Amazon will monitor workers' keystrokes to 'combat data theft'

I'm not a huge fan of this monitoring, but why be so dramatic? You aren't losing any rights here, let alone all rights. You do not have a right to use your employer's computer without your employer's permission.

If you want to do something that isn't monitored, just use your own computer instead of your employer's computer. You should be doing this anyway, keystroke monitoring or not.

Hahaha. We Americans have this little term called "Human Capital"

I am.

Just thinking everything's great doesn't actually change reality lol

Once healthcare is tied to employment, that is exactly what people are.

It's clear that, in their super-capitalistic view, if they pay you a salary they own you for 8 hours a day. Property doesn't have rights, so neither do you.

This has been clear for quite some time, but it's reaching exaggerated extremes in recent years.

It's worrying how US companies are expanding so intensely into the EU as well.

Reading about this topic, it seems this is also not legal, especially when limited personal internet usage is allowed as well in the contract.

What's the right way to approach this issue? I guess if someone brings this up, they'll just update contracts and say that personal internet usage is forbidden? It still feels like someone is watching you.

You need to have this sensitive data locked down appropriately so that people cannot just unilaterally access it on a whim. There should be an audit trail back to some rationale for access (e.g. support case) that enables access, and if the data is sensitive enough it should use multi-party auth.

Keyloggers are not going to stop someone who is using someone else's computer already - they are WHY they are using someone else's computer!

You'd have to set up a system where the phone tech could not access the account data unless the customer relayed the right name, SSN, or whatever other validation that they were the right person (people forget passwords!). But this means you need to be able to look up an account by some kind of PII, or at least ask the customer to cite some recent purchases (to prove ownership)... in which case the tech has to be able to see the purchases to validate them!

Anyway, I'm sure there's some path here to make it mostly possible, but I don't think it's easy and I'm sure it's a higher-friction customer support experience.

This sounds like someone's solving a lack of training with code

We give full admin rights to laptop owners and don’t install spyware. I would be sad if a coworker acted as if their keystrokes were being recorded; thinking that would surely slow them down and make them more careful about pursuing all promising research paths. So I think it’s important for companies that don’t spy to signal that they don’t; the opportunity cost outweighs the marginal security benefit.

In practice, companies only have humans look at IT use if there's a security problem or a performance problem.

Over here, when a company would do that and use it against me, I would sue them for privacy breach. Employee rights are very well protected in western Europe.

Use a VPN, that way if you good off on your phone during the day at least they can only see how many bytes you're using and when

Queries to sensitive DB endpoints are what you want to keep an eye on.

Now I'd rather keep a simple job and work on side projects that interest me than working at a FAANG.

There’s an entire suite of software companies that have been building this stuff for twenty years, companies like Verint.

That's already two decades back.

I remember back when I started out in the 2000s. I worked at a call center here in Bangalore. The breaks were one 35 mins(lunch), three 15m breaks spread over the shift, which most people took to use rest rooms. Many times you need to call the floor manager, and they turn it down. You need to hold your rest room emergency until they let you go to the toilet for 15 minutes. You got penalised if you over shot the 15m rest room break.

They even had metrics like resolve rate, calls per day, escalation count, data collection metrics(if you made 3 mistakes entering the user email, you were fired) etc etc.

https://youtu.be/lX1P-gGqNjo

All the messages on Exchange Online and Teams are logged and can be searched through by an admin, that's to be expected.

It's not logging keystrokes of other apps.

His COO later stopped taking meetings in the office because the CEO would sometimes sit and watch and listen in to the office from home.

She’s monitored doing everything including the time it takes to read management emails and going to the toilet.

She puts up with being treated like crap because she thinks the job has prestige.

When the book was first published that all sounded hilariously preposterous. These days it’s almost standard. :(

However, if you’re working at an employer-provided work device, your practice is a wise one.

Normalizing the surveillance state is the chilling part. It’s just that the corporation is state entity, not the government.

To your point, the reason we have bad cops is that we have problem people that carjack, rape and the like, so we therefore have cops. If people really didn’t want bad cops, they wouldn’t crime.

But I doubt Amazon has lost much money from the looks of it.

Criminal insiders that prey on the customers are a more interesting target, but I suspect they are in different unmonitored areas.