I'm a lot more paranoid about privacy these days.
I'm a lot more paranoid about privacy these days.
1. Almost all software can be abused or co-opted for surveillance purposes.
2. Some software comes already designed for surveillance purposes up front.
2a. This includes plenty of well-known mass appeal software; importantly, the customer-facing marketing copy and the investor pitch can present a completely different value proposition.
3. Software doesn't become used for surveillance or abuse by accident; there are actual human beings who make a decision to use it in this fashion, or commission it for this purpose.
3a. The "misguided programmers harming people by trying to solve social problems with technology" meme is dumb for many reasons, but it's also distracting (possibly purposefully so) from the fact that it's not software, or people who coded up the software, that are the primary culprits. The coders that were too naive or too self-interested to refuse work or blow the whistle may have some responsibility, but we should start talking about the people who made the decisions to commission or repurpose technology for bad purposes.
If the piece of software you created is unbiased and unopinionated, it can be used for evil purposes. If you make the software deliberatedly against that, you have to (a) take measures without the company knowing (b) have the manpower to do it alone while still reaching development goals (c) those measures can be undone by another developer that cares less that you.
After all, software big enough is collective by nature. It's also unfair to us to think that we're responsible for any misuse as if we were mechanical engineers creating weapons for war
You can quit. Literally, there is something you can do. If your boss asks you to write or adapt something to surveil, then you can quit.
There may be consequences to quitting, perhaps disproportionately felt between you and the company, perhaps consequences that you won't enjoy as much as your current job stability and paycheck, but the choice is always there.
This is why unions are so important, even in a field like software engineering. If you quit on your own, the company may not care. But using the threat of strikes, workers can demand better conditions for themselves and more ethical directions for their company.
Why that is the case is another interesting question.
It's entirely possible that in the post-IBM microcomputer, pre-Google AdWords span, they were correct.
However, it's pretty obvious that current era, power has slid back from labor towards extremely-large corporations.
Sadly history repeats so we'll probably just have another "cultural revolution" and "great leap forward" in the 21st century.
In Marxist terms, lumpenproletariat is a close approximation, but a weird accident of history.
That depends on your baseline, of course. Or to answer your other question:
> Why would you expect anybody getting that kind of money to identify with the lower classes?
I don’t expect it, though I do have deep solidarity myself. Because, to return to the middle of your response:
> If you're making 100k+/year, you're well into bourgeois territory, and FAANG benefits are practically near-instant-owner-class.
I can speak to six figures, and I’m in no way into bourgeois territory. I’m approximately as comfortable as middle class boomers, ie I can make financial decisions to benefit my aging family with some hope I’ll still be comfortable myself. I don’t own anything in the sense meant by “bourgeois” in this context. I may yet, in the sense of a retirement plan. That’s a middle class aspiration. Which, having grown up poor and then broke and then getting by… I recognize very much is still working class.
There certainly is a larger segment of the tech work force than the general population which has reason to believe it can cross the bridge from gentry to ownership… but it’s still a minority of us and it’s mostly scraps. I don’t expect most of my colleagues to be comrades, but I certainly don’t agree with their class analysis which you have expressed so clearly.
If you mean software engineers when saying "tech workers" because unions make it harder to fire people. There's not much that makes a software engineer's job harder than a bad engineer who isn't getting fired and is destroying the quality of the product and the code and creating work for everyone else to fix, all the time.
Unions also result in gaining seniority by time spent in a job instead of competency, and that's also a miserable experience, when someone incompetent is dictating the engineering work. In software engineering you want people who are technically proficient and capable of mentoring to assume leadership positions and positions of increased responsibility, not people who've been there the longest.
I am not actually so much resistant to unions, as I do not see what benefit I’ll get from them. What exactly in my life would have changed for better if I had been a part of a union? Just one thing, can you name?
If you have ever gone up against HR over anything ever, a union would have benefited you.
On call? They paid me $500 a week to have a cellular phone officially, but at the same time unofficially everyone was strictly forbidden to call it. It was an internal political move by the engineering department (see our commitment to this new product? we even put Mike on call), turned into an additional benefit to best engineers.
> If you have ever gone up against HR over anything ever, a union would have benefited you.
My wife (who is one of the best teachers in California, documented) was fired exactly because of the union rules. The principal wanted to keep her so much, that the district turned his desire into a political tool: oh you want to keep L? she is a good teacher? sign this paper (some financial cover up) and we will give you the money to keep L. The union did not care is she a good teacher, or not. Less seniority? Go away (but we keep your $1000 union fees).
They won't, but its a delusion that favours capital over labour.
My favorite counter-example is a collective action of about a thousand medical workers in SF Hospital demanding from Facebook an increase in censorship (and the censorship is impossible without surveillance).
Why do you think a union will support your ethical choices? And if it would not - you’d have to quit the company and the union, loosing not only your salary, but also union fees.
A union gives you more choices than "surveil or resign".
And if the union fails you because it says "no, you have to surveil" then you can still resign.
Why shouldn't workers in a factory have a say over how their labour is used by those who appropriate it?
Baffled by how obvious solutions appear to have fallen off the radar.
As you say, collective bargaining is usually going to be more effective than individual.
It may be more effective in terms of salary and working conditions (though I doubt that in software engineering I would have been able to get better pay through collective).
But in terms of ethics?
Individually, it’s almost impossible to make me support surveillance and censorship. But a big collective is much more vulnerable to manipulation. Comes 9/11 and you’ll get “collective” support for Patriot act, comes 6/1 and you’ll get “collective” support for censorship.
If you had a union, or even a professional association whose code of ethics had teeth, you could refuse without having to quit. It's incredible to me that in 2022, most programmers are still anti-union.
> To stop the surveillance, [they] would have to get their equipment suppliers to make changes; they would have to change their own back-office systems; they would have to reformulate customer contracts so they would not rely on the data being available in case of disputes; and so on.
> [It] would cost [them] more money to stop the surveillance of their customers than to continue doing it.
> That is quite literally what "surveillance too cheap to meter" means.
which is why it's less of a technical problem and more of a social problem
people need to realize that with how the technology is today we can't afford to rely on marked self regulation for a lot of things especially wrt. privacy protection it just fundamentally does not work
(Or in other words, such usage of employee surveillance should be just plain out forbidden by law not just to be used but to be deployed)
Of course, there have always been these kind of people, but in the old days they were easily identified groups of disabled and elderly people, who, most importantly, understood also themselves that they need help.
The bleak future I see that increasing amount of normal people with normal intelligence are just going to be financially destroyed, all while they themselves believe that they are fully qualified and justified to decide whether their money is "invested" in the next cryptard scheme, sent to a nigerian prince to get millions, or put in a crappy health insurance covering accidents once in a blue moon, instead of those damn government elite experts taking their money and actually providing health care and pension. And after they are destroyed, they become even more hostile against the "elite experts" who just seem to be laughing at their faces "told you so".
(To be extremely clear here: I believe intelligence is a highly multi-dimensional thing. And yu can be intelligent only in very limited dimensions. so practically all of us - me very much included - are morons in most of the dimensions. So I am not pointing here to any specific group, but all of us are vulnerable in some dimension. I may be able to above average avoiding certain kind of scams, but I am for sure vulnerable - even laughable stupid looking afterwards - for face-to-face friendly scams. Which, luckily to me, are typically not expensive.)
Unfortunately I have no good solution anywhere in sight. The best idea I have so far is to mock online the idiots who think Ayn Rand was a genius. I have to admit, though, that even that is likely to be useless even in the best case, so most of the time I try to just bite my lip.
By law, like by some Patriot act?
I tend to believe it, "will be."
All tech will eventually be used to try to gain an advantage in war and surveillance. I don't think there's a way to prevent it.
There's probably more illegally unpaid overtime than there's unauthorized (boss doesn't like) breaks. The data can likely prove that, too.
I am sick and tired of how often extremely pertinent information has to be neutered in this way. And I am utterly disgusted at how the legal system is used to protect scummy corporations like this unnamed hotel chain.
I wish we had strong laws that prevented employers from even thinking about threatening employees for talking about their work. Or collective bargaining to make sure employers don't have the leverage to impose such one-sided contracts.
My apartment building has lights in the hallways that are only on when needed, but they just use a basic infrared sensor.
* Minimize installation cost. They just wanted to plug into a light socket, not run network cabling.
* Push data logs to a central server. They didn't want to send a tech physically to each lightbulb to get data for e.g. energy usage certifications.
plus other obvious requirements.
All of that made it really easy to just stick a beacon tag inside employee badges and measure the RSSI from the mesh lightbulbs (since they already tracked that to discover who their physical neighbors were). Instant employee monitoring.
"All of that made it really easy to just stick a beacon tag inside employee badges and measure the RSSI from the mesh lightbulbs (since they already tracked that to discover who their physical neighbors were)."
If it's any consolation to the original engineer it feels like a non-trivial thing to add
Using it for location of employees was the new part.
After that initial success, one of the intermediary contractors came up with the surveillance idea (among others) to try and find reasons for <hotel chain> to roll the system out to more facilities.
PIRs are cheap and last basically the lifetime of the hotel. I would need to see some actual data to believe this whole project didn't actually cost more than installing a bunch of PIR lamps.
For location tracking they specifically called out things like equipment carts, but it was implied that it could track other bluetooth devices.
that's the rule I've always followed.
(I know I’m jumping right to where the slippery slope ends.)
There’s a good quote that goes something like “the law treats all men equally: the rich man and the poor man are punished the same for stealing bread to feed their family.”
Personally, I prefer less on the books and proper enforcement, but many people like a lot on the books and just as many loopholes.
Even without intending to, everyone would go from a ticket or two per decade to dozens of tickets on every commute.
"But the law is still the same!?!"
Of course it is, but changing from poorly scalable human-required surveillance to always-on, fully-scaled electronic surveillance, changes it from completely reasonable to massively oppressive.
If everyone's productivity is fine, and people take unauthorized breaks, no one will notice, all is cool. If one or two people are noticeably unproductive, the manager will likely investigate and fix the unauthorized breaks, which is also fine.
But with constant electronic surveillance, it's no longer about meaningful productivity differences, it is about oppression.
A reasonable manager would accept the occasional smoke break, but do something about hour long naps.
Often a manager will not have any say over these things. "The metrics speak for themselves!"
Regardless, I don't think we should design systems with the assumption that the people in charge of them will be compassionate and reasonable. There are a lot of petty, corrupt (in the moral sense, not financial) people out there in positions of power over others.
It would always be entirely unworkable at anything resembling the current fine structure, with fines in the $100s for a single infraction. These are based on the assumption that people are rarely caught.
I could see a surveillance-based system working, something on the lines of a congestion toll. Maybe $0.02/mi/mph over the limit, so going 10mph over the limit for 20 miles would be a $4.00 charge. We'd also have to eliminate the bogus insurance surcharges which falsely equate speeding with unsafe driving (barring neighborhoods & construction zones, they can signify either an unsafe driver or a highly skilled driver).
In France, messing with the people's ability to drive affordably led directly to the Yellow Vest riots.
i have never worked in an office environment where people didn’t routinely unwind for a couple minutes. the way we’re treated in an office setting vs those outside an office is in a lot of ways disturbing. a couple years ago my friends dad lost his job of 25 years because he was caught sneaking around a corner, out of eyesight of his foreman, to eat a candy bar. he had been warned about these “unauthorized” snack breaks in the past.
this idea is entirely foreign to any of us who sit at a computer coding or doing whatever desk job that sometimes we don’t stop to think of how ludicrous some workers are treated—my entire post college career, if i wanted to eat a candy bar, i just ate it.
were a decision to come down in just about any office full of engineers which said “unless authorized, you cannot drink or eat anything. if any unauthorized stoppage of typing occurs, there will be consequences.” people would be justifiably outraged.
but they’d be “catching” “unauthorized” non-typers.
the idea that someone somewhere decided to put trackers on human beings is wild.
did you forget about cellphones?
That everyone has accepted that owning a phone means you can be tracked with accuracy most the time, both digitally and physically, is pretty wild.
Your profile indicates that you've commented on HN on a weekday.
Don't worry - this behavior has already been reported to the authorities.
If both pilots left the cockpit mid-flight in order to chill with the stewardesses, I would be fine with them being barred from working as pilots ever again.
I couldn't care less if a receptionist catches a quick smoking break during a slow hour.
And your best solution to this is building automated lighting systems that omit functionality? That's your grand plan?
Reminds me of people that complain about seats being removed from buses to make more room for passengers because homeless people sleep on them.
When you're trying to solve things via tertiary order effects you should consider if that's the real issue at hand .