Welcome to the era of the hyper-surveilled office
economist.com
economist.com
>Last year Fujitsu, a Japanese technology group, unveiled AI software which promises to gauge employees’ concentration based on their facial expression.
Just need software that punishes employees who aren't happy enough at work, then we'll have a proper nightmare.
Click the "Start Virtual Camera" button and switch to this webcam in your conference software, flick between the two scenes semi-rapidly
"ah man, my webcam is playing up"
I've heard of a company measuring how "well" a meeting went based on some AI analysis of people smiling. So much time here is wasted on managing workers and talking about how to work, instead of just getting shit done.
So they put up a bunch of signs above each couch and bench that said "No sleeping."
I've still got a collection of pictures of people sleeping directly under the signs. Fight the power. :-)
"You have challenged me for the position of Employee of the Month, and must now meet me in single combat…! Do not forget to bring your Bat'leth, I will not be merciful."
"Live Gagh will no longer be provided in the break room, as it was encouraging too many breaks. "
"The sales team has no honor, and our Product Manager acted like a spineless P'taaq in that meeting! I have deleted their logins and assumed command myself!"
" A true Klingon warrior tests their code in production."
"What is this talk of "Pull Requests"? A true Klingon warrior makes DEMANDS! "
"The beatings will continue until this team shows a TRUE warrior spirit. "
" This burndown chart is pitiful. It is barely singed!"
" When I take a mental health day, it is for YOUR mental health. Do not waste this opportunity. "
"You joined our team over a year ago and have still not challenged me for my position. We need to discuss your career goals."
> I've heard of a company measuring how "well" a meeting went based on some AI analysis of people smiling. So much time here is wasted on managing workers and talking about how to work, instead of just getting shit done.
"We value your autonomy! We know studies say happy, autonomous workers perform better!"
Proceeds to stifle autonomy by invading your privacy in whatever way is legal or difficult to prove illegal.
Consideration due is consideration given.
Put another way: people care exactly as much as they are cared about.
If companies aim for maximum, minimum and average to trace one flat line across diagrams visualizing some kind of performance metrics, then us humans will never ever live up to those expectations.
Automating the good old “floggings will continue until staff morale improves”.
Though given a choice between that and the utterly cringy gamification¹ that some managers² seem to think doesn't make us want to high-five them in the face with a chair, I know which I'd hate least.
[1] which thankfully seems to be going out of fashion, but it'll be back again soon with a slightly different mask
[2] or “team togetherness and efficiency encouragers” or other fanciful titles they might have
That is quite the title. Imagine if they would just work and you actually had someone to help you. A whole new universe of productivity.
I am not entirely certain how to prepare a child for this world. Short of running your own company, it will be hard to avoid the beast.
Software that automatically says “you should push how harder”, “john is harming morale”, “jane is overworking”. Will be too tempting for a detached senior leadership to resist.
At my firm, laptops seem to have mysteriously gotten slower recently, chrome now regularly crashes on moderately sized documents. I would be surprised if it's not spyware related.
I'm moving over to a Linux machine as soon as I can, that way I can benefit from lack of software support.
The fact is the world is not by default this way. Sometimes people have to fight, and die, for rights.
Ask, and ye shall receive: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/mar/03/c...
If bosses could have slaves working for them, a vast majority of them would use slaves in an instant, without thinking about it. At best, they'd use a contractor or two removed from them, to mitigate the ethical accusations (same way they justify the use of sweatshops, child labor in mines, violently threatening and beating or even murdering workers when they stand up, and so on, in the production/supply chains the most seemingly "progressive" companies).
The only reason they don't have everything they want atm, and societies got things like paid leave, the 5-day 8-hour workweek and such, has been pushback (which was reristed fiercely, with many dead in the process). Pushback, plus, when the global communist movement was still a thing, and still shiny to many, the danger of working classes falling for socialism as an alternative to capitalism, which between the 30s and 70s did wonders in securing concessions from capitalist governments.
Since pushback has stopped, and the alternative system of production is dead and/or discretided, in any job market that they have the upper hand, they'll reinforce any 19-th century norm they like.
But, the collective labor pushback has stopped since the great offshoring took over in the last 30 years thanks to globalization, and various labor unions lost their power as the great industrialists moved the labor intensive jobs overseas where they could easily enforce their 19-th century norms and environmentally damaging practices and make killer profits, which in term bought them more lobbying power and political influence back home to push for lax immigration and lax trade policies with oppressive regimes, to further water down local wages and working conditions to "increase economic competitiveness" with those oppressive regimes.
Now we're slowly moving back to longer working hours and worse working conditions, but not by force like in the past, but by making housing and living so insanely expensive and getting a job so competitive, that the only chance people have is to willingly sacrifice the quality of life to get a head start in the rat race over everyone else, unless they were lucky enough to inherit some generational wealth that has appreciated, like a house.
Couple this with economic policies where at every crisis or dip in the economy, the well off, asset holder and big companies get further boosted up and amass even more wealth, while the lesser well off and small business go bust and end up worse off and pushed "further back on the monopoly board".
Depends on the field of course, but from my experience interviewing in tech, the market is very competitive now in my area in Europe for those without a lot of experience, and employers are not willing to offer any concessions besides the minimums mandated by law. Asking for full WFH is also out of the questions most of the time. This signals to me that there is no shortage, otherwise employers would be more accommodating for this.
In my country there is also a perpetual shortage of doctors and nursing staff in the public sector despite an abundance of them in the private sector. So the shortage is purely because the government is not offering the right financial incentives and working conditions for them to stay in the public sector.
My point is that "shortage" is always relative and we should look at the full story and the complete context to understand where it comes from and why it's happening, because without context I'm also having a perpetual shortage of Ferraris and Lamborghinis, though the full story is that my budget is $5000 and not a cent more, yet that information kind of changes and explains everything.
So, in conclusion, most of the times, "shortage of workers" just means people unwilling to work for the poor conditions and compensation being offered by employers, not that there's a shortage of people capable of doing said work or capable of learning to do it if offered the chance/training.
Size of the companies appears to matter when it comes to accommodations. In my industry, companies are effectively offering the same WFH policy across the board making people like me suspicious that CEOs banded together to discuss 'best practices', but anecdata from social circle suggests that smaller companies do work to accommodate people they want to keep.
I'd usually add "for a pittance," but I see FAANG (is it now "MAANG"?) companies offering pretty insane salaries, but they are notorious for difficult working conditions.
Doctors and nurses are also infamously overworked, with crazy shifts and lack of sleep being the norm. This is even more unconscionable as lack of sleep can lead to mistakes where patients die.
Pretty much universally, they report the experience was a tornado, and they could only manage it for a few years.
But they made a lot of money. The smart ones, lived humbly, and saved up, using their earnings to do things like start small businesses.
It’s kind of surprising, to talk to a painter, or shopkeeper, and have them tell you about their “days on The Floor.”
For a counter, see the following article on demand outstripping supply of remote jobs: [1]
In some fields, like tech, there's a strong demand, but not so in plenty of others -- especially if you as a worker make the unreasonable demand to be paid a living wage or not be worked to the point of burnout.
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220421-are-there-enou...
The inflation complaint is similar. We've had ludicrous inflation in housing, college tuition, health care, and many other things for over a decade. Inflation is not a problem until it starts to hit wages and supply chains.
Not just that. A large portion of the loss of influence of unions was the riseup of the pacifist dogma. Just look how all the benefits were won: by (sometimes extremely) brutal violence, by the blood of the workers who died by the hands and guns of corporate goons [1].
A very good example is the social structure and workers rights of the two neighboring countries France and Germany. French workers are routinely willing and able to commit to violence both in the office (in the form of "bossnapping") and on the streets and the public supports that, and when German protests escalate into a couple of banks getting redecorated with paint, concerned citizens turn up to clean the fucking bank [2]!
As a result of that difference in attitude, German workers have it way worse than French workers - politicians in France know that the cost of going against the people is high. A society that doesn't fight for its rights eventually gets taken over by those that do. Democracy is not god-given, it is earned by blood and needs continuous maintenance, otherwise it erodes.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/the-10-biggest-strikes-in-u-s-h...
[2] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/g20-in-hamburg-bu...
Same with Antifa. Some protestors are basically just mindless hooligans and their protests and property damage are harming the small business and working class people a lot more than the politicians and the ruling class.
Like during the protests in France I kept seeing many mid-range Renault/Peugeot/Citroens on fire on the streets of Paris. Chances are those were most likely the cars working class people used to get to work the next day and not the cars of fat-cats.
I agree with protesting violently against governments but what use is destroying working class property?
Riots and terrorism generate world headlines, while peaceful picketing rarely gets anywhere near the attention (unless it's also met by violence, as the nonviolent demonstrations and sit-ins were during the Civil Rights struggles in the 60's).
I am a pacifist myself, and am completely against violence, but I can see why some people who have less of a problem with it might find it strategically advantageous.
The willingness to resort to violence is a great part of the reason that the world is as much a hellhole as it is now.
The thing is, the government itself is violent at its core:
- cops beating up peaceful protesters or executing people on the streets
- cops evicting people from their homes because they can't keep up with rent
- cops arresting women because of miscarriages (over 1.200 in 15 years per [1]!) and soon because they dared to abort an unwanted pregnancy
- social security systems, especially unemployment insurance, are purposefully laced with endless hoops to be jumped through, all in the name of denying as many people as possible access to these while still being able to claim that "we have a system for poor people"
"Peaceful resistance" against this level of violence is a pipe dream. The insistence on "peaceful" resistance, the complete lack of material consequences for offenders acting as part of the government is the reason why civil rights are under attack by the government as harsh as they are at the moment.
I'm not a friend of violence myself, but I absolutely refuse to look down on people for deciding to go the militant path in the face of the violence that governments are committing against the common citizen every day.
If used against powerful governments it usually results in violent crackdowns which wind up killing off and/or imprisoning the leaders of the anti-government movements.
When used against weak governments, the government may topple, but what arises in its place is often even worse than the toppled government, and that tends to be followed by much more bloodshed.
If used against the populace it tends to cause both vigilante violent reaction and a resentment of the populace against one's cause.
Violent action usually leads to violent reaction, and the moderates are killed off by those who are even less reluctant to use violence to achieve their aims.
Countries thus afflicted not infrequently are plunged in to the horrors of civil war, which suits the extremists of every stripe, while ordinary people who just want to live their life are devastated.
Especially regarding revolutions against authoritarian regimes - I can't name even one major society that went through the change from an authoritarian government to a democracy without a war or revolution of some sort (even the British parliament's history has a couple of wars related to it). Usually, two or three revolutions, civil or external wars are part of any major democracy's history.
State intelligence often tries to frame them as terrorists but they break fewer laws than the state itself. Also by several magnitudes.
Not to mention much more murderous. Fascists have murdered over 200 people since the reunification [1], left-wing oriented people four in the same time [2]
[1] https://www.dw.com/de/chronologie-rechte-gewalt-in-deutschla...
[2] https://katapult-magazin.de/de/artikel/gegenueberstellung-po...
Are there jobs that don't do surveillance?
Seems like every company's jumping in head first.
Try front-line and front-line-adjacent healthcare. Due to federal privacy laws, a lot of ordinary office surveillance tech is not permitted.
It's not uncommon for regular offices to have "security" cameras. But when IT tried to put the cameras all over our building, the legal department told them to go stick their heads in a pig.
I wasn't part of the discussions that followed, but based on my company's privacy training, I can imagine a couple of problems:
- Legal didn't want even the remote possibility that a "security" camera might be able to view a patient's records on someone's screen.
- Legal didn't want any record that a particular patient went into a particular office, thus identifying them as having a particular ailment. (It's the same reason all of our promotional flyers sent in the mail have to be in a plain white envelope, and not postcards announcing to the world "You're overdue for your herpes follow-up!")
There are still security cameras, but they're only allowed in the employee parking lot. And I think I've seen them in the server rooms. But that's pretty much it.
Video evidence could also exonerate them, of course. But they probably erred on the side of opacity and the status quo over more transparency, as ass-covering corporations often do.
/s
And here's a paper on his it can be attempted at workplaces: https://www.sjjg.uk/pdfs/cecchinato-gould-pitts-2020-self-tr...
Phrenology is still pseudo=scientific bullshit even when the calipers[1] are replaced with an "AI" black box of software.
> Just need software that punishes employees who aren't happy enough at work, then we'll have a proper nightmare.
"RSA ANIMATE: Smile or Die"[2]
[1] https://images1.bonhams.com/image?src=Images/live/2006-06/16...
Our developer systems come with 32/64GB memory, multiple TB of NVMe storage, high-end processors, discrete GPUs to drive 4 4K monitors, etc. But we save $30 via the Dell configurator by skipping bluetooth, wifi, cameras, etc.
Oh, also not many people realize this but CCTV cameras all have the capability to convey audio captured via an internal microphone. It just depends on whether they have hooked the wires up to enable this feature. But, the innate ability is there. And, the CCTV software the guards use have the ability to store, retrieve and play this back alongside the video playback.
The Freedom-to Always Rip True Act.
I don’t know of any zero-party consent laws for audio.
But like a lot of the time nobody goes, nobody cares. Depends on the murder...who and where, and like the budget, if the budget just got slashed...
Tangent. So that's when the apathy inescapably sets in for police departments susceptible to it, when they want nothing more than do their jobs but just can't get the resources to actually do their jobs. Have to be more selective, do something similar to doing their jobs but not as expensive. Pretend to do it, answer the phone but get victims off the phone unless the case is stereotypical, bounce people to a different state service. Or recently when I was pressing charges for being assaulted here in Santiago, first assault I actually had minor wounds in so first time I could press charges. Fought back obviously, fight back every time.
So the printer was low on toner, and my form looked blurry and shitty. Still legible though, just a legal document of inferior worth, as evidence for instance or as collateral for picking up on the case later, because of low production values. I told him a company would have a little closet stocked up with more toner things--all office supplies--so they could print all the forms they needed to print. The policeman said "yeah that's how it should be, that's the dream."
Like it was a fantasy to the extent he couldn't articulate what ought to be done about it. In the meantime, they do what the can. But they can't do what they can't do.
Another example was a rock I picked up after a riot, like 12 ounces, weighed as much as a hammer, obviously for stoning people. Picked it up at 22:16 hour when things cooled down and the show's over. Obviously the intention was to kill policemen. Brain damage. You could tell from the weight, and actually it was too heavy for its purpose, it's like a shot put, evidently malicious. And it had no business where I found it, piece of concrete specifically chiseled in order to stone people with. I got stoned in March, the stoners were aiming for police on motorcycles. Didn't get hit, but the intention was there, I was considered pro-police.
And in fact I am pro-police, pro-carabinero, so going back to that rock, I told a policeman I collected it, wanted to present it to them so they could do detective work. It was evidence of something. At the very least I got it off the street, apart from it there's no rocks there it was conspicuous. I don't know whether to post a photograph, I wish the police photographed it, did good old-fashioned detective work on who made it, with what type of chuzo (like a pick), whatever. The policeman (carabinero) said yeah...you know we're uh not the right station for forensics, you'd have to take it to another...Which other I asked...no another one. And for him I have no blame, absolutely none. These men and women are completely overwhelmed. I talked to them about it right after the assault, said "yeah everyone's insulting you, the screams, the graffiti, they say..." then struggling at how to express what I was talking about without actually spelling it out. I then saw a graffiti of what I was referring to on the wall across the street and said "There it is! You can read it for yourself!" Like people think it's so funny to insult the people who protect them. Haha, great joke, classic.
Same in California, so so many activists undermining them, like they can hardly do anything else for the benefit of society other than emasculating police. Any chance they undermine a gangster? Take a picture of a crime in progress but of the criminal, not the cops making the arrest but the actual assault or burglary or robbery?
So back to that assault, it was the stupidest shit, if the assaulter had been in a green uniform forty of the hundred witnesses would have filmed him swing at me, but because instead he took his shirt off as an escalation and obviously was not police, talked very shitty as part of the intimidation like making a show of how uneducated he was by his own volition, and made death threats like an ipso facto criminal, the witnesses respected him more, then yeah they were afraid of him. And nobody filmed it.
I looked for film evidence, photography even, nothing. Everyone was out of battery. It was a super drawn-out conflict, with like five escalations to which I didn't back down, before the punches and kicks. Like three bouts. It was a good clean fight, but oh well, I guess everyone had Apple iPhone 5S's like me whose batteries crap out weirdly, evidently not truly random.
Two witnesses though, and I thank them. A third witness wimped out on testifying.
Like he wanted best of both worlds, you see, protection from police (and men like me who fight back) against criminals, but at the same time bother criminals the least so they can be their favorite or least bullied. Suck up to criminals. That's the attitude. That's what's up.
I would say open offices are bull pens, not offices. Offices have walls, doors, and one person capacity.
I'd have a fleet of these things in the office within a week of that memo haha
https://www.amazon.com/AnnoyingPCB-Ultimate-Productivity-Des...
I imagine the best place for these would be in the faux ceiling above a smoke detector
https://twitter.com/WeBuildNPR/status/1522586389774221313?cx...
The company could still use such software on employees and claim it was doing so for security purposes, for instance, or maybe even just to make sure the employee was working (without evaluating the work product).
Why not prohibit the user of such software on employees entirely?
> The company could still use such software on employees and claim it was doing so for security purposes, for instance, or maybe even just to make sure the employee was working (without evaluating the work product).
This article will be incorporated into a larger collective bargaining agreement that specifies people can only be disciplined or terminated for "just cause". The most common "just cause" for termination is a failure to perform one's job duties. Our employer could not use information gleaned through software surveillance to demonstrate just cause, much as police officers can't introduce evidence obtained illegally in court.
> or maybe even just to make sure the employee was working
That would fall under "time taken to complete the work".
Interesting that you should mention this, as police have been known to use "parallel construction"[1] to get around such attempts to restrict what they're allowed to do.
If companies can still surveil their employees, they might also resort to something like parallel construction to come up with other excuses to discipline/terminate their employees, even when the real reason they did so was a result of surveillance.
I said, "okay I'll do that, but then I'm never going to put that laptop on my home network, or use it on any network I may frequent outside of the office, so I'll just leave my laptop on my work desk instead". The point, of course, is the same reasoning behind IT policies that don't let people install stuff on work computers: if you're going to access my computer remotely, I won't trust it one single bit, so it doesn't belong on my home network.
This changed their mind, quick. All it took was a little resistance and "good for the goose and the gander" mindset, and the manager droid 'got it'. No, I won't be letting you spy on my family ..
Sometimes resistance is not futile
Just look at the output. Nothing more. Does the employee provide value at the end of the day or not. That's important. Not hours or anything else.
The need to control is greater than...
I don't know. I lack that need, instead needing people to be great people more, and they can't be great when the environment they work in snuffs out greatness.
Not to the bean counters. If they can get a good job out of you while distracted 25% of the time they think they could get 25% more out of you for no extra cost if they beat that distraction out of you.
It is one of those double standards many companies have: if you are needed to work extra “you are salaried, not paid by the hour, a bit of flexibility is normal and expected” but if you don't do 37.5 hours one week or are seen to be relaxing too much “your contract clearly says that you are paid to be actively on the job for X time, no less”. Luckily our current regime is far more sensible about this sort of thing, considerate even, though before that buy-out this sort of issue was on the list of reasons I was days away from walking out & burning a few bridges along the way.
To be honest you should immediately exploit that for your own career. Office surveillance exploiters wouldn't hold back as well. Tell them you want set goals and no surveillance, make your employment conditional to that. If that doesn't work go to the next higher instance. If it is only the CEO or owner and he supports it, change the company. Otherwise make an offer to replace the manager or being elevated to the same position with defined goals. Often just a little resistance is enough.
Why especially then?
Because some office workers think they are special in regards to their output being more creative and cognitive rather than physical and therefore should not be measured in the same fashion as the number of widgets per hour made by a factory worker or tiles per hour laid by a handyman for example, even though ironically, modern SW tools like Jira and processes like Agile & Scrum attempt to do just that, turn cognitive work into factory style repetitive assembling/plumbing work. Which most of it is :) B.R.B, gotta wrap up those story points for the end of the sprint. /s, but only barely
And yeah, commoditization of factory workers is a large problem too, and the commoditization of the skilled professions (WTF, a real oxymoron) is a "what the hell are you even thinking?" situation.
Would you worry what would happen to you and the company if one of your reports introduced a serious bug or security flaw into the software?
(note: I think these concerns can -- and should -- be addressed in other ways that don't require intrusion into employees' day-to-day activities, but I raise them because I think they're part of the reason (along with compliance, perhaps in some cases?) why these systems are introduced in the first place)
Problem is, they are still proxies. Proxies are great at satisfying feelings, but proxies are by no means a guarantee they will reflect what they try to capture. There are no end of examples of perverse incentives showcasing how a metric can "feel" great, but end up being a big bag of nothing if not detrimental.
Other than that, even thinking along the terms of "well they must have a reason" is a great way of introducing slippery slopes all the way to extremism. I'd have a hard time arguing any answer would justify becoming more and more extremist and trying to deny people privacy and autonomy to such a degree.
It's possible I misunderstand what you're saying here, but I think I agree; I wasn't intending to justify managerial surveillance, only to understand and elaborate why it might be happening.
Without understanding the cause(s), the tendency of organizations will, I'd guess, instead be to patch over any problems that arise -- the process equivalent of adding warning signs instead of fixing a dangerous bridge.
The solution in an effective employment marketplace is to build organizations that avoid the root causes entirely and thus attract (effective, motivated) employees and build desire in others to work at similar workplaces -- while perhaps reducing organizational running costs at the same time as a side-effect.
Last I heard, Mark spends ~$24M/yr. on his security detail. He's got very thick glass installed in his house. 2 foot thick, but I can't confirm that. It's not just bullet proof, it's RPG proof, or something. The optical distortions are quite real through that much silicon and plastic.
I'm not privy to the details on FB internally, but I imagine that the guys you're paying ~$67,000/day will keep you pretty cloistered from threats, either real or potential. Now, combine that with issues like the Dictator's Information Problem.
As such, I'd speculate that Mark doesn't really get to talk with honest people all that much. Mark ain't dumb, he knows it, but he also thinks all the stuff his security team is telling him is real too. A team that doesn't stay employed if the threats disappear.
So, in Mark's mind one solution is to 'air gap' the people from him via the metaverse. He's 'with them' in the same visual spaces, but his security won't be compromised.
In Germany a lot of that stuff is illegal already or needs to be approved by the Betriebsrat (work council) but can come in through the backdoor as little known features of common software anyway.
And yet everyone still flaunted all the rules: we were drunk and on drugs, we ate and had our cellphones.
Rules exist to selectively enforce against people who are not liked.
That company periodically took screenshots of all (ALL!) their employees' workstations. They monitor internal network for suspicious traffic and, until COVID happened, they did not let anyone work remotely.
Never understood what they were afraid of. Their content is already plastered all over the Internet.
Let me just put it this way, you are correct that the concern with employee monitoring makes absolutely no sense, because that’s not the right perspective, assumption of motivation.
Maybe one camera for the entrance, if you have reasons to be paranoid (I was thinking about it for myself, because of weird landlord with second keys), but why more cameras?
edit: one further reason for myself I remembered, watching the small kids from the smartphone, while going out for some minutes. But in the end I never set it up
NB: I don't agree with the increasing paranoia, it's just devil's advocate.
>are secret cameras a legal way to get evidence?
Depends entirely on the context and where you live. There are no universal surveillance laws. There are also social aspects outside the realm of court why one would opt to do so.
- people put rooms up on Airbnb and are (perhaps understandably) paranoid about things being stolen. It goes too far if there are cameras in bedrooms though.
- people want to monitor their kids
- general monitoring to catch anyone who breaks in while they are out etc.
Have personally never heard of putting cameras inside for catching domestic violence: I suspect that abusers may be 'smart' in the sense that they'll catch on to this pretty quickly and prevent someone from doing it or manipulate the situation.
I live in a leased ground level floor through apartment with three entrances not including 6 accessible windows. In order to cover an entrance from inside some of the living space would need to be included. To fully cover I would need 5 cameras and have them in bedrooms too. Exterior cameras could help, but I have no authority to install. While I have no specific reason to worry, I wouldn't want my landlord to install them and be able to see what/who comes in and out of the apartment and/or raise the rent because of it.
Even just covering the 2 main entrances I find it uncomfortable to be able to know when my spouse is entering/exiting the home, I trust them.
2. Kids When you need it you need it. Like when I was isolating with covid. However it is their privacy I am concerned also as I don't want them to think it's OK to be surveilled.
3. Safety Did I leave the stove on? Not so important, but since one entrance is a galley kitchen I easily monitor this and the rear entrance.
Is the basement flooding? This is actually a big one for me. Installing one here however would mean potentially spying on the landlord which I would not do without explicit permission.
What are you going to do about it at that point that you wouldn't be able to do about it the next morning or whatever? Insurance doesn't require camera footage and realistically the most likely outcome of any of this stuff is an insurance claim.
The kids thing I don't know, it certainly depends on your family's circumstances and your personal concerns with your children, who you know and I don't. There are definitely situations where a camera can be worth it there, but not as many as most contemporary wealthy parents seem to think.
Edit: Moved edit to reply that was not an option before.
We feel safer with cameras but in practice there are few cases where we truly are. I think what the kids are likely to learn from this is that an authority's sense of security is a more powerful demand than their own need for privacy, something with, to me, pretty direct connections to the overall worker-surveillance conversation. I'm not judging you for having cameras or even specifically recommending you don't, just agreeing that your fears are justified and they may not be, probably aren't, worth it.
TBH I'm not sure what the wealth link is either! But I was poor/working class most of my life, and am high income now, and have friends in both groups. I just do not see cameras in the homes of people who are not affluent, except sometimes camera-enabled baby monitors. It may just be a matter of access but they aren't all that expensive so I'm not satisfied by that explanation.
I was already able to provide a good look at a thief’s car who stole a package from my neighbor’s doorstep to distribute around the community. And the neighbor’s camera got the theif’s face.
I also have a dash cam for the same reasons. I want to have my evidence because others will probably have theirs and my evidence can be a tool to protect me.
> something happens on my property that I could be liable for, such as a trip and fall on the sidewalk in front of my house
- that's a homeowner's insurance claim, and their problem now.
> Or if I have to use self defense
- in your own home? very few prosecutors would pursue this and fewer juries convict it. I have incredibly little trust in the carceral justice system but even I can believe this will end in your favor
> if cops do something unsavory
- camera won't stop them and it won't get them punished either. it *might* help turn it into a big media event which long-term may help erode these powers. but it won't help you.
> someone breaks in or damages car
- evidence for what? again this is an insurance claim, and the damage itself is sufficient evidence for this. the police may or may not pursue the damager but either way you still have a broken car, and still get your insurance payout. why care?
The increase in your insurance premiums due to an unfavorable judgment is my problem. I know from experience at my businesses.
>in your own home? very few prosecutors would pursue this and fewer juries convict it. I have incredibly little trust in the carceral justice system but even I can believe this will end in your favor
The cameras would not be in my home, but for example, if the victim claims I let them in, and I can easily prove that they broke in.
>camera won't stop them and it won't get them punished either. it might help turn it into a big media event which long-term may help erode these powers. but it won't help you.
It is not about punishing the cops. It is about protecting me from he said she said legal costs. And especially when it comes to cops since their word has a higher value than my word.
>It may cheap in terms of money but it does not cost nothing. It normalizes surveillance and fear, and reinforces our natural inclinations towards distrust and retribution. These things are understandably tempting but we are all better to the extent that we individually fight them in ourselves.
Sure, but everyone else is arming themselves, so it does not make sense for me to sacrifice myself and not have evidence in my corner if I want to use it, while letting others have theirs. It is not like I have easy access to a cops’ body cams.
Then, ownership. How can you be sure this video footage is kept safe and private? Who owns it and for how long can they keep it? Imagine a teenage child entering the wfh room while you're on a break, I can image wanting to have that video removed immediately.
Also - a home office which is surveilled this way must be decorated completely neutral; you might have an incorrect world map on the wall or a product made by a competitor in view, or perhaps a beach picture of your family to which people can be very sensitive.
I have so many objections against this.
If you want to browse HN, why not just browse it on your phone?
Or is that tin hat thinking?
i might get checked up on a couple of times by the customer im framing houses for, and another two times by the city inspector.
no HR, no surveillance, no office politics.