBI shortly.

Based. I hope that this isn't an empty threat and ends up actually being prosecuted.

I think you might be confusing audio and video surveillance with computer system logging. We can log anything we want it’s in their employee contract that they have no expectation of privacy on company computer systems and it should not be used for any personal business, which again WFH is great because clearly they have their own personal computer they use to access remote access and all our logging is on the server side. If I have timestamps of every key stroke and every mouse move and screenshots of their desktop every 1 minute there is nothing illegal about that. Even if it was remotely grey area it would be covered by their employee agreements, confidential agreements and proprietary information agreements. Your fake outrage is a joke.

Regardless of whatever wording you have included in your employment agreements, your statements on the matter indicate that you are surveilling your employees without their knowledge. Your public comment to that effect could actually be used in court to throw out whatever wording you have in your agreement, as your statement nullifies the assumption that your employees have read the agreement (you don't believe any of them have, and you believe the wording that is there is vague enough that they are unware of any actual surveillance -- this is damning as it is exactly what a prosecutor would have to prove in this case, and you have openly admitted it). Don't worry I already archived the original thread and included it in my report to the FBI.

When your employees bring a WFH device into their home, and your spyware collects metadata on their keystrokes, you are in violation of federal wiretapping law as you are collecting metadata from within their private home network and exfiltrating it through connections not initiated by the employee and without their consent or notification.

By law you must indicate to your employees that you collect metadata on their keystrokes (under privacy laws, this is still just private information in aggregate). Every time one of your employees enters private information or logs into their bank on their WFH device, and you log your metadata on these keypresses, you are committing another felony. Even the DoD has to provide a warning every time you log into a DoD system describing the surveillance being used on the device.

Depending on your employees' locations, this may also be a GDPR violation.

There are also numerous export control laws governing surveillance software that you may or may not be in violation of depending on your location. This is why obtaining this kind of software is difficult, especially in the EU.

People like you should be afraid, not your employees.

Please do explain. What is illegal? Recording minute granular measure of keyboard and mouse activity by employees on our internal company computer system. You’re in a fantasy world, the FBI is literally laughing at you right now.

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