Apple call center workers fear AI-powered surveillance cameras in their homes | Hacker News Reader

Apple call center workers fear AI-powered surveillance cameras in their homes

9to5mac.com

197 pointsheshiebee67 comments

The telescreens from 1984 have arrived! Just like in the Apple commercial.

Be aware that Albania is currently not a EU member [0], so none of the EU privacy laws apply (although per the linked NBC article, this proposal is illegal in Albania too [1], so I don't know what that company thinks they're doing).

BTW, this is technically a dupe from two days ago [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accession_of_Albania_to_the_Eu...

[1] https://www.idp.al/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Rekomandim_nr_... (Albanian-language pdf)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28113304 ("Big Tech call center workers face pressure to accept home surveillance")

Who knew a luxury brand device manufacturer would usher in the Orwellian future?

It didn't take big brother. People willingly lap it up.

The ecosystem that works together turned into an inescapable dragnet.

That's the cost of letting the giants grow so big.

Even in 1984, it was said that many people willingly bought televisions. I vaguely remember a character saying he wanted one but couldn't afford it.

That’s why Brave New World is a much stronger prediction. People don’t want the State to take their Freedoms because that’s not American.

But when a Lucury&Socialization brand comes and promises to make your life Better for the low price of your excess brainwaves… lovely! Sign me up for soma that.

I hate when someone says „BNW is actually a better prediction“ (you also never hear it the other way around). Both works are pretty much orthogonal e.g. we can have the NSA spying on citizens AND the hedonistic complacency from BNW simultaneously.

Precisely. They are works of literature, not predictions.

Examining science fiction through the lens of prediction is so reductive and flattens the whole experience of reading, in my view.

Your argument is identical to: “I hate when people project matrices onto lower dimensions; do they not see how that loses information? People should only ever deal with matrices in their original form, that way no data is ever destroyed. If the analysis cannot make use of the matrix in its original form, then it shouldn’t happen at all”

I disgree, to be honest. There are readings of science fiction that simplify themes and ideas don’t miss the point as thoroughly as does a predictive one does.

I remember a comment from a similar discussion a few years ago; Huxley indoors in our homes, Orwell outside on the streets.

Do you also hate when people say 3+4i is closer to 5i than 5?

> That’s why Brave New World is a much stronger prediction.

Agreed, but I fear we get the best from both worlds.

Time to ask for a redo from Ridley Scott?

Teleperformance is one of the worst companies I’ve ever come to know. Besides paying terribly (think less than 2 USD/hr), they’ve stole wages by way of metric manipulation, denied vacation entitlements, restricted the amount of bathroom breaks, forced 10-13 hr days where you get 2 hours of lunch break (yay but actually they just don’t need you for that time but you’re stuck at work), trying to force people into wfh… you get the picture.

It makes you appreciate first world employment comforts because this is a company that will happily take any advantage it can.

I wouldn't mind seeing a federal law stating that any internet company doing business in the USA has to pay workers minimum wage.

Only large companies. Small companies would be exempt. I despise most regulations, but wouldn't mind regulating big companies a bit more.

That exemption would make the law useless (trivially circumvented through one more layer of subsidiaries and contractors)

The law can count for subsidiaries and contractors too. No number of layers of corporate shell can stop the workers who need to say "You've reached Apple support, how can I assist you?".

Why should low cap business owners be able to exploit foreign laborers just because they’re low cap?

Why should small companies be exempt? If you can't afford to pay people a minimum wage, you shouldn't be in business

Generally the principle is that we should do this “Because additional flexibility with how small businesses are run allows them a greater chance to grow to become bigger businesses. “ but other than that… it’s also just the normal thing in many countries that certain regulations only kick in once your business grows to a certain size. I can thing if several USA and Australian laws like this.

Normal doesn't mean its right, seeing as the normal is currently anyone can do it, big or small, as per this thread and OPs suggestion.

Everyday I realize that the reason we're hitting all these dystopian practices and rules is because tech is trying to scale things that don't scale.

That’s actually a really interesting perspective.

“Can we remove people from all the loops everywhere? It will be so much cost effective!”

“Gee, I wonder how the world became so dehumanized?”

Companies like this that depend on large MNC fixed contracts have limited capacity to grow or innovate. They provide a basic service at a fixed annual fee. So they grow by cutting from their employees.

Remember a similar situation in India when employees went berserk, rightfully so.

Everyone seems to have missed that Apple specifically ban contractors like Teleperformance from doing this.

[include] Apple spokesperson Nick Leahy said that the company “prohibits the use of video or photographic monitoring by our suppliers and have confirmed Teleperformance does not use video monitoring for any of their teams working with Apple.” Leahy said that Apple had audited Teleperformance in Colombia this year and did not find any “core violations of our strict standards.”

This is from my own experience working at a TP call center, for a major tech client and not in Albania or Colombia.

External and internal audits are known for weeks in advance such that they could put a facade on in time. During audits you suddenly don't have a limit on bathroom break time (generally an alert would come at 15mins per day) and there would be pizza at the office every other day. Only 'loyal' employees would be chosen to any interviews/meetings about culture etc.

I understand that Apple isn’t directly responsible for this policy and a contracted firm is primarily responsible. However, this press couldn’t have came at a worse time when Apple is also facing negative PR resulting from their announcement of expanded protections for children.

For what it's worth, Apple is a very deliberate company with immense control over their supply chain. Surveillance could very well be their internal MO, we have no way to hold them accountable in that regard. Considering how they want to generate low-resolution hashes of your content on-device before it's shipped off to their servers... yeah, I can see the two aligning. It's part of a larger, internal push to increase liability and weed out "bad actors"

Yeah, for a company like Apple, I would hold them responsible for the contractors actions here. Apple could easily replace them if they wanted to.

"negative PR resulting from...expanded protections for children" is an insanely generous paraphrasing of what actually happened...

Agreed, we should stop ceding the language we use to describe this betrayal of trust to Apple’s idiot marketing division. These aren’t child safety features. By the time CSAM has been produced the child has already been harmed. Also pedophiles, may they be tortured barbarically and may their barbaric torture be televised by mandate on all those little TV screens that squawk at us while we’re getting gas until every last one of them is too scared to ever go near another child again, will simply turn off iCloud photos, or iCloud, or whatever 3rd parties Apple will let in on the surveillance.

This will not help keep a single child safe. It’s not a child safety feature, it’s an adult surveillance feature.

Well said. If Apple wanted to keep children safe they would fund investigations into allegations of child abuse.

> will simply turn off iCloud photos, or iCloud, or whatever 3rd parties Apple will let in on the surveillance

I mean apparently they're already uploading photos to Facebook of all places and getting caught there, so you may be overestimating how smart they are.

Normally the conflation isn't a big deal, but if you're going to be that vitriolic, I'm going to please ask you to say "child abuser" and not "pedophile". What pedophiles need is therapy and possibly monitoring.

Is there data on how effective therapy is for pedophiles? Intuitively I'd expect it enjoys the same 0% efficacy rate as gay conversion therapy.

Lots of people have bad impulses that they need to control and therapy helps there doesn't it? The goal wouldn't be the same as conversion.

It's at least similar. Gay conversion aims for 3 things as far as I can tell:

1) Stop acting on your current sexual feelings

2) Stop having those feelings

3) Start feeling different sexual feelings somehow, but probably not

At the very least the first step is the same, and equally unlikely to happen. I don't know what the current status is with castration or chemical castration for pedophiles but I wholeheartedly support it. I don't really care if they get the help they need, I don't care about them or their dignity or humanity at all. I only care that they don't rape children.

> At the very least the first step is the same, and equally unlikely to happen.

Well there's different kinds of "acting on". "Don't have consensual sex with another gay person" is a hard sell. "Don't rape anyone" gets pretty good support from everyone. Rape is a lot more about power than it is about attraction, and it's not that easy to figure out who would go there.

That's a good point, I dunno, maybe you're right and I just get carried away when I think about this stuff, it's all just so disgusting. I see what you mean, the difference between pedophile and child abuser.

Sorry, you mean spying on everyone?

*better time

They are responsible as long as they have a contract with that company. Otherwise it's denying responsability by using contractors.

You mean the mandatory Personal Informant app that Stasi left on it's wish list?

This title is misleading at best - Apple call centre workers may fear AI-powered surveillance cameras, however Apple is not doing this, nor is the subcontractor on the Apple contract, as Apple has explicitly banned their subcontractors from doing this.

Just to be clear, each contract that Teleperformance has opperates with differerent rules and pay scale / entitlements etc.

If you were working one of their other contracts, you may not even be in the same building as the others.

So the Apple ai camera thing is probably specific to Apple as I know a few people who work there in Colombia and don't have cameras when they work from home.

It’s the opposite which is why the title is misleading - the “Apple ai camera thing” is happening on other Teleperformance contracts but not Apple.

The idea that there is an “Apple ai camera thing” is just the implication from the (misleading) title but it doesn’t exist.

From the article:

> Apple spokesperson Nick Leahy said that the company “prohibits the use of video or photographic monitoring by our suppliers and have confirmed Teleperformance does not use video monitoring for any of their teams working with Apple.”

The article also never makes the claim that the cameras are observing people doing work on an Apple contract - it says that it is Teleperformance who ‘has contracts with Apple’, but not that this is used on the Apple contract.

We're not reading the same article bud. It clearly states this is the Apple account and that Apple UK had the same issues with their Albanian branch.

> a Bogota-based worker on the Apple account ... said that she signed the contract ...because she feared losing her job.

> the new contract, first issued in March. The contract allows monitoring by AI-powered cameras in workers’ homes, voice analytics and storage of data collected from the worker’s family members, including minors

> the contract, a copy of which NBC News has reviewed

You think NBC are gona headline an article risking defamation when they have a contract that would or would not state if this is a legitimate proposal???

Your comment reads like a complete misdirection.

Might as well, the jig is up. Apple has shed their privacy facade, why not go all in on surveillance?

Is this called Proctoring? My son went to college and because of COVID they had his math class online. In order to take a test he needed a web camera to watch him and he had to show the room he was in was empty and they assigned a person to proctor him during the test to make sure he wasn't cheating.

Now they are doing this with remote workers but using AI instead of people?

Now I'm really glad Hyundai bought Boston Dynamics :D

Plot of I, Robot foiled for a few more years...

I'd be awry of a Korean conglomerate buying an advanced robotics company after what happened to Samsung TVs that watch you while you're watching. Seems like privacy protection laws are toothless in Korea.

“ Apple outsources some of its call center work around the world to Teleperformance, and employees say they are being pressured to sign a contract agreeing to the cameras, despite an Apple policy prohibiting it”

Isn't this why many companies outsource. They can get away with these shenanigans whilst keeping a level of distance and feigned unawareness.

Plausible denieabilty.

fear

I am in fear for my loved ones. I am hiding under my blanket.

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