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Comment by RadiozRadioz | Hacker News Reader

Are there companies who don't track individual badge-in rates? I thought that was common practice.

Are there countries where the police don't track where you are at all times?

There is a qualitative difference between "could, with a valid reason and manual effort, track" vs. "automatically tracked and shared with your management chain".

Any company with badge readers has an access log. In the before-times, that log would only be used for a legal or HR investigation, after the fact, when there are other performance problems.

This is going to be used to punish employees, semi-automatically, probably even if they are otherwise performing well.

In fact, in Germany hour-booking is independant from access-badging. And employers are forbidden to cross-reference those systems.

Any source for such a bold claim? Our Betriebsrat is absolutely fine when managers check our attendance by looking at hour booking entries and associated locations.

Hour bookings and locations are dine, as in you saying at which location you clocked in and out. Referencing badging to enter and exit a location to cross-reference clocking in and out data is, usually, a complete no-go. Unless, of course, a specific employee is suspected of cheating.

But then I assume it depends on the BR as well, but each and every BR I encountered so far was strictly oppossed to this kind of data cross referencing. Unless, of course, entering and exiting a location is used for clocking in/out, because then there is no data to cross reference.

I remember when the CEO of a company I worked for stepped down and I encouraged a friend to run for the position saying I'd vote for him. I thought it was amusing, but I've always found it funny that centrally-planned dictatorships are seen as a terrible form of government, but also essentially how every private company is run. (In the US at least - I have a vague notion that workers get seats on company boards in other countries at least.)

While I am sure there was database somewhere with badge-in data, up until now I have never worked at a place that looked at that data or made it available to managers or employees. Exempt status (non-hourly worker) in US essentially prevents company from controlling hours worked for individual employee.

I worked at a company that used badge-in data to determine how many people to expect for lunch (which the company provided). Given the terribly ancient tech that system ran on, I'm certain that around 11AM every day the person responsible for producing lunch would import a CSV file into Excel and tally the list, all in plaintext.

Granted, that's probably an odd exception to the norm, but your comment reminded me of how badge-in data presented a clever solution to a problem, even if I shudder to think of how that data could have been used for harm.

Depends on how you mean 'track'. At our company, of course we always had badges and therefore there's some auditable trail of access somewhere. But it was never a tool that my management chain regularly used to check up on employees outside of an occasional anomaly. It wasn't until a 3-day office mandate that managers started receiving badge-in reports.

> I thought that was common practice.

It is.

At places I’ve worked, they were logged, but only ever audited in cases of suspected time fraud or other legal infractions. Anonymized statistics were also sometimes used for covid tracking. There was never somebody actively sifting through the data and taking attendance.

> Are there companies who don't track individual badge-in rates? I thought that was common practice.

It's interesting that when a spouse does it, it is called abuse, but when employer does it, it is okay?

Family relationships are much closer and have more trust than relationship between employer and employee.

So if a husband doesn't trust the wife, it is okay to have them clock in and out of the house and wear a tracker?

Maybe? Not my cup of tea, but if I didn't trust my wife, and she allowed me to track her, maybe that'd solve whatever hypothetical problem we were having. Very unlikely, but I don't think the idea itself, doomed to fail or not, is a problem if both parties consent.

Which is what you do when you work for an employer that wants to track your entries/exits into their buildings. You consent to allowing systems to be put in place that serve as placeholders for when trust isn't yet or won't be established.

What are you talking about?

I would assume that most companies are not large enough to need badges, but also that the smaller number of large companies have a higher percentage that do.

Maybe your sample is biased towards companies that track individual badge-in rates.

Possibly, but then I think to all those thousands of companies still on timecards. That must surely make up a healthy portion.

Timecards are generally used for hourly employees rather than salaried (although not universally).

If you have to badge in it’s tracked somewhere. If they generate reports or even access the data is another story. The buildings access control system knows what badge ids opened the door or gate.

Saying someone is "tracking attendance" doesn't mean "there is hypothetical data out there that could be used to track attendance." It means they are generating those reports and using them. The "another story" is the entire story.

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