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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

I really hope that if this happens, DPAs bring the hammer down on everyone involved (both MS and companies using it) in a useful timeframe (i.e. before it has become socially acceptable because "everyone is doing it" and there are no consequences).

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Everyone is already doing it. Not to engineers yet, but look at Amazon warehouses.

These things are always deployed against the least powerful first.

It's also easiest to implement in the warehouse.

Do you have a right to privacy in the workplace?

Back in the day the boss would be right there with you in the store etc and could watch you all the time.

Or maybe this will be something that really only shows up in china etc? I think they are a bit further along on some of these types of things.

I prefer to say "they're a bit less developed on some of these types of things". Their attitude is still very much that of the Industrial Revolution, where a worker was no more than a replaceable meat unit with no rights and no expectations of a life of any kind outside of productive work.

You don't have the same rights to privacy when performing your job for a corporation, and everyone else is already doing it in other industries.

Just this week was a big story about how a call center provider (used by Apple and others) was forcing employees to install cameras in their own homes to monitor their remote work: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/big-tech-call-center-...

woah, this is bonkers !

I am not sure what is possible in other jurisdictions such as the EU, but I have not seen something like this so far.

I'm not sure about individual member states, but there was this story in Germany the other day:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/gdpr-german-laptop-retailer-fi...

€10M fine for keeping employees under video surveillance for no good reason.

This is an example showing that there are limits to employee surveillance on-site.

I was just going to mention customer service reps, who traditionally would have worked out of call centers and been subject to restrictions to make it more difficult for them to steal customer data (with the side 'benefit' of micromanaging productivity). With the pandemic, businesses that had considered CS staff they couldn't replace with AI as not sitting for remote were forced to figure out a way, and that way was essentially to replicate many of the security conditions of the call centers in the home, rationalized as a necessity to keep people employed and get through the pandemic. But let's be real, CS has long been a race to the bottom cost segment, often outsourced and run as a computer with a mere human overlay. So it was only a matter of time before management was satisfied that the security risks were mitigated enough to justify the new coat savings. Some big companies have already decided to stick with the home-based support setups they put in place only because of the pandemic. And now to apply the formula elsewhere.

Customer support is a computer with a mere human overlay. A profound statement.

In the US, or in Europe?

What’s a DPA, please?

Data Protection Authority

Data Processing Agreement: https://gdpr.eu/data-processing-agreement/

Thank you!

I believe it's data privacy advocate?

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